Hansvan de Ven. Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China.

Abstract

Founded in Shanghai by British diplomats in 1854, the Maritime Customs Service was an ad hoc institution charged with collecting customs on China's foreign trade according to the commercial treaties that the Qing Empire had concluded with a series of Western nations in the wake of the First Opium War (1839–1842). The arrangement later obtained official recognition by the Qing government, and the predominantly foreign-staffed Maritime Customs Service emerged as an important revenue-creating, knowledge-producing, as well as policymaking institution of central importance to the Chinese state. The Maritime Customs Service was the only nationwide institution that survived the frequent political upheavals between 1854 and 1949, thus making “China” into something more than just a cultural or geographic expression. Yet despite its enormous importance to Chinese history, it has warranted very few specialized treatments since John K. Fairbank published his monograph on the early history of the service in 1954. Having gained serendipitous access to previously closed customs archives in China and sometimes drawing on a number of projects emanating from those primary sources, Hans van de Ven is the first in more than a generation to produce a book-length English-language contribution to our knowledge of this peculiar institution. By “follow[ing] the money” (p. 8), van de Ven masterfully rewrites the story of the Maritime Customs Service, demonstrating its perennial relevance not only to late imperial and modern Chinese history, but also to global and financial history. The book is chronologically arranged into seven chapters, each of which emphasizes a different thematic aspect of the Maritime Customs Service and suggests how late imperial Chinese history and Republican history can be fruitfully reperiodized. For instance, van de Ven identifies the 1880s as a watershed, where China finally succumbed to the “new” economic imperialism and was increasingly reduced to a supplier of raw materials to world markets. Similarly, the book makes an important contribution to the financial history of China by showing how the Maritime Customs Service emerged as a debt-collecting agency and issuer of trusted bonds after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912.