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This chapter argues that prior to the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, both Qing China and Tokugawa Japan were familiar with the principle of personal jurisdiction and the existence of ethnic and social groups that had separate legal existences prior to the Opium War. In the Qing legal order, the Manchu conquest élite enjoyed extensive legal privileges, which placed them outside the criminal jurisdiction of the local Chinese administration. Similarly, the Tokugawa shogunate was accustomed to devolving jurisdiction to local domains and different status groups.

This chapter considers the marginal literati authors whose knowledge of exotica drew from both official sources and the marketplace. It shows how Qing China entered the nineteenth century with not one but many competing claims to knowledge that would trigger a new round of negotiation over pharmaceutical objecthood in the modern era. For someone residing in an urban center with ready access to the marketplace, exotic objects were not just something one might have heard of or read about, but tangible specimens to collect, examine, and (in many cases) ingest. This chapter thus follows one author’s journey through the Qing world of goods to shed light on new directions in the bencao tradition. To conclude, the chapter discusses the political significance of this vernacular sphere of knowledge and the double-edged meaning of curiosity.

This chapter focuses on nineteenth-century Japan. It notes that the Tokugawa and Meiji regimes, both before and after 1868, enjoyed almost total success at controlling opium within Japan's borders, and both employed this control to enhance state consolidation and centralization of power. The chapter notes that Japan also established an opium regime in China and sold refined narcotics, doing so in the face of ever-mounting Chinese resistance and international censure. It furthermore explores the historical origins of Japanese involvement in the opium trade by examining changing Japanese views of opium use in Qing China. The chapter demonstrates how the mechanisms of sakoku furthered political consolidation in Tokugawa Japan, and argues that Meiji Japan used opium to move away from being a co-victim of Western imperialism to become a co-predator in China.

This chapter illustrates how the Qing officials mainly understood banquan/copyright as a privilege granted exclusively by the state to reward publishers or authors for their outstanding works rather than a form of property that the state was obligated to protect. It discusses the two forms of state-issued banquan/copyright protection that interlocked the state's authority and cultural value of a book with the protection of a book's exclusive profit, as well as the proprietorship recognition of a book. When the two mechanisms were put in practice, publishers and authors quickly learned that such privileges might not necessarily deliver the kind of state protection they had envisioned and expected. The quarrels between them and the very state authorities granting them banquan protection against unauthorized reprinting committed by the government provoked a series of discussions in late Qing China on the nature of banquan/copyright. This chapter also discusses whether banquan/copyright was a form of property that comes into existence by itself or a privilege that had to be granted by a state authority.

This chapter picks up the transformation of bencao in post-Conquest Jiangnan. It highlights the vocal critics of amateur authors and considers the ways in which the Qing state’s cultural policy over the eighteenth century shaped the now-marginalized field. The chapter explains that with the Qing reforms in government and culture came a parallel, albeit less pronounced, reconfiguration of natural studies within Confucian learning. The centrality of pharmacy and the nature of drugs in the pre-Conquest years also came under intense questioning in postwar decades. In a move that was hardly premeditated, the Qing rulers found themselves in the company of new allies from the elite strata of literati and physicians who were championing a new approach to the field of bencao.

Between 1876 and 1879, the most lethal drought-famine in imperial China's long history of famines and disasters struck the five northern provinces of Shanxi, Henan, Shandong, Zhili, and Shaanxi. The drought in the Yellow River basin began in 1876 and worsened dramatically with the almost total failure of rain in 1877. The lack of consensus over theories of famine causation and over definitions of moral versus immoral responses to the disaster presaged the more extreme breakdown in consensus following the famine over what values were crucial to Chinese identity. The famine thus reveals competing contexts for the consideration of trauma in a key period of transition in late-Qing China. Because the image of innocent human beings starving to death is so disturbing, a famine provides a particularly vivid window through which to view a culture's response to disaster.

