This is a book about state institutions, political ideology, and the patterns of interaction between the two. It argues, first and foremost, that ideological belief systems imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final two centuries of China’s imperial history. These ideological constraints explain many of the Qing Dynasty’s unique fiscal weaknesses, which eventually had ruinous sociopolitical and economic consequences. Scholars of economic and institutional history have, for the past several decades, distanced themselves from cultural and ideological analysis, but some core features of late imperial Chinese fiscal history cannot be plausibly explained without it. The challenge here is to reintroduce ideology in such a way that makes sense of the Qing’s political and intellectual idiosyncrasies, relative to both other Chinese dynasties and other early modern Eurasian regimes, while also fluidly interacting with the numerous nonideological forces at work in its fiscal politics and institutions.

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.