Ambassadors, Economists and Oriental Despots: the Early Nineteenth Century Understanding of China

Abstract

The orientalist critique notwithstanding, we can broadly identify a series of often conflicting discourses that shaped an evolving early nineteenth century view of China. First, there is a group of British ambassadors, diplomats and missionaries who produced conjectural histories concerning the character, development and political economy of the Asian states they visited. These histories, in turn, both affected and were influenced by those writers, who following Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, constructed the first global political economy. In this context the impact of the Mills’ pere et fils in shaping a utilitarian critique of oriental despotism was highly influential. Somewhat relatedly, but enjoying a different political trajectory, so too was the identification of the Asiatic mode of production (AMP) fitfully outlined by Marx and Engels in a series of books and articles that appeared in the course of the 1850s.

We considered China immense and impotent, inventive and backward, superstitious and atheistic, cruel and philosophical, paternal and corrupt; and being disoriented by the disorderly notion we had of her, not knowing where to place her in our scheme of civilization … unable either to relegate her to the ranks of the barbarian … or to elevate her to our own level of pride, we shut her off in another sphere and another scale of time, in the category of what is at once real and incomprehensible.

Paul Valery Orient and Occident 1928