Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

Chapter 2 focuses on the expansion of pro-market trends and how it came to influence Qing policies. It also discusses the economic developments that inspired the rise of pro-luxury consumption ideas from the late Ming period to the early nineteenth century. In this context it examines the writings of a variety of scholars and intellectuals including Lu Ji (1515–52) and Tang Zhen (1630–1704), the two most prominent pro-luxury advocates.This chapters also illustrate the elasticity of the Confucian discourse on the economy and its ability to adapt to actual changes in the economy of the empire, challenging the notion that Confucian ideology led to intellectual immobility.