Trade and Conflict in the South China Sea: Portugal and China, 1514–23

Abstract

It used to be a truth universally acknowledged that the Chinese state was historically hostile to foreign trade, and that if the Chinese were in want of anything, it was the freedom to trade. This truth has been so resilient that it has for five centuries anchored the perception that China needed to be knocked out of its complacency, and for two centuries supported the argument that capitalism arose in Europe because the European state, precisely unlike the Chinese state, was the proponent, patron and benefactor of foreign trade that it organized, or at the very least chartered, through monopoly corporations. This chapter argues the fallacy of these assumptions and proposes that the history of the early modern world be written not as a polarity of East and West, each counterexemplifying the other, but as a joint process of engagement and alternation in which both sides struggled over the relationship between foreign trade and the state, which violence alternately destabilized and maintained.¹