The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
But, as I will mention
in my next lecture, it is far from clear that the eighteenth
century in China saw the preparation of China's manufacturing
goods for the competition from Japan in the nineteenth
century, even when Chinese ships would still dominate
the waters.
The
Transformation of Coastal Peripheries into Economic
Centres During the Age of National Seclusion
The eighteenth century
has often been considered the golden age of late imperial
China. The political and social troubles of the seventeenth
century seem to have subsided, to be replaced for several
decades by an unusual blend of peace, prosperity, and
order. The Qing government's military campaigns pushed
China's boundaries father westward into central Asia than
had any earlier dynasty.1 From c. 1600 to c. 1850, its
population arguably tripled and its cultivated land more
than doubled.2 Once distant provinces of the south like
Guangxi, Yunnan, and Guizhou received massive inflows
of peasants from the overpopulated southeast, just as
newly acquired stretches of Xinjiang, Mongolia, and eventually
Manchuria were opened up by poverty-fleeing peasants from
the northern plains.3 In the early eighteenth century,
something like 16 to 27 million bushels of rice were annually
being shipped down the Yangtze Valley.4 In the mid-nineteenth
century, the amount of rice shipped from the Hunan-Hubei
area to the Lower Yangtze delta and Zhejiang hovered between
30 to 40 million bushels, enough to feed between a third
to a half of the total population of Japan in 1800.
Emblematic of this Qing
success was the government's development of copper coinage,
the currency so long considered the country's basic metal
coin. As we have seen, ever since the twelfth century,
the Chinese economy had suffered a severe shortage of
these coins. Then, from the 1720s, the copper mines opened
by the government in the far southwestern provinces of
Yunnan and Guizhou annually began to provide the economy
with 5,000 tons of copper coins.6 As much as 90% of this
production ended up being privately sold in the early
eighteenth century in violation of government regulations.7
But it secured for the country sufficient copper supplies
for the first time in seven centuries.
Today I want to revise
this view of the eighteenth century Chinese economy in
two respects. First I would like to view this landed success
through the perspective of maritime East Asia.
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