Speaking of Profit: Bao Shichen and Reform in Nineteenth-Century China pdf

William Roy is a social historian of modern China, in very broad terms "social" and "modern", whose work has centered on cultural, intellectual, economic and political history as well. His first two books dealt with the nineteenth-century history of a major inland Chinese trading city; The second received an impressive award from the Urban History Association, and made him engage in the debate on issues of "civil society" and "the public sphere". He also wrote books on the consciousness of the ruling elite of the Qing dynasty in the relatively prosperous eighteenth century, and on the patterns of agricultural violence in a war-torn Chinese province habitually over the course of seven centuries. Recently he wrote a general exegetical history of the Qing dynasty, entitled The Last Empire of China.

Speaking of Profit: Bao Shichen and Reform in Nineteenth-Century China pdf by William T. Rowe

In the first half of the nineteenth century the Qing Empire faced a crisis. It was broadly perceived both inside and outside of government that the “prosperous age” of the eighteenth century was over. Bureaucratic corruption and malaise, population pressure and food shortages, ecological and infrastructural decay, domestic and frontier rebellion, adverse balances of trade, and, eventually, a previously inconceivable foreign threat from the West seemed to present hopelessly daunting challenges. This study uses the literati reformer Bao Shichen as a prism to understand contemporary perceptions of and proposed solutions to this general crisis. Though Bao only briefly and inconsequentially served in office himself, he was widely recognized as an expert on each of these matters, and his advice was regularly sought by reform-minded administrators. From examination of his thought on bureaucratic and fiscal restructuring, agricultural improvement, the grain tribute administration, the salt monopoly, monetary policy, and foreign relations, Bao emerges as a consistent advocate of the hard-nosed pursuit of material “profit,” in the interests not only of the rural populace but also of the Chinese state and nation, anticipating the arguments of “self-strengthening” reformers later in the century.