Mercantilism, Account Keeping and the Periphery-Core Relationship

Cheryl Susan McWatters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429938689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Mercantilism and accounting remain two dynamic and debated concepts in terms of definition and scope. This volume brings together the research of international scholars from a wide variety of disciplines – accounting, anthropology, native studies, economic geography, economic history and management – to reflect on alternative approaches to the study of these concepts.

This book focuses particularly on how individuals across space and time negotiated and navigated systems of exchange and trade, especially when confronted with world views and cultural systems that conflicted with and disrupted perceptions of their own. Through this, the volume offers a helpful reinforcement to the view that the analysis of mercantilism must be more highly contextualised to time and place, along with deeper focus on the local actors involved. It is these local actors who negotiated, exchanged and navigated differing world views and who enable us to tease out the longer-run global economic and social processes and the impacts of these encounters.

Complementing the growing interest in mercantilism, Indigenous studies and the relationships between colonists, traders and their counterparts in colonies and trading ports, this work provides a cross disciplinary examination of the subject area. Furthermore, it encourages a renewed interest in the use of archival documents and documentary sources in novel and innovative ways.

Part I

Pre-market intermediaries and Indigenous players

1 Jesuit account books and their role in connecting worlds

Frederik Vermote

In the study of the history of globalisation and its myriad connections, world historians sometimes compare the evolution of this process to the Buddhist image of Indra’s net.¹ It is hard to find a better metaphor or more convincing visualisation than a giant web with reflecting nodes at every intersection, a symbol for a world of interconnectedness where interdependent entities and their reciprocal interactions affected everyone and everything. Globalisation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not as encompassing as its perfect Buddhist analogy. If globalisation had any resemblance to Indra’s net, or could be understood as an earthly, imperfect shadow of the idea, then it seems logical to assume that it grew more connected throughout the period we are looking at – call it the early modern world 1500–1800. While new knots were appearing as more people and regions were tied into a global net, the degree of connectivity grew similarly. As new connections and threads were spun, the density of the existing threads increased, which fortified the connections along yet other axis.

The process of globalisation shaped the Jesuit missions in China in a continuous way, not just as the missionaries started out and travelled along the maritime network that the Portuguese sailors had established in the early sixteenth century, but also later on, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as multiple European states and companies provided networks from Europe to east Asia. At that time the Jesuit missions in Asia operated no longer ‘in an era of first contacts’, but rather in an ‘age of sustained contact’, where first encounters ‘were turned into places of repeated meeting’.² The aim of this chapter is to examine the process of globalisation in this period and the ways in which it affected the finances of the Jesuit missions in China.

World historians such as Peter Stearns and Robbie Robertson, who have studied the process of globalisation (including its historical roots and the development of a global consciousness), do not include the seventeenth or the eighteenth centuries as significant turning points that marked an increase in ‘global history’.³ According to them, the year 1492 – the first time humanity’s interconnections assumed global proportions – and 1850 – the second wave of globalisation – are milestones that do deserve a historian’s attention. These two dates did not end the debate within the field of world history as to when the process of globalisation began or generated revolutionary transformations: different world historians have taken the position that globalisation was a phenomenon that became significant after 1500 (Jerry Bentley), during the sixteenth century (Immanuel Wallerstein), somewhat before 1500 (Janet Abu-Lughod) or a long time before 1500 (Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills). Meanwhile, economic historians have understood the concept of ‘globalisation’ as ‘the integration of international commodity markets’.⁴ According to O’Rourke and Williamson this definition of the economic phenomenon of ‘globalisation’ is in line with ‘the way all economists are trained’ and places the birth of ‘globalisation’ somewhere in the nineteenth century.⁵

O’Rourke and Williamson are convinced that economically significant globalisation did not start before the nineteenth century no matter how many galleons, junks or caravels sailed between Europe, Asia and the Americas. Just as in the field of world history, the debate has not been resolved in economic history either. Monetary historians with a focus on specie flow such as Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez have rejected the narrow approach of O’Rourke and Williamson.⁶ Others, such as G. Balachandran and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, have similarly criticised O’Rourke and Williamson’s ‘gross caricature of world trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which derives entirely from a slanted reading of European trade in the epoch’.⁷ In another article Subrahmanyam regrets that economic historians often ignore non-European actors and economic movements, thereby misrepresenting the overall early modern period. As such, O’Rourke and Williamson’s evidence places the birth of globalisation ‘under the (probably benevolent?) aegis of the British empire’.⁸ Rather than proposing yet more landmark dates that could resolve the debate on the birth of globalisation or facilitate the construction of a periodisation of the past 500 years, this chapter examines some insignificant dates. These dates are insignificant in the sense that they do not delineate a historical period. However, the dates are tied to very rich sources, snapshots or keyholes, through which I will write a global micro-history of Jesuit finances in China.⁹

Snapshots or keyholes to world historical time¹⁰

My snapshot is taken in 1676. This date is not significant in either the bigger Asian or European history narratives. It is the date or short period – 1674–1676 – that was covered by a Jesuit account book of missions in the southern Chinese province of Jiangnan. I will analyse the local, regional and global elements, and the overall historical context of the account book to improve our understanding of the relationship between local histories and global connections, and to reveal how globalisation may have affected Jesuit missions in China. I argue that although the Jesuits are often portrayed as global avatars with successful methods, knowledge and intercultural sensibilities to organise their distant missions, their finances betrayed a dependence on mostly local economic sources and benefactors.

