[citation needed] William Rowe grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was president of a small local savings bank.
Riding in a military bus, all along the side of the road he saw farmers plowing fields with water buffalo: " I could have been on Mars.
The language instructor insisted that he join the university's graduate program, where he studied with C. Martin Wilbur.
Rowe's initial two volumes on the mid-Yangzi commercial city of Hankow during the Qing dynasty set out to show how capitalist organization, political institutions, and legal self-regulation were present, just as they were in the West.
They were welcomed as contributions to the debate on whether urbanization was much the same historical process around the world or whether the city played different roles in each society.
In the West, argued Weberians, cities were centers of the emerging bourgeoisie, rational behavior, and economic development.
One, common in Marxist histories, saw the business class in late imperial China as being so "feudal" and oppressive that Chinese capitalism was suppressed.