Abstract
Stacie Kent's new book, Coercive Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire, should be of keen interest to historians of the maritime world. This is a book about how changes to the rules governing maritime trade, international and domestic, opened the gates for what became a full-scale transformation of China's political economy. The ‘unequal treaties’ foisted on the Qing empire in the nineteenth century have generated mountains of very diverse historical discourse about the cession of Hong Kong, extraterritoriality, the issue of diplomatic language and indemnities levied on the embattled Manchu court. As Kent shows us, these subjects amount to just a tiny fraction of the actual words in the treaties, which are otherwise concerned exclusively with commerce and taxes. The lengthier commercial stipulations in these treaties have not received historical scrutiny anywhere close to the level of those other provisions, but in Kent's analysis they formed the core mechanism through which China underwent its transition into a capitalist political economy. The commercial treaties and the commerce that followed, she argues, served to discipline Qing officials into abandoning other governmental priorities in favour of the singular priority of circulation for the purpose of capital growth.
For historians of China, what is novel about this book is how it rereads the crucible of the mid-nineteenth century through the lens of the history of capitalism. Coercive Commerce is a structural history of a transitional moment in the political economy, told through a close examination of the tax administration. This is not a re-hashing of the ‘sprouts’ of capitalist enterprise, like much earlier work. It is also not an explanation of ‘divergence’ in developmental trajectories between China and Europe. Instead, Kent boldly revives the old and critiqued paradigm of foreign ‘impact’ and Chinese ‘response’ after the Opium War, but with a deeper emphasis on structural transition and a more careful understanding of the Qing administration. Where historians of the mid-twentieth century subtly (or unsubtly) championed Britain's role in forcing Chinese officials to understand the value of commerce, Kent's goal is identifying key flashpoints of a structural transition that earlier generations noticed but largely miscast under the banner of inevitable modernisation. Here China is not tradition-bound or passive but a powerful and complicated state embroiled in its own internal conflicts over correct approaches to governance. Her attention to the domestic context enables Kent to more thoroughly explain how the new rules of commerce introduced through the treaties served to transform first the work, and then ultimately the priorities of Qing officials.
The structure of the book is chronological, five chapters that each take on what Kent calls ‘an episode of deterritorialization and reterritorialization’ (p. 20). Chapter one begins with the first treaty after the Opium War, reconstructing the task of interpretation and implementation from the Qing perspective. Chinese versions of the first treaties differed from those of their foreign counterparts in casting what westerners deemed self-evident ‘rights’ as ‘benefits’ bestowed by the sovereign, until the second round of treaties in 1858 made English the official language of treaty interpretation (pp. 43–45). How Qing officials historically understood and attempted to practice ‘good governance’ was likewise undermined by the treaties, which stripped away the ability of local officials in the treaty ports to act on priorities other than abstract market efficiency and circulation.
The second and third chapters take on the tax structures of the Qing empire as they evolved after the Opium War. Chapter two examines the expansion of the Imperial Maritime Customs (IMC) in the early 1860s, a foreign-managed institution with the Qing state that has received extensive scholarly attention in the past few decades. Kent's priority here is consistent with her overarching argument, highlighting how the IMC made Chinese commerce legible to foreign merchants and recasting the foreign customs as an ‘alien body’ within the Chinese government that worked to elevate the priority of ‘limitless circulation’ among state officials (p. 59). The story becomes more complicated in chapter three, where Kent outlines how key features of the new regulatory regime engendered disorder and accelerated the Qing regime's progressive loss of sovereignty in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her analysis here of the blurred distinctions between foreign and Chinese ownership of goods and vessels is a powerful example of how human agency intersects with larger structural change.
Chapter four uses the soybean trade to recover a moment where the fundamentals of Qing approaches to commerce and taxation butted up against the new treaties. Despite the efforts of British diplomats and the leaders of the IMC to discipline Qing officials into prioritizing capital circulation above other goals, when it came to the soy business Chinese officials persisted in their approach to ‘commercial governance’ by attempting to preserve a branch of shipping the British considered inefficient and contrary to the purpose of capital circulation (p. 140). The final two chapters then turn to Anglo-Chinese negotiations over the lijin (transit tax) in the 1880s and 1890s, the reorganisation of which Kent argues was the decisive end point for earlier Qing approaches to the administration of trade. The conference in Yantai (Chefoo) about lijin collection was the moment ‘when the looming issue of proper commercial governance crystallized into concrete problems’ (p. 149). After the tax was standardised and placed under the control of the IMC, Chinese domestic trade was placed under the foreign-managed customs and ‘abstract qualitative’ governance came to rule the day (p. 169). Value, not use-value, became the underlying metric for success (p. 223).
This is an exciting and challenging book. The author's ability to blend granular detail with big-picture analysis is methodologically impressive, as is her knack for synthesising theory and explaining its intersection with a broad range of scholarship. Maritime historians should be especially eager to read this new perspective on the vibrant and volatile shipping industry in nineteenth-century China.