Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary Study of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644-1840

This seminal book translates and analyzes thirty-eight memorials to the throne and other documents dealing with important issues of Chinese political economy--water control, mining, grain trade, pawnshops, brewing, and commercial shipping. The documents also contain detailed discussions of how the state should control wealth, self-interest, profit, hoarding, and the market; these texts go a long way toward dispelling the notion that economic liberalism is necessarily a Western, "modern" phen…