A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation: China and the Discourse of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

Representations of the foreign inevitably reveal as much about the historical circumstances of those doing the observing as about those being observed. The debates over trade issues and human rights that have largely shaped Western perceptions of China over the past decade, for example, have foregrounded a series of distinctive tropes with a consistency suggestive of a well-worn cultural habit. China's economic miracle, we are given to understand, is predicated upon an increasingly free circulation of goods and capital entailed by the reversal of long-standing policies of state interference in the marketplace. The unremitting suppression of political dissent in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, meanwhile, offends democratic sensibilities as a systematic obstruction of the free flow of ideas posited by the liberal ideal.1 I will argue in this paper that the centrally constitutive role of these familiar tropes of circulation and constraint in modern Western conceptions of China have identifiable roots in the eighteenth-century history of this encounter and reflect, in particular, the distinctively commercialist orientation of British visitors to China during that period. These visitors approached the Far East with an unshakable and universalizing conviction that trade was the lifeblood of a prosperous society, and that, in turn, the free circulation of goods and capital was the lifeblood of trade. The Chinese refusal to accept this doctrine, their contemptuous hostility toward Western traders, and the barriers they erected to the free flow of international commerce contributed to a widespread perception among British observers that an unnatural tendency toward blockage and obstructionism was an integral, defining feature of Chinese society as a whole. If the geography of England is increasingly defined in this period by writers