Many studies on globalization in modern China are predicated on the basis that the nation’s economic development was a product of foreign influence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is contention amongst scholars regarding the nature of external competition over and influence in the Chinese polity. Historian Robert Bickers argues that foreign intervention permitted political actors in control of regional and provincial administrations to quickly accrue both capital and coercion. Others, such as scholars Rune Svarverud, and Sherman Cochran have produced work that offer alternative narratives for the study of identifying the roots of Chinese economic development by not uniquely focusing on the European powers.  Examining existing literature and criticism regarding Chinese economic development during this time period is necessary not only to understand the effects of foreign encroachment, but also to recognize its broader implications for understanding the foundations for the later development of a centralized, sovereign Chinese state.

Robert Bicker’s Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire analyzes and recounts the massacres, treaties and ‘incidents’ that led to what is known as A Century of Humiliation in a linear fashion (Scramble for China 4-5). As noted in Jeffrey Friedan’s book Global Capitalism, “China had been one of the most tortured victims of Western imperialism.” (Global Capitalism 308) Bicker’s intent is to reveal the unfair advantages imposed upon the nation following the Opium Wars. He does so by sensationalizing a wide range of primary sources including newspaper articles and anecdotes of foreign encroachment in order to get the message across as to how far Western powers went.

Although Bicker’s account might appear to offer a revision of conventional narratives, at times he constructs a passive-victim image of the Chinese people as having been overtaken forcibly and thereby denying their agency (SC 77-85.) Playing along the Eurocentric trope of victimizing the “East” was a questionable facet when reading the book. After all, if foreign forces were so powerful, how and why did much of the Chinese polity avert collapse into several mandates?

Conversely, Svarverud’s International Law as a World Order in Late Imperial China argues that the need to reform and build a legal system that would support economic growth and integrate with the world order did not commence until after 1895 (International Law as a World Order in Late Imperial China 163). China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War raised the prospect that both legal and economic reform would secure stronger links between the two. The book offers a rich understanding of Chinese law, providing both the external and internal observer’s perspectives. Svarverud asserts that China’s delayed entry into the world order occurred because of Chinese and European officials hostility towards the introduction of international law (ILWOLIC 91). Svarverud cites the French chargé d’affaires M. Klecskowsky stating in the year 1900, “Who is this man who is going to give the Chinese an insight into our European international law? Kill him– choke him off; he’ll make us endless trouble (ILWOLIC 91).” Although Svarverud’s book particularly serves foreign readers who seek to understand China’s legal developments during the late Qing, he also warns of historical traps and encourages a comprehensive study of foreign legal institutions and theories (ILWOLIC 1).

Sherman Cochran’s Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia argues Chinese businessmen were not just ciphers upon which Western merchants projected their ideas, but instead decisive agents in their own right (Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia 2.) Cochran has organized his book topically within a chronological framework in which he presents case studies of the development of five Chinese firms in the pharmaceutical industry, demonstrating how they established commodity empires within China and Southeast Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The striking capability of pharmaceutical entrepreneurs to adapt to changing operational environments did not stop with foreign concessions nor the military invasion and occupation of China by Japan (CMM 135-141). Cochran’s account exemplifies a new mode of historical scholarship that leaves behind Eurocentric inquiries of expansion and convergence in favor of a historical narrative of global conjunctures and interconnections. Cochran rightly informs us that global historical scholarship has to broaden its perspective and to take into account these “agents of consumer culture” in order to fully understand the connection between consumerism and globalization (CMM, 3.)  However, Cochran could have gone into more detail discussing his definition of consumer culture, particularly as it was being constructed and developed through the early twentieth century by Chinese businessmen in China.  Such a charge does not belie Cochran’s overall thesis; it simply elucidates the complexity of the subject. Nevertheless, Cochran succeeds in his goal of restoring agency to the Chinese pharmaceutical entrepreneurs and how they adjusted to dramatic changes in Chinese society and foreign affairs.

Bickers, Robert A. The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914. London: Allen Lane, 2011.

Cochran, Sherman. Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Friedan, Jeffry. Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007.

Svarverud, Rune. International Law as World Order in Late Imperial China Translation, Reception and Discourse, 1847-1911. Leiden: Brill, 2007.