The account book, written by the Jesuit missionary François de Rougemont (1624–1676), is a keyhole that bears semblance to a high-resolution image. No other sources on Jesuit finances in China match its detail. Nearly all his accounting entries illuminate local and regional interactions, and illustrate the degree to which he was disconnected from the global Jesuit financial network. His records therefore throw light onto the complex local economy and can help us understand that, in the highly monetised economic region of Jiangnan, silver was more pervasive than scholars previously assumed, even among the poorest layers of Chinese society. By reconstructing economic networks, this snapshot and account book of a person with global connections illustrates how de Rougemont balanced his finances thanks to local real estate investments, combined with rent from assets in India and Macau.

Jesuit account books of their missions in China are a rarity. The bibliographical section on Western primary sources of the Handbook of Christianity in China includes only three, two in Western languages and one in Chinese.¹¹ Most Jesuit account books were destroyed upon the author’s death because enemies of the Society could use this type of document to critique the Jesuits’ management of their financial affairs, which was a very delicate issue. The three that survive seem to have been preserved almost by accident. Each of the sources in Western languages is a draft version of a more complete account book or ‘major ledger’ that has been lost. The reason François de Rougemont’s account book survived was that, after his death, his friend Philippe Couplet, who was a missionary in the nearby Shanghai missions, decided to take it with him when he visited Europe during the early 1680s. Couplet most likely wanted to use it as a propaganda tool to re-emphasise that the missions in China still needed money from rich European benefactors. After that the account book was forgotten only to be unearthed from the archives in 1992, when Noël Golvers, realising the value of this source, deciphered, translated and analysed the manuscript and wrote a thorough study about his findings.¹² De Rougemont’s account book is without doubt the most complete and extensive of its kind, consisting of nearly 150 pages of text with over 800 entries that cover his daily expenses and other financial transactions. The manuscript itself is ‘a small in-12° codex of 230 single pages (14.8 by 8.5 cm), of Chinese paper’.¹³ The manuscript received a new cover when it arrived ‘into the collections of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library)’ of Brussels. It is relatively well preserved apart from a hole through several pages, its ripped open fold and the fact that just over twenty pages are cut out. Most of the text is written in Latin, Portuguese, Chinese and Dutch.

The account book information was framed within a bifurcated balance of debit and credit. Numbers prevailed and because of their often incomplete and mathematical nature even economists or economic historians have to go through great pains in order to puzzle together their detailed renderings of who owed whom such and such goods and money. Despite this, historians without a knack (or passion) for numbers are often amazed at the information penned down in these Jesuit account books. Perhaps this is because, just like Indra’s net, every entry in an account book was connected to a certain degree. Even the most basic and short account books hinted at a human network (behind the numbers), through which, at the very least, money and goods were exchanging hands. The relationship between two parties was often more entangled than a simple material exchange. Take, for example, the following entry made during April or June 1675: ‘[…] Yam, the great-hsiang kung [secretary-catechist], sent me 4 ounces of pure silver – 4.000t. – which were spent to print and bind books, (both) sacred and profane, as for example (T’ai-hsi) shui-fa.’¹⁴ This entry raises many questions: Was it a regular occurrence for high-class (?) Chinese women to sponsor the Chinese Christian missions? What role did they play in these communities? Did the missionaries often use this type of funding for scientific goals (publishing books)? Was the money given in silver (instead of copper) because the printers would rather accept this currency? Who was the audience of the work – (T’ai-hsi) shui-fa – published with this grant? How was Yam thanked for her support in the preface to this work? How would Chinese readers relate to this type of benefactress (was she funding scholars or religious misfits)? Account books are lenses into local communities that constituted the tiniest node in a global network. The information they contain magnifies the degree to which its players were all interacting, to such an extent that the assimilated Jesuits and their global religion were sometimes hard to distinguish for being buried so firmly and deeply into the fertile ground of the local communities.

Global turmoil and local solitude

Of the Jesuit missionaries active in China during the second half of the seventeenth century, François de Rougemont was ‘one of the lesser known, eclipsed by such personalities as Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688) and Philippe Couplet (1623–1693)’.¹⁵ While Verbiest’s work took place in the Chinese high society at the court in Beijing, de Rougemont worked in the Chinese countryside in a local parish. De Rougemont was born on 2 April 1624 in Maastricht. He entered the Antwerp Jesuit college in 1635 and continued his studies in Brussels, Mechlen, Louvain, Courtrai and finally Louvain again until 1654. It took him close to four years to travel from Flanders to Jiangnan, China. He stayed several years in the nearby town of Hangzhou before being sent to the adjacent Suzhou prefecture where he arrived in July 1661. The pastoral centre of this prefecture was Changshu where, after the death of his predecessor Father Girolamo de Gravina (1603–1662), de Rougemont became the head of the Jesuit mission, responsible for the Christian communities of the whole prefecture.

From the moment de Rougemont had expressed interest in the Jesuit China missions in 1654 until his death in 1676, he worked under the auspices of the Portuguese padroado or patronage. As such, before leaving Europe, de Rougemont travelled to Portugal since the Portuguese king would sponsor his trip to China and provide him with an annual stipend as well. When the recruiter of Jesuit missionaries Martino Martini (1614–1661) passed through Louvain on his way from northern Europe to Rome (and Portugal) in 1654, he stayed several months in the same Jesuit residence as de Rougemont. De Rougemont was inspired by Martini and requested permission from his superior to join Martini on his way back to China and become a missionary. They left Antwerp in December 1654, and it would take the Jesuit miss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: mercantilism and accounting across space and time
• Part I Pre-market intermediaries and Indigenous players
• Part II Encounters with the periphery
• Part III Production, consumption and management of the colonial economy
• Index