8 - Piracy, Empire, and Sovereignty in Late Imperial China

Summary

Abstract

A reminder of the hazards of a Eurocentric approach to the phenomenon of piracy, this chapter studies interactions between the Qing regime and pirates. Late imperial China saw the development of three overlapping maritime “regimes” along its coasts, namely, the imperial dynastic power, the European overseas enterprise, and the “pirates” themselves. Notably, the latter two regimes challenged the first in various ways. A reassessment of the Qing imperial claims of sovereignty in the face of activities labelled as piracy provides crucial understanding of the way empire was constructed. One may point at both parallels and dissimilarities between East Asian and Western forms of piracy, revealing how the various players off China's coasts contended with each other over maritime space.

Keywords: China, Qing Dynasty, maritime regimes, sovereignty, maritime space

Introduction

Piracy played an important role in the making of the Qing Empire (1636/44–1911). Such a premise at first may appear far-fetched. Not so long ago, China scholars paid little attention to the maritime, dismissing it as peripheral and unimportant. Although today maritime history is one of the hottest topics in Chinese history, few if any scholars would place piracy at centre stage. Indeed, no China scholar has examined the relationship that piracy had with empire building and the legal regime upon which the state rested. Important studies by Janice Thomson, Anne Pérotin-Dumon, Eliga Gould, Lauren Benton, Michael Kempe, and others, although adding greatly to our understandings about the role that piracy has played in the operations of empire and law, nevertheless are Eurocentric in that they focus on Western imperialism and say little about how non-Western imperiums and legal regimes developed or functioned. In this chapter, I shift attention to the construction and internal dynamics of the Qing Empire, sovereignty, and piracy between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Put simply, this chapter takes a China-centred perspective.

This chapter builds on Benton's and other recent studies on European empires, legal regimes, and piracy by exploring how Qing rulers, scholar-officials, agents of foreign states, and pirates interacted with one another in the construction of empire and sovereignty. While my research has been inspired by Benton in particular, I nonetheless take her studies as my point of departure because there is so much that was different in China. She has persuasively argued that the expansion of law closely followed the expansion of European empires across the globe.