A Global History of Trade and Conflict since 1500

L. Coppolaro, F. McKenzie, L. Coppolaro, F. McKenzie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137326836
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book explains the causes and consequences of the intersection of two transformative global forces - trade and conflict – since 1500. The nine historical case studies – interspersed over 500 years and spanning the globe - make a major historical contribution to the enduring debate about whether trade makes peace more likely.

1

Trade and Conflict in the South China Sea: Portugal and China, 1514–23

Timothy Brook

It used to be a truth universally acknowledged that the Chinese state was historically hostile to foreign trade, and that if the Chinese were in want of anything, it was the freedom to trade. This truth has been so resilient that it has for five centuries anchored the perception that China needed to be knocked out of its complacency, and for two centuries supported the argument that capitalism arose in Europe because the European state, precisely unlike the Chinese state, was the proponent, patron and benefactor of foreign trade that it organized, or at the very least chartered, through monopoly corporations. This chapter argues the fallacy of these assumptions and proposes that the history of the early modern world be written not as a polarity of East and West, each counterexemplifying the other, but as a joint process of engagement and alternation in which both sides struggled over the relationship between foreign trade and the state, which violence alternately destabilized and maintained.¹

The prejudices against this view have deep historiographical roots running down through diverse soil strata: Western hostility to the command economy of the Communist period; before that, the Western belief that China needed to be ‘opened up’ (a phrase that the reform faction in the Communist Party curiously chose to resuscitate in the 1980s to describe China’s re-entry into global capitalism); before that, the imperialist conviction that only force of arms could bring down the Great Wall; and before that, the mercantilist notion that China was a benevolent autocracy that protected domestic assets by demeaning merchants and placing all decisions in the hands of ‘mandarins’ (curiously, a Portuguese loan-word from Sanskrit). It is true that at no point during this half-millennium did China unconditionally open its borders to foreign trade, but then neither, with few exceptions, did any European state. The relationship between foreign trade and the state has never been as cleanly bisected as it is in neoliberal ideology, which gives the state the role of an arm’s-length regulator whose purpose is to clear the deck for the circulation of commodities and the accumulation of capital. In practice, the trade–state relationship is quite the opposite, as the contemporary Chinese state fully, though not exceptionally, demonstrates. Trade could not happen without the infrastructure, legal regulation and security that the state alone can supply.

This chapter goes back to the first encounters between Portuguese merchants and Chinese officials in the 1510s, encounters that were closely followed by observers at the time and have been carefully scrutinized by historians subsequently, on the hunch that we may have read past what actually happened at that time in our rush to confirm what happened later. One way of opening up these encounters is to see them from the perspective of Ming China. Narratives of this history tend to represent the Portuguese as acting, aggressively but more or less effectively, and the Chinese as reacting, invariably ineptly. In fact, by attending more carefully to what Chinese officials were doing at the time, a logic of trade–state relations that does not conform to later characterizations comes into view. Indicative in the context of China, it is also striking for being much closer to the norms prevailing in Europe at this time. The relationship between China and Europe would subsequently change, for a host of reasons. At the time, though, it was not so clear that they were each other’s counterexample. Grasp this possibility and the conventional images of both China and Europe have to change. Rather than reading back from later developments, this chapter presents the context in which the Portuguese found themselves as dynamic and changing on both sides, not as passively continuing age-old proclivities. The context is important, because at the moment that the Portuguese arrived, officials of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) were revising institutional arrangements governing maritime trade. This revision was partially derailed in the following decade, allowing Europeans to tell a very different story about China’s hostility to trade, which has obscured not only the actual history of the period but the general ‘premodernity’ of trade that prevailed across the sixteenth-century globe.

