Professor Wong is available to meet with graduate students who would like to discuss their research with him. Please email crrs@utoronto.ca to book an appointment.
Friday, March 27, 2026, 10:00 am
Regents Room, Goldring Student Centre Room 206,
150 Charles St W.
We recommend that in preparation for the seminar, you pre-read the selected materials:
R. Bin Wong, “Public Goods and Economy in the Early Modern Era—New Perspectives on Modern Economies and Contemporary Environmental Concerns,” in Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy, ed. Masayuki Tanimoto and R. Bin Wong (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), pp. 292–313.
Before industrialization began in Great Britain and spread across Europe and to white settler societies in other world regions, people across the globe recognized their reliance on their nature’s land, water, and sunlight to secure their livelihoods. In both Western Europe and East Asia people often managed their natural resources as public goods. The principles and practices their descendants used to exploit natural resources in the 19th and 20th centuries to achieve modern economic development leave us in the 21st century coping with the problematic environmental consequences they unknowingly caused. As we grapple to improve natural resource management and recognize the growing importance of public goods over private goods, we can draw inspiration from early modern public goods provision that span social and natural environments.
R. Bin Wong
Distinguished Research Professor of History, UCLA
Before moving to UCLA in 2004 to be the founding Director (2004-2016) of the UCLA Asia Institute, Bin Wong served as Director of the Center for Asian Studies at UC Irvine where he was Chancellor’s Professor of History and Economics. He has also been a visiting professor and researcher at institutions in mainland China, France, Japan, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. Wong’s own research has examined Chinese patterns of political, economic and social change, especially since eighteenth century, both within Asian regional contexts and compared with more familiar European patterns, as part of the larger scholarly efforts under way to make world history speak to contemporary conditions of globalization. Wong has written, co-written, co-edited, and translated ten books and also written or co-authored more than a hundred articles published in published in Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese journals that reach diverse audiences within and beyond academia. He sits on the Scientific Council of the Paris School of Economics and Political Science and previously served on the External Research Evaluation Committee of Japan’s Research Institute on Humanity and Nature as well as the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. Since his retirement from UCLA in 2023 he has been teaching in a graduate program on political economy at the Taipei School of Economics and Political Science.
