Chapter 6 takes the narrative from the Taiping Rebellion and its aftermath to the end of the dynasty. By the mid-nineteenth century, the traditional moral consensus that state taxation was inherently wrong had largely crumbled, and many of the most prominent statesmen in the country now openly embraced a new, pro-government investment mode of thinking. Nonagricultural taxes almost immediately began to expand rapidly once the Taiping Rebellion flared up in 1851, and continued to rise after it had been put down, despite the significant amount of political controversy and opposition that this generated throughout the later nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the “realist” assumption that the peasantry would not tolerate higher agricultural tax quotas remained firmly entrenched, unaffected - and even strengthened - by Taiping-era socioeconomic crises. Provincial land surveying made an institutional comeback in the late nineteenth century, but not until the Qing Court faced a complete fiscal collapse in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) did it finally throw caution to the wind and begin to systemically experiment with higher agricultural tax quotas. To the surprise of many contemporaries, these experiments were largely successful, and while they came much too late to save the Qing from political collapse, they nonetheless laid the intellectual and political foundations for a more robust tax regime in the Republican era and the People’s Republic.

Chapter 1 provides a general overview of Qing fiscal policy, focusing on major changes in the early eighteenth and later nineteenth century. After an attempt to reform the agricultural tax apparatus in the early eighteenth century lost steam amid accusations of “snatching profit from the people,” the central government made no further attempts to modify it until the mid-nineteenth century. In the meantime, nonagricultural taxes grew, but remained comparatively insignificant in total volume. As the economy grew, formal government revenue as a share of total economic output plunged from around 4 percent to barely 1 percent prior to the Opium War. Following a wave of mid-century political and financial crises, the government finally swung into action, implementing a number of major fiscal reforms, most notably the creation of a new commercial tax. The agricultural tax, however, remained stagnant at eighteenth century levels until the early twentieth century, when the Qing state was on the verge of total collapse. This stagnation had particularly crippling consequences for the Qing’s industrialization drive in the later nineteenth century.

Chapter 5 discusses the entrenchment of fiscal conservatism in mid-Qing politics, covering the Yongzheng to Daoguang eras (1722-1850). A spirited attempt by the Yongzheng Emperor to expand formal agricultural tax quotas and rationalize fiscal institutions had some success, but quickly encountered widespread opposition. By the late 1730s, the Qing Court settled into a set of fiscal institutions that would remain largely unchanged for the next 170 years. Formal agricultural tax quotas were, with the exception of the grain tribute, fixed in absolute values of silver, and could no longer be increased.Furthermore, provincial and local land surveying was made illegal by imperial decree, depriving political elites of their primary, and perhaps only, source of reliable macroeconomic information. Soon after - and arguably as a direct result - a “Malthusian” worldview began to gain popularity among political elites, arguing that, because the population was rapidly growing while total agricultural output remained unchanged, the amount of taxable surplus that the state could safely extract before rural incomes fell below subsistence level was actually shrinking. Driven by this deepening sense of insecurity, the Qing Court came to view nearly any proposal to raise agricultural taxes with deep suspicion.By the late eighteenth century, such proposals met with almost automatic rejection, and often carried serious political consequences for their sponsors. Meanwhile, nonagricultural taxes continued their slow upward trend, and became the focal point for fiscal reform efforts in the early nineteenth century.

Chapter 3 surveys Chinese fiscal institutions prior to the Qing, focusing on reforms implemented in the mid to late Ming. It makes two basic claims: First, the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming all taxed much more aggressively than the Qing, and, in the Song and Yuan cases, dramatically so. Moreover, the Tang, Song, and Ming all implemented major reforms to their fiscal institutions around mid-dynasty, which generally led to substantial increases in the total volume of government income. Second, fiscal conservatives relied heavily on deontological moral arguments to combat these expansionist policies, but had limited success in doing so. In, for example, the later Ming, although moral condemnations of “pursuing profit” were visibly influential in court politics, they were largely ineffective in stemming the tide of fiscal reform. This was, at least in part, because fiscal conservatives were unable to clearly and powerfully predict the socioeconomic consequences of fiscal expansion, which limited their political persuasiveness until the final years of the dynasty.

Chapter 2 considers and critiques a number of rationalist explanations for these developments, including geopolitics, financial necessity, administrative capacity, principal-agent problems, and potential collective action issues. It argues, first, that some combination of these factors is largely capable of explaining the Qing’s approach to nonagricultural taxation, which grew whenever the state faced significant fiscal pressure, but was subject to a number of political economy and administrative constraints that became increasingly apparent in the nineteenth century. The chapter then argues that these rationalist theories are unable to fully explain the stagnation of agricultural taxes from the early eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, which suggests that ideological factors should be brought in to complete the picture.