This chapter assesses the Chinese economic history before the late nineteenth-century development of capitalist firms and markets transforming China's economy. It makes a distinction between economic growth as a general category and industrialization as a more specific species of economic growth. The social organization of agricultural production was based on family farming across varied ecological conditions. Improved technologies of tilling, sowing, fertilizing, weeding, and harvesting spread across the empire after the third century. To understand the institutions that promoted a flourishing commercial economy across and beyond the vast spaces of China's agrarian empire, the chapter looks more closely at how production and exchange were organized. It is difficult to create metrics for early modern era legal practices that are judged by economic effects, but the growth of the porcelain, tea, and silk trades to Europe and colonial America suggest that the Chinese institutional nexus for foreign trade did not stifle exchange in a consequential fashion.