The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Press, 2000. John K. Fairbank Prize 2001. Joint winner, World History Association Best book of 2000. Choice Notable Academic Books 2000.
The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. M. E. Sharpe: 1999.
The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937. University of California Press, 1993. John K. Fairbank Prize 1994.
Edited volumes
The Pacific in the Age of Early Industrialization. Farnham England: Ashgate/Variorum, 2009.
with McNeill, J. R., . The Cambridge world history: Production, destruction, and connection, 1750 to the present. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
with Barker, G., Benjamin, C., Bentley, J. H., Christian, D., Goucher, C., Kedar, B. Z., Mcneill, J. R., Yoffee, N.. The Cambridge world history: Structures, spaces, and boundary making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Orthopraxy, orthodoxy, and the goddess of Taishan .” Modern China 33.1 22-46.
“Region and world in economic history: the early modern / modern divide” Transactions of the International Conference of Eastern Studies 52 41-55.
“Standards of living in eighteenth-century China: regional differences, temporal trends, and incomplete evidence” In: Allen, Robert C.; Bengtsson, Tommy; Dribe, Martin, eds. Living standards in the past: new perspectives on well-being in Asia and Europe. : 23-54.
“Women's work and the economics of respectability ” In: Goodman, Bryna; Larson, Wendy, eds. Gender in motion: divisions of labor and cultural change in late imperial and modern China : 239-263.
“Women's work, family, and economic development in Europe and East Asia: long-term trajectories and contemporary comparisons” In: Arrighi, Giovanni; Hamashita, Takeshi; Selden, Mark, eds. The resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 year perspectives : 124-172.
“Facts are stubborn things: a response to Philip Huang” Journal of Asian Studies 62.1 : 167-181.
“Political economy and ecology on the eve of industrialization: Europe, China, and the global conjuncture” American Historical Review 107.2 425-446.
“Beyond the East-West binary: resituating development paths in the eighteenth-century world” Journal of Asian Studies 61.2 539-590.
“Is there an East Asian development path? Long-term comparisons, constraints, and continuities” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 44, pt.3 322-362.
“Re-thinking the late imperial Chinese economy: development, disaggregation and decline, circa 1730-1930” Itinerario 24.3-4 29-74.
"Ritual Imitation and Political Identity in North China: The late Imperial Legacy and the Chinese National State Revisited," Twentieth Century China 23:1 Fall, 1997.
"Power, Gender and Pluralism in the cult of the Goddess of Taishan," in R. Bin Wong, Theodore Huters, and Pauline Yu, eds., Culture and State in Chinese History.
“"Traditional' Chinese business forms revisited: family, firm, and financing in the history of the Yutang Company of Jining, 1779-1956.” Late Imperial China 18.1 : 1-38.
“Local interest story: political power and regional differences in the Shandong capital market, 1900-1937” In: Rawski, Thomas G.; Li, Lillian M., eds. Chinese history in economic perspective 295-318.
"Water to Iron, Widows to Warlords: the Handam Rain Shrine in Modern Chinese History," Late Imperial China 12.1 62-99.