This chapter discusses data and methodological issues, and provides a general overview and classification of all documented protests. These episodes were not distributed evenly over time but were clustered in three waves: 1740–1759, 1776–1795, and 1820–1839. The reasons for establishing 1740 and 1839 as the temporal boundaries of the study are twofold. First, Qing China during this period was at its height of early modernity. Its levels of centralized state power and commercialized economy were comparable to eighteenth-century Europe. Second, studies that deal with unrest in the late Ming–early Qing period (from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century) and the late Qing period (from the end of the first Opium War, in 1842, to the collapse of the Qing empire in 1911) are relatively abundant.

This chapter discusses the history of the border region between Chosŏn Korea and Qing China, and norms of governing the territory before the nineteenth century. The region, which straddled the Tumen River, served as a military buffer for the early Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910) to defend against “barbarian” Manchus. After the Manchus founded the Qing dynasty in China, the Qing demarcated the northeast territory of Manchuria, including the Tumen River valley, as a “prohibited zone” where settlement and commercial activity were prohibited. The Chosŏn government upheld this policy and prohibited its own people from crossing the Chosŏn-Qing border into Manchuria. The chapter shows that the policy was not strictly enforced; Koreans and others crossed into the zone to engage in trade. For the most part, however, border infractions did not worry the two governments because the region remained sparsely inhabited and their claims to territory were mutually recognized.

Over the course of the mid-nineteenth-century wars, the dominant powers (Britain, the U.S., Russia, and Qing China) came to espouse a surprisingly similar orientation toward legitimate statehood. While the liberation wars of the late-eighteenth century witnessed the creation of many new republics, by midcentury those republics and the empires that had survived pursued greater central authority. Although sometimes at odds with liberal rhetoric of the age (especially among reforming Republicans in the U.S.), these actors recognized the importance of coercion of violence to maintaining their states. The victory of centralized authority, whether it took the form of empires or republics, reinforced the power of established states and of organized, aggressive defense of that order.

The secret to sustaining national power since the eighteenth century has revolved around “state financial capacity,” or the ability to raise low-cost capital and then use it to adapt to change and stay active in the world. While the historical record does not offer license to legislate smothering taxation or carry crippling debt, it does warn against the seductive assumption that taxing less and borrowing less are necessarily good. This chapter draws lessons from the English strategy after the Glorious Revolution and the American strategy after the Great Depression, both of which used low-cost capital judiciously to buy security and growth. Qing China and the Soviet Union failed because they could not do the same. The correct balance involves adequate taxation and borrowing to increase the capacities of a society; doing less undermines national power in the long run.

One stipulation of the peace agreement ending the Boxer War in China was that a high-ranking member of the Chinese royal family would travel to Germany to personally apologize to the German emperor for the murder of his envoy, Clemens von Ketteler. This so-called ‘mission of atonement’ saw Zaifeng, also known as Prince Chun, travel to Europe on behalf of the Chinese emperor. The Chinese contingent refused to cross the border from Switzerland into Germany, however, when it came to light that Kaiser Wilhelm II had decreed that members of the party kowtow before him during their audience. The incident led to a diplomatic impasse that illustrated the diplomatic incompetence of the German emperor and threatened to destabilize the conditions for an international peace agreement.

It is incontestable that the German navy occupied Kiautschou Bay after receiving a direct order from Kaiser Wilhelm II. What is often forgotten, however, is that this intervention was in line with long-term naval planning which had exhaustively surveyed the Chinese coastline in search of a harbour that would offer not only a naval advantage but the kind of economic benefit to Germany that Britain enjoyed in Hong Kong. The manner in which the occupation was brought about was also the result of a plan to exploit a crisis in China to gain territory that was originally hatched by the German foreign secretary, Bernhard von Bülow. While Wilhelm II had forced the pace of the occupation, he did so in a way that aggravated both Russia and the Chinese, brought into question the sovereign rights of the Chinese emperor and empress dowager, and sparked a scramble for Chinese territories.