With few exceptions\, accounts of early-modern Chinese state finance emphasize the a bsence 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-moder n polities\, such as England and France\, where the Crown acted as a struct ural debtor. Instead\, scholars have often understood the participation of Qing monarchs in the money market as playing the inverse role\, that of cre ditor\, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
As par t of a comparative study of fiscal-state formation in seventeenth-century C hina and England\, this talk will reexamine the relationship between state finance and money markets in early-modern China. Focusing on the long seven teenth century (c. 1590-1712) and the Ming-Qing transition\, Groz will anal yze 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-eco nomic development.
He will argue that credit and credit-like interact ions between state and money market played a key role in the evolution of l ate-Ming and early-Qing state finance as well as fiscal politics. Where bor rowing from merchants was a pervasive feature of late-Ming finance\, the as sociation between state borrowing and coercion\, as well as the fiscal inca pacity of late-Ming governments\, combined to delegitimize credit operation s 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 underwr iting low-interest loans to peasants. But Groz will show there was a consid erable ideological hurdle to doing so\, in debates about the legitimacy of monarchical participation\, the balance between private and state-managed c redit institutions\, and coercive lending by officials and soldiers.
This talk is free and open to the public. No registration is required.
< p>Sponsored by the Department of A sian Studies and the Centre for Chinese Research.Date
& Time:
Thursday\, September 11\, 2025 | 2:00pm – 3:30pm (PD
T)
Location:
CK Choi Room 351\, 1855 West Mall\
, Vancouver
Gabriel Groz is a doctoral candidate in t he Department of History at the University of Chicago.
CATEGORIES:Featured Chinese,Featured Events LOCATION:Room 351\, C.K. Choi Building GEO:49.267266;-123.257944 URL;VALUE=URI:https://asia.ubc.ca/events/event/crown-and-money-market-in-se venteenth-century/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://asia.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2025/08/poster-911-event.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20250309T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR