China Trade and Empire

China Trade and Empire PDF Author: Alain Le Pichon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197263372
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
263 letters written by or to William Jardine and James Matheson... covers a period of rapid growth for Jardine, Matheson & Co, from 1827 when the founders first joined forces, to Jardine's death in 1843, shortly after the end of the Opium War

China Trade and Empire

China Trade and Empire PDF Author: Alain Le Pichon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197263372
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 672

Get Book Here

Book Description
263 letters written by or to William Jardine and James Matheson... covers a period of rapid growth for Jardine, Matheson & Co, from 1827 when the founders first joined forces, to Jardine's death in 1843, shortly after the end of the Opium War

Is China An Empire?

Is China An Empire? PDF Author: Han Shih Toh
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814667447
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
With the rapid increase in China's overseas investment and trade, China's global economic clout is increasing by the day. Does China's global economic reach make it an empire in the 21st century? What sort of impact will China's trade and investment have on its global counterparts? Chinese investment projects around the world, from railways in Africa and dams in Latin America to the acquisition of landmark buildings in the US, look to alter global patterns of influence and power. How would other countries react to China's rising international influence?The US government and many Americans deny their country is an empire, although the US status as the leading superpower makes it an empire in all but name. How will China coexist with the US, which has arguably been an imperialist power since the end of World War II? How will the incumbent neo-imperialist power, the US, deal with an emergent China?With its acute analysis of Sino-US relations, the book will interest readers who wish to understand the impact of China on various countries, its place on the world stage as well as the geopolitical implications for all in the 21st century.

Imperial Twilight

Imperial Twilight PDF Author: Stephen R. Platt
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307961745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.

Empire of Silver

Empire of Silver PDF Author: Jin Xu
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300258275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A thousand-year history of how China’s obsession with silver influenced the country’s financial well-being, global standing, and political stability This revelatory account of the ways silver shaped Chinese history shows how an obsession with “white metal” held China back from financial modernization. First used as currency during the Song dynasty in around 900 CE, silver gradually became central to China’s economic framework and was officially monetized in the middle of the Ming dynasty during the sixteenth century. However, due to the early adoption of paper money in China, silver was not formed into coins but became a cumbersome “weighing currency,” for which ingots had to be constantly examined for weight and purity—an unwieldy practice that lasted for centuries. While China’s interest in silver spurred new avenues of trade and helped increase the country’s global economic footprint, Jin Xu argues that, in the long run, silver played a key role in the struggles and entanglements that led to the decline of the Chinese empire.

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom PDF Author: Stephen R. Platt
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307271730
Category : Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
A gripping account of China's nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles--a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China. The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a failed civil servant who claimed to be the son of God and brother of Jesus. The Taiping rebels drew their power from the poor and the disenfranchised, unleashing the ethnic rage of millions of Chinese against their Manchu rulers. This homegrown movement seemed all but unstoppable until Britain and the United States stepped in and threw their support behind the Manchus: after years of massive carnage, all opposition to Qing rule was effectively snuffed out for generations. Stephen R. Platt recounts these events in spellbinding detail, building his story on two fascinating characters with opposing visions for China's future: the conservative Confucian scholar Zeng Guofan, an accidental general who emerged as the most influential military strategist in China's modern history; and Hong Rengan, a brilliant Taiping leader whose grand vision of building a modern, industrial, and pro-Western Chinese state ended in tragic failure. This is an essential and enthralling history of the rise and fall of the movement that, a century and a half ago, might have launched China on an entirely different path into the modern world.

Trading Freedom

Trading Freedom PDF Author: Dael A. Norwood
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226815587
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Introduction: America's Business with China -- Founding a Free, Trading Republic -- The Paradox of a Pacific Policy -- Troubled Waters -- Sovereign Rights, or America's First Opium Problem -- The Empire's New Roads -- This Slave Trade of the Nineteenth Century -- A Propped-Open Door -- Death of a Trade, Birth of a Market.

Opium and the Limits of Empire

Opium and the Limits of Empire PDF Author: David Anthony Bello
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
This book examines the Chinese opium crisis from the perspective of Qing prohibition efforts. The author argues that opium prohibition, and not the opium wars, was genuinely imperial in scale and is hence much more representative of the actual drug problem faced by Qing administrators.

The Survival of Empire

The Survival of Empire PDF Author: G. B. Souza
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521531351
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In this original study of the Portuguese Empire in the East, the Estado da India, George Souza looks in detail at the activities of Macao. His aim is to enquire into the nature of Portuguese society in China and the South China Sea and explain why the political and economic activities of the Portuguese crown did not inhibit the growth of local entrepreneurial trade. He also examines the nature of Portuguese maritime trade in Asia and analyses the focal role of Macao as an adjunct to the Canton market. The operations of Portuguese private merchants, the so-called 'country traders', are described and tellingly assessed in the wider context of the economic development of China and Southeast Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

China’s Cosmopolitan Empire

China’s Cosmopolitan Empire PDF Author: Mark Edward Lewis
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067403306X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The Tang dynasty is often called China’s “golden age,” a period of commercial, religious, and cultural connections from Korea and Japan to the Persian Gulf, and a time of unsurpassed literary creativity. Mark Lewis captures a dynamic era in which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule, painting and ceramic arts flourished, women played a major role both as rulers and in the economy, and China produced its finest lyric poets in Wang Wei, Li Bo, and Du Fu. The Chinese engaged in extensive trade on sea and land. Merchants from Inner Asia settled in the capital, while Chinese entrepreneurs set off for the wider world, the beginning of a global diaspora. The emergence of an economically and culturally dominant south that was controlled from a northern capital set a pattern for the rest of Chinese imperial history. Poems celebrated the glories of the capital, meditated on individual loneliness in its midst, and described heroic young men and beautiful women who filled city streets and bars. Despite the romantic aura attached to the Tang, it was not a time of unending peace. In 756, General An Lushan led a revolt that shook the country to its core, weakening the government to such a degree that by the early tenth century, regional warlordism gripped many areas, heralding the decline of the Great Tang.

The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes

The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes PDF Author: Raoul McLaughlin
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473889812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
A fascinating history of the intricate web of trade routes connecting ancient Rome to Eastern civilizations, including its powerful rival, the Han Empire. The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes investigates the trade routes between Rome and the powerful empires of inner Asia, including the Parthian Empire of ancient Persia, and the Kushan Empire which seized power in Bactria (Afghanistan), laying claim to the Indus Kingdoms. Further chapters examine the development of Palmyra as a leading caravan city on the edge of Roman Syria. Raoul McLaughlin also delves deeply into Rome’s trade ventures through the Tarim territories, which led its merchants to the Han Empire of ancient China. Having established a system of Central Asian trade routes known as the Silk Road, the Han carried eastern products as far as Persia and the frontiers of the Roman Empire. Though they were matched in scale, the Han surpassed its European rival in military technology. The first book to address these subjects in a single comprehensive study, The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes explores Rome’s impact on the ancient world economy and reveals what the Chinese and Romans knew about their rival Empires.