Empire of Impartiality: Managing Indebtedness to Foreigners in Eighteenth-Century China

Abstract

Recent scholarship highlights the role of commercial credit, often backed by the power of the state, in creating conditions of subordination in the expansion of European empires. Less attention has been paid to how such indebtedness was understood and handled by the counterpart states, thereby missing the opportunity to appreciate other modes of interaction between private credit and imperial construction. This article investigates the framework under which the eighteenth-century Qing empire dealt with accusations brought against indebted Chinese merchants by external parties. I stress the importance of bringing Sino-Western and intra-Asian cases into a single analytic frame to reflect the Qing empire’s comprehensive approach to the maritime frontier. In these cases, the Qing emperor intervened to help foreigners recover their funds and even assumed unbound liability as a last resort. Buttressing such practices was a foundational principle of the Qing imperial formation: that the emperor’s claim to universal sovereignty rested upon his utmost impartiality toward the ‘inner and outer’ – a contrasting pair based on shifting relativity rather than fixed territoriality. This study highlights the importance of understanding the different modes of mutual constitution between how an empire imagined and managed different groups of people it ruled over or encountered and the practical parameters of its political economy in global history.