With few exceptions, accounts of early-modern Chinese state finance emphasize the absence of mechanisms for public borrowing in the late Ming and early Qing, despite the dynamism of private credit markets. This has long been seen as a constitutive difference between early-modern China and other early-modern polities, such as England and France, where the Crown acted as a structural debtor. Instead, scholars have often understood the participation of Qing monarchs in the money market as playing the inverse role, that of creditor, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
As part of a comparative study of fiscal-state formation in seventeenth-century China and England, this talk will reexamine the relationship between state finance and money markets in early-modern China. Focusing on the long seventeenth century (c. 1590-1712) and the Ming-Qing transition, Groz will analyze four kinds of interaction between state and capital markets—regulation, taxation, coercion, and participation—and consider their institutional and political legacies of the period for China’s early-modern political-economic development.
He will argue that credit and credit-like interactions between state and money market played a key role in the evolution of late-Ming and early-Qing state finance as well as fiscal politics. Where borrowing from merchants was a pervasive feature of late-Ming finance, the association between state borrowing and coercion, as well as the fiscal incapacity of late-Ming governments, combined to delegitimize credit operations and precipitate efforts to eliminate local borrowing under the early Qing. By the late seventeenth century, the Qing state had begun to reenter the money market, this time as a creditor, both pursuing profits and underwriting low-interest loans to peasants. But Groz will show there was a considerable ideological hurdle to doing so, in debates about the legitimacy of monarchical participation, the balance between private and state-managed credit institutions, and coercive lending by officials and soldiers.
This talk is free and open to the public. No registration is required.
Sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies and the Centre for Chinese Research.
Date & Time:
Thursday, September 11, 2025 | 2:00pm – 3:30pm (PDT)
Location:
CK Choi Room 351, 1855 West Mall, Vancouver
Speaker
Gabriel Groz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago.
