Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft

by Stephen R. Halsey

Overview

China’s history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been framed as a long coda of imperial decline, played out during its last dynasty, the Qing. Quest for Power presents a sweeping reappraisal of this narrative. Stephen Halsey traces the origins of China’s great-power status in the twentieth century to this era of supposed decadence and decay. Threats from European and Japanese imperialism and the growing prospect of war triggered China’s most innovative state-building efforts since the Qing dynasty’s founding in the mid-1600s.

Through a combination of imitation and experimentation, a new form of political organization took root in China between 1850 and 1949 that shared features with modern European governments. Like them, China created a military-fiscal state to ensure security in a hostile international arena. The Qing Empire extended its administrative reach by expanding the bureaucracy and creating a modern police force. It poured funds into the military, commissioning ironclad warships, reorganizing the army, and promoting the development of an armaments industry. State-built telegraph and steamship networks transformed China’s communication and transportation infrastructure. Increasingly, Qing officials described their reformist policies through a new vocabulary of sovereignty—a Western concept that has been a cornerstone of Chinese statecraft ever since. As Halsey shows, the success of the Chinese military-fiscal state after 1850 enabled China to avoid wholesale colonization at the hands of Europe and Japan and laid the foundation for its emergence as a global power in the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674915060
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/12/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	868,053
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Stephen R. Halsey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Preface Introduction: State-Making and Empire in a World-Historical Context Sovereignty and Successful State-Making in Modern China Rethinking the Modern Chinese State Chapter Summaries Chapter 1. Europe’s Global Conquest Colonialism in India and Southwest Asia Colonialism in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa Constrained Sovereignty: China’s Escape from Formal Colonization Weak States and Porous Economies Chapter 2. Foreign Trade Cotton Textiles and Opium Culture and Consumption in Nineteenth-Century China The Mediated Economy The Qing State and Sino-Foreign Trade The Imperial Maritime Customs Service and China’s Foreign Trade Chapter 3. Money Patterns of Taxation and Public Finance in the Qing Empire Before 1850 Internal Rebellion and the Crisis in Public Finance, 1850–1865 From Agriculture to Commerce: Growth of the State’s Extractive Capacity Patterns of Resource Distribution: Abandoning the Empire’s Western Peripheries Defending Imperial Sovereignty: The Pursuit of Wealth and Power in Eastern China Money and the Military-Fiscal State in China Chapter 4. Bureaucracy Patterns of Local Governance in China Before 1850 The Creation of New Fiscal Bureaucracies After 1850 Sovereignty and the Development of Modern Policing in China Bureaucracy and the Military-Fiscal State in China Chapter 5. Guns Military Affairs in China Before 1850 Creating New Armies Military Industries in China After 1850 Infrastructure Weapons Production Building Coastal Defenses in China Guns and the Military-Fiscal State in China Chapter 6. Transportation Steam Transport Before 1872 The Creation of the CMSNC, 1872–1873 Unexpected Success, 1873–1878 The Company’s Achievements, 1878–1895 Patterns of Business organization After the Loss of the CMSNC’s Patron, 1895–1915 Transportation, Statecraft, and the Military-Fiscal State Chapter 7. Communication The Postal Courier System and Its Decline Early Opposition to the Telegraph in China Geopolitics and the Telegraph, 1874–1881 Construction and Administration of the Telegraph Network Telegraphy and the New Language of Statecraft Intelligence, Economy, and Bureaucracy Telegraphy and the Tensions Between Governance and Political Participation, 1900–1911 State-Making and the Information Order in Modern China Epilogue: State-Making in China, 1850–1949 Development of the Military-Fiscal State During the Republican Period The Emergence of the Mature Military-Fiscal State After 1949 China’s Century of Transformation Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

A bold argument about modern Chinese statecraft that finds nineteenth-century China successful in forging a military–fiscal state worthy of comparison with familiar European examples of modern national state formation. In contrast to recent American scholarship seeking to put China into the broader African and Asian world of European colonialism, the author argues the political significance of China not becoming a formal colony, and offers a fresh account and challenging interpretation about the origins of the modern Chinese state.

R. Bin Wong

This is an outstanding new study of Imperial China’s relationship with the Western powers in the middle of the nineteenth century. Halsey offers surprisingly fresh data, many from the local archives, and shows that the conventional story of China’s meek ‘response’ to the West is extremely one-sided. The book convincingly demonstrates that the Chinese authorities, at the center as well as at the local level, had a rather sophisticated understanding of the international situation and took the initiative to undertake administrative and political reforms to cope with the situation.

Akira Iriye