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Administering wealth: the concept of “economy” and the epistemic foundations of nationalism in late-imperial China (late-nineteenth–early-twentieth century)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2020

Pablo A. Blitstein
Pablo A. Blitstein*
Affiliation:
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 54 boulevard Raspail, 75006Paris, France
*
Author for correspondence: E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this paper, I will focus on the emergence and uses of political economy in late-nineteenth–early-twentieth century China. I will discuss how the concept of “economy” came to be conceived as an autonomous sphere of human life, with its own rules and its own order, and how the production of “wealth” was conceptually divorced from ethics, politics, and administration. For this purpose, I will focus on a group which played a key role in reshaping the social and political discourse of the empire: a group of nationalist reformers who wanted to transform the Qing empire into a constitutional monarchy. I will explore how these reformers brought together two different sets of traditions – the Chinese imperial traditions of literati statecraft on the one hand, and mostly British, French, and German traditions of political economy on the other – and how they used them to naturalize a particular idea of what the “Chinese nation” was and should be.

Keywords

Economyglobal historyintellectual historymodern Chinanationalismtranslation
Type
Featured Essays on the History of Political Economy in Asia and Europe
Information
International Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , July 2021 , pp. 185 - 206
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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