The principal source on which this chapter relies is the internal summary of daily court deliberations known as the Veritable Record. Every reign had its own, compiled after the death of the emperor on the basis of the court diary. The Veritable Record was vulnerable to retrospective political interpretation, as we shall see, but it is the closest we come to watching the administration of the realm unfold on a daily basis. Not a source on which earlier historians of the Portugal–China relationship have drawn, the Veritable Record of the Zhengde Emperor reveals policy debates on the Chinese side missing from the standard source, the dynastic history of the Ming, produced long after the dynasty had gone. This record chronicles the debates and decisions people at the centre of the political system made in the face of conflicts arising from the demand for trade by both Chinese and Portuguese. The state appears here not as a monolithic abstraction but as a field of action in which personnel worked within the institutions and policy-making processes available to them to address problems, able to look back to earlier precedents but never forward to the new situations that their own precedents would create. Most had their eyes on securing the wealth and stability of the Ming regime, although this did not mean that they were unified in how to achieve that goal. Some had their eyes on benefits that might accrue to local interests favouring trade, although not if doing so would produce a local benefit that entailed a loss for the government. It was through their debates over what was the best course to follow that the Chinese ‘state’ emerges as an actor in this history of trade and conflict.

Trade and tribute

Portuguese mariners reached the south coast of China in 1514. The sea journey from Lisbon may have been long, but the time between the first Portuguese forays out into the Atlantic and their arrival in China was remarkably short: not much more than three decades to navigate the Indian Ocean, establish a base at Goa, annex the port of Malacca, sail into the Spice Islands and move north to Canton. They did so by piggybacking onto existing trade networks that laced together the South China Sea world economy, partly through trade, occasionally by exploiting a modest advantage in weapons technology.²

On their way eastwards around the Indian Ocean and into the South China Sea, the Portuguese encountered mostly small littoral sultanates. They were entirely unprepared for a state as institutionally complex as Ming China. Chinese had long been major players in maritime trade. The Song (960–1279) had suffered little anxiety over this trade beyond requiring that foreign traders report their cargoes to the Supervisorate of Maritime Affairs. When Khubilai Khan invaded China in the 1270s as the new founder of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), he interdicted maritime trade to prevent Song loyalists from receiving foreign aid to fund their resistance against the Mongols. In 1284, he imposed a monopoly on foreign trade, although this time from a desire to capture revenue. He relaxed the monopoly a year later, although the option to monopolize was always a temptation. The Yuan imposed a complete state monopoly on overseas trade in 1303, and for the next two decades alternately lifted and reimposed it until 1322, when it lifted it altogether.³

It was the founder of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368–98), who brought the inconsistent policies and relaxed enforcements of earlier dynasties to an end. Zhu prohibited private foreign trade in the first years of his reign. This applied to both foreign merchants coming to China and Chinese merchants sailing abroad. Thenceforth, all foreign trade would have to pass through diplomatic channels. The only foreigners allowed to enter the Ming realm to trade were those who came as members of tribute missions. These missions, carefully regulated as to size and schedule, were permitted to engage in trade through designated Chinese brokers, but their formal purpose was to present tribute to the emperor and receive his gifts to take home to their rulers.

The tribute system was an institutional reality; it was also a consensual fiction. On the Chinese side, the fiction was that the emperor ruled the world on Heaven’s behalf, and that all other rulers, of lesser status, should acknowledge his suzerainty by sending tribute as a token of submission to his authority. Rulers outside China went along with this fiction, as the posture of submission gave them diplomatic access to China and opened space for trade. Although the system predated the Ming, it was the Ming state that insisted on channelling all foreign trade through this mechanism. Zhu Yuanzhang’s purpose in funnelling trade through the tribute system was, as prohibition had been for the Yuan state, strategic. Like Khubilai, he believed that it was essential to control the comings and goings of people along the coast in order to consolidate his grip on power. He regarded absolute prohibitions on not just overseas trade, but overseas contact, as fundamental conditions that made this degree of control possible.⁴

Since the nineteenth century, comparative history has counterposed the tribute system, in which a regional hegemon imposes subordination on lesser states, to the Westphalian system of interstate relations based on the formal equality of all nations. The contrast is sensible so long as we resist the modernist temptation to treat the Westphalian system as inherently superior in terms of the norms that it imposes, and the tribute system as a premodern atavism that could only survive in backwards Asia. Consider them, rather, as possible outcomes of two very different state contexts: the Westphalian system (itself as rich in fictions as the tribute system) emerging in the densely and hostile multistate context of Europe, and the tribute system organizing interstate diplomacy within a regional system consisting of one superstate and many much smaller states.

