Conclusion

Summary

The Conclusion briefly identifies avenues for future research. In particular, it returns to the question of Sino-Western economic divergence mentioned at the beginning of this Introduction, and explores the possible connections between Qing fiscal undercapacity and China’s relative economic decline in the eighteenth, nineteen^th, and early twentieth centuries. The most promising of these appears to be that government taxation can be an effective - albeit not exclusively so - way to concentrate capital and acquire the economies of scale often necessary for industrial takeoff, and therefore that the Qing’s fiscal weakness deprived it of a capital accumulation tool that some of its main competitors, notably Japan, used to great effect. The Conclusion also discusses the various connections between fiscal capacity and the broader concept of state capacity, and whether the ideological narrative presented here offers more general insights into the sociopolitical decline of Confucianism in the later nineteen^th and twentieth centuries.