Matthew W. Mosca. From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China

Abstract

The British maritime assault on the China coast in 1840 came as a shock to the Qing Empire despite many prior signs indicating a possible attack. And the reasons the Qing so underestimated the British Empire before the first Opium War involved stove-piping and a failure to connect dots. In this impressive book, Matthew W. Mosca demonstrates that the reasons for the massive Qing intelligence failure about the world at large and strategic vulnerability along its coast lay not only in its bureaucratic structure, but also in the nature of Chinese geographic epistemology and the modes of geographic writing practiced in late imperial times. He also shows how a relaxation of imperial monopoly over discourse on external affairs in the early nineteenth century, combined with the shock of the first Opium War itself, allowed networks of scholars to consider world geography and geopolitics in new ways outside official channels. These innovations among private scholars helped change what had been a segmented “frontier policy” into an integrated “foreign policy” that would eventually comprehend and begin to deal with the British Empire and other aspects of the new international scene in which the Qing found itself.