Such is theory; practice took matters in a different direction. Everyone understood that maritime trade, while it could be risky and expensive, could also be hugely profitable. Commercial families were keen to pool their assets and invest in overseas ventures, both as sole owners or as share investors. Sailors were keen to sign on, and the marginal and unskilled willingly took passage in the hope of finding wage labour in Chinese enclaves abroad. The state also understood the enormous wealth that maritime trade could generate. It was not in Zhu Yuanzhang’s intellectual repertoire to imagine growth; he sought to monopolize foreign trade not to make money from it, but to prevent individuals from amassing wealth that could serve as a base for resisting his state. His descendants came to think differently. During the reign of the madcap Zhengde emperor (r. 1506–21), some officials began suggesting that the monopoly could generate fiscal income. Informal coastal trade had been increasing since the 1470s, such that by the time Zhengde was on the throne, the idea that it was legitimate to permit and tax foreign trade was growing at the expense of the ideal of maintaining the old tribute system.

The contradiction between trade and diplomacy

The idea of encouraging maritime trade posed institutional contradictions over which the Zhengde court would struggle for years. It was not a fundamental adage of Ming statecraft that the state should exploit every possibility to extract revenue; the state’s role was rather to ensure the physical and moral well-being of the people. Revenue from land taxes was the foundation of the state’s fiscal income, and this was generally considered adequate to meet the needs of the people and the state. Commerce was also taxed, but at a level so modest (between 3 and 10 per cent) that it constituted only a minor line item in the state budget. The tribute system was even less a generator of state income. Its reason to exist was entirely diplomatic; indeed, what the Ming government paid to cover the expenses of diplomatic missions far exceeded what it received in gifts and payments. However, the lavish profits that maritime trade yielded gradually encouraged officials in regions where foreign trade was conspicuous, especially the southernmost province of Guangdong, to consider the possibility of looking to increase revenue through trade. Doing so meant detaching foreign trade from the tribute system. As the Ming founder had explicitly forbade his descendants from altering the basic institutions of the dynasty, this was a tall order. But many were willing to try.

The institutional fabric within which trade and diplomacy were conducted was somewhat complex and needs to be sketched. Foreign envoys arriving at China’s shores were handled by an agency called the Office of Commercial Shipping (Shibosi), conventionally translated as the Supervisorate of Maritime Affairs. Early in the fifteenth century, this agency passed to the control of eunuchs, who constituted a parallel state administration responsible not to the government but to the imperial household. Their mandate was to protect the interests of the emperor, particularly his financial interests. Diplomacy more generally was handled by the Ministry of Rites, which oversaw the protocol governing Ming relations with foreigners. Border security was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of War. As tribute missions arrived by ship on the south coast of Guangdong province, the day-to-day business of trade and diplomacy was the responsibility of officials posted there. Guangdong and neighbouring Guangxi were under the supervision of a grand coordinator (a civil bureaucrat) and a grand defender (a eunuch). Beneath them, the Guangdong provincial leadership in Canton was split three ways among an administration commissioner, a surveillance commissioner or censor and a military commissioner. Problems arising from relations with seaborne foreigners tended to land on the desk of the administration commissioner. Neither the Ministry of Rites nor the Ministry of War had direct appointees at the provincial level. The only way they could be involved was by reviewing regional decisions at the request of the throne or by petitioning the throne directly for action on a particular issue.

The first moves in the direction of treating maritime trade as a revenue generator may have come from the eunuch administration, which had a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Intersection of Trade and Conflict Since 1500
• 1 Trade and Conflict in the South China Sea: Portugal and China, 1514–23
• 2 Portuguese Resilience in Global War: Military Motivation and Institutional Adaptation in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Cape Route
• 3 An Explosion of Violence: How the Haitian Revolution Rearranged the Trade Patterns of the Western Hemisphere
• 4 Lifting the Continental Blockade: Britain, Portugal and Brazilian Trade in the Global Context of the Napoleonic Wars
• 5 Retreat from Globalization: Britain and the Renewal of Imperial Trade between the Two World Wars
• 6 Trade and Conflict in the Rhetoric of Winston Churchill
• 7 War, Revolution and the Great Depression in the Global Wheat Trade, 1917–39
• 8 Trading Blocs and Trading Blows: GATT’s Conflictual Path to Trade Liberalization, 1947–67
• 9 Nixon’s War with the International Economy
• Conclusion: Dismissing the Kantian View of Trade and Peace
• Bibliography
• Index