Stephen R. Halsey

Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft Stephen R. Halsey

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.; Quest for Power analyzes the origins of China's rise to great power status in the twentieth century. The author argues that the threat of European and Japanese imperialism triggered the most innovative state-building efforts since the foundation of the country's last dynasty in the mid 1600s. This claim casts doubt on the entire interpretive thrust of existing historical accounts of China during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, questioning their story of decline, weakness, and failure. Halsey instead argues that a military fiscal-state emerged in China between 1850 and 1949 because of the continuing danger of war with the great powers. This form of political organization combined money, bureaucracy, and guns in new ways and helped to ensure the country's survival during the apogee of Western colonialism. As the great powers transplanted their competitive international order to East Asia in the 1800s, China replicated many features of European states through conscious imitation and independent trial and error. Military-fiscal states in these different regions represent variations on a common global theme, their political structures drawn together to a certain extent through a contingent process of historical convergence. Leading officials soon came to describe their reformist policies through a new vocabulary of sovereignty, a European concept that has served as a cornerstone of Chinese statecraft since the late 1860s. In short, China achieved remarkable success in the search for power in the late imperial (1850-1911) and the Republican eras (1911-1949), laying the foundation for its growing international influence since 1949--Provided by publisher. Review Quotes: This is an outstanding new study of Imperial China s relationship with the Western powers in the middle of the nineteenth century. Halsey offers surprisingly fresh data, many from the local archives, and shows that the conventional story of China s meek response to the West is extremely one-sided. The book convincingly demonstrates that the Chinese authorities, at the center as well as at the local level, had a rather sophisticated understanding of the international situation and took the initiative to undertake administrative and political reforms to cope with the situation.--Akira Iriye, editor of "Global Interdependence""Brief Description: "Quest for Power analyzes the origins of China's rise to great power status in the twentieth century. The author argues that the threat of European and Japanese imperialism triggered the most innovative state-building efforts since the foundation of the country's last dynasty in the mid 1600s. This claim casts doubt on the entire interpretive thrust of existing historical accounts of China during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, questioning their story of decline, weakness, and failure. Halsey instead argues that a military fiscal-state emerged in China between 1850 and 1949 because of the continuing danger of war with the great powers. This form of political organization combined money, bureaucracy, and guns in new ways and helped to ensure the country's survival during the apogee of Western colonialism. As the great powers transplanted their competitive international order to East Asia in the 1800s, China replicated many features of European states through conscious imitation and independent trial and error. Military-fiscal states in these different regions represent variations on a common global theme, their political structures drawn together to a certain extent through a contingent process of historical convergence. Leading officials soon came to describe their reformist policies through a new vocabulary of sovereignty, a European concept that has served as a cornerstone of Chinese statecraft since the late 1860s. In short, China achieved remarkable success in the search for power in the late imperial (1850-1911) and the Republican eras (1911-1949), laying the foundation for its growing international influence since 1949"--Provided by publisher. Review Quotes: A bold argument about modern Chinese statecraft that finds nineteenth-century China successful in forging a military fiscal state worthy of comparison with familiar European examples of modern national state formation. In contrast to recent American scholarship seeking to put China into the broader African and Asian world of European colonialism, the author argues the political significance of China not becoming a formal colony, and offers a fresh account and challenging interpretation about the origins of the modern Chinese state.--R. Bin Wong, co-author of "Before and Beyond Divergence""Publisher Marketing: China s history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been framed as a long coda of imperial decline, played out during its last dynasty, the Qing. "Quest for Power "presents a sweeping reappraisal of this narrative. Stephen Halsey traces the origins of China s great-power status in the twentieth century to this era of supposed decadence and decay. Threats from European and Japanese imperialism and the growing prospect of war triggered China s most innovative state-building efforts since the Qing dynasty s founding in the mid-1600s. Through a combination of imitation and experimentation, a new form of political organization took root in China between 1850 and 1949 that shared features with modern European governments. Like them, China created a military-fiscal state to ensure security in a hostile international arena. The Qing Empire extended its administrative reach by expanding the bureaucracy and creating a modern police force. It poured funds into the military, commissioning ironclad warships, reorganizing the army, and promoting the development of an armaments industry. State-built telegraph and steamship networks transformed China s communication and transportation infrastructure. Increasingly, Qing officials described their reformist policies through a new vocabulary of sovereignty a Western concept that has been a cornerstone of Chinese statecraft ever since. As Halsey shows, the success of the Chinese military-fiscal state after 1850 enabled China to avoid wholesale colonization at the hands of Europe and Japan and laid the foundation for its emergence as a global power in the twentieth century."

Contributor Bio:  Halsey, Stephen R Stephen R. Halsey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami.