Capital and commercial governance in the late Qing /

Capital and commercial governance in the late Qing /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Kent, Stacie Anne, author.
Imprint:	2015. Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2015
Description:	1 electronic resource (467 pages)
Language:	English
Format:	E-Resource Dissertations
Local Note:	School code: 0330
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10773138

Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:	University of Chicago. degree granting institution.
ISBN:	9781321894011
Notes:	Advisors: James L. Hevia; Moishe Postone Committee members: Bruce Cumings. This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. This item must not be sold to any third party vendors. This item must not be added to any third party search indexes. Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-11(E), Section: A. English
Summary:	In the second half of the nineteenth century, foreign commercial activity in the Qing Empire and the regulations governing it changed. The trading activities of Euroamerican firms increasingly mixed with the Empire's domestic commerce; at the same time, trade regulation became an international project, framed by dozens of bi-lateral treaties and multilaterally negotiated commercial regulations, and administered by a new multinational Customs service using novel bureaucratic protocols. This dissertation uses Chinese and English language archives produced by the Qing government, British diplomatic service, and Shanghai Municipal Council to examine how treaties, taxation, customs protocols, and paperwork organized and policed foreign and domestic commerce during the period 1842-1887. Scholars have disagreed whether the new regulatory order that developed in the Qing Empire's treaty ports modernized the Empire by institutionalizing "open" trade and "modern" bureaucratic practices or whether the asymmetries of power codified by late Qing treaties subjected the Empire to Euroamerican domination. More recently, other scholars have begun to again recast the character of late Qing institutional transformations, arguing they were a pragmatic state-building project shaped by indigenous ruling principles and practices. Within this debate, it has remained unclear why the advance of Euroamerican commerce into the Qing Empire took place alongside new methods of policing trade and producing state revenue. This dissertation examines the relationship between Euroamerican trade and changing arts of governance in the late Qing Empire. I argue that transnational capital and commodity flows challenged Qing officials to reconsider what commerce was, how it contributed to society and whether the tools and spaces the Empire used to organize governance could sustain order in a rapidly changing commercial environment. Although these reconsiderations took place in the context of asymmetrical power relations between the Qing Empire and Euroamerican states, I argue it was not merely the threat of military domination that reshaped Qing governance. Rather problems related to commercial activity and treaty obligations triggered a gradual colonizing transformation in the Qing arts of governance. This argument links late Qing participation in processes of global political-economic integration to the erosion of imperial rule. It also helps to clarify how modern global capitalism offered a novel model for governing practices in the late Qing. The argument in the dissertation develops along two lines. First, I bring critical attention to the norms, assumptions, and technologies deployed in the Qing Empire to create a new regulatory order. Second, I trace how Qing leaders critiqued and accommodated this colonial regulatory order. Together, these two lines of argument refine our understanding of historical differences between the Qing Empire and the Euroamerican societies that sent merchants to trade in China. I re-interpret Qing governing practices as neither the rote expressions of a static, xenophobic culture nor the pragmatic pursuit of instrumental interests, as previous historians have argued. Rather I examine how specific ontologies and governing dispositions produced a Qing imperial order that substantively differed from the world inhabited by the British, American, German, and French merchants and diplomats shaping the new arts of commercial governance. Qing ontologies and dispositions offer an alternative narrative of commerce and governance that critically illuminates naturalized presuppositions held by foreign merchants and diplomats, as well as by many historians of China. In the historical narrative developed by the dissertation, late Qing treaties initiated an ongoing project of regulatory innovation and revision that introduced new objects, strategies, and tactics for governance. I build the case that this project responded to a shifting landscape of capitalist commercial activity, suggesting that colonialism in China was not a political project distinct from modern capitalist commerce. Rather colonialism took place through capitalism and in its image. For commerce to modernize China, it had to colonize it as well. This argument ultimately suggests broader reconsideration of what counts as colonialism and how modern governing practices are imbricated with capitalism.