Imperial China and Capitalist Europe in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy
Author(s)
Hung, Ho-Fung
Abstract
Ming-Qing China has long been portrayed in Eurocentric historiography as a plainly agrarian and inward-looking empire, in contrast to the commercially dynamic & maritime-oriented Europe. However, a recent wave of research illustrates the blossoming of maritime trade and domestic commerce in 16th-18th-century China and depicts China as the center of the early-modern world economy. Acknowledging the existence of an early-modern global economy and that China was a crucial component of it does not infer that there was a single world system grounded on an integrated division of labor and centered at China. This article is an attempt to locate China properly in the early-modern world by examining the form and impact of the 18th-century Sino-English trade as an example. I will argue that (1) despite the intensive trade between Europe & China, economic exchange was institutionalized under a system of port of trade that kept the political economy of China intact. Nonetheless, the actual dynamics underlying the emergence of the system in China is more complicated than what the port-of-trade theory suggests; (2) China’s participation in the global economy facilitated a drastic socioeconomic transformation of the Qing Empire in the 18th century. The transformation was parallel to the formation of the core-periphery division of labor in 16th-century Europe, but was contained in a political framework and geopolitical setting vastly different from those in the latter. Capitalist development was arrested, while the booming market economy weakened the imperial state, paving the way for the 19th-century disintegration of the empire.
