"China's remarkable economic expansion in the eighteenth century - propelled by large-scale changes in agriculture, demographics, land use, and property rights - had far-reaching social consequences. One important result of the growing population and deepening commercialization of the rural economy was a relative scarcity of land. Just as this problem increased, the new complexity of property rights in land outgrew the customary law, challenging long-held traditions and the shared ideology that governed economic exchange and land ownership in rural China." "In this book, Thomas Buoye reconstructs and analyzes the everyday struggles of the common people to cope with changing concepts and laws regarding property rights in this shifting social landscape."--Jacket.