Matthew W. Mosca'sFootnote ¹ new book deals with late imperial Chinese frontier policy during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). He sees the frontier as a major constituent of the Qing's emerging foreign policy in the nineteenth century. Based on major revisions of Mosca's 2008 doctoral dissertation, the book arcs strategically around the Qing Empire under Manchu rule from the 1630s to the 1860s, when new questions emerged to complicate any efforts to counter the advance of European imperialism in the South China Sea. Mosca contends that Qing China moved from a series of disjointed frontier policies, each specific to the political characteristics of the Central Asian border states, to a body of knowledge that began to evolve into an informed and integrated “foreign policy” in the nineteenth century. Before 1750 the multiple sources of Qing intelligence, which was based on several frontiers, were sealed off from each other and virtually incommensurable. By 1800, however, the Qing rulers began to coordinate borderland policy across multiple frontiers. In effect, diverse frontier policies became a coherent foreign policy devised by the dynasty to keep up with and control the predatory advance of the British Empire from South Asia to East Asia and centering initially on the Canton trading system.

Between 1750 and 1850, Qing rulers, officials, and scholars consolidated their fragmented perceptions of foreign territory into a single, integrated worldview. This consolidation occurred because a single “foreign” policy was required to cover the British expansion in both India and Canton. The previously localized “frontier” policies pursued by the Qing military to deal with Vietnam's incursions along the south China coast, internal rebellion in Taiwan, and infiltrations in landlocked Xinjiang and Tibet could not keep pace with these and other regional but still global developments.

Mosca energetically goes through the available Chinese, Manchu, and British sources to reveal the information networks used by the Qing to gather intelligence about the worrying expansion of the British in India and Canton, once they understood that the British were indeed active in both arenas. In the process, the Qing altered its own understanding of its place in the contemporary world. Undeterred by any alleged Sinocentric worldview associated solely with tributary relations, Qing China's officials and scholars addressed its foreign affairs to meet the growing British threat. To coordinate a sufficient response aimed across the bow of Britain's maritime and inland borderlands, the Manchu state pivoted away from its earlier frontier-oriented geopolitical assumptions.

Mosca presents a particularly good account of this reshaping of China's diplomacy in Chapter 8. In this chapter, Mosca maintains that the emergence of a foreign policy began in earnest when the scholar-classicist Wei Yuan 魏源 (1794–1856) reinterpreted the strategic place of India in Qing thinking from 1842 to 1860. Mosca reviews the career of Wei Yuan and his most famous work, the Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms (Haiguo tuzhi 海國圖志, 1844). Earlier Wei had compiled the Collection of Statecraft Writings from the Qing Dynasty (Huangchao jingshi wenbian 皇朝經世文編) between 1821 and 1826 for He Changling 賀長齡 (1785–1848), then the financial commissioner of Jiangsu province. Wei then turned to Qing diplomacy in light of his unexpected findings that the new barbarian threat represented by the British differed from the previous Jesuit era in scope and danger. For Mosca, Wei Yuan's work marked a “watershed” in the history of Qing geographic research on the outside world. His shift also signaled the rise of Han Chinese scholar-officials as loyal guardians of the dynasty, a prominent theme of the book. Wei Yuan brought into dialogue “virtually all geographic traditions within the Qing empire” (p. 285).

In his discussion of Qing China's transition to a modern foreign policy in the mid-nineteenth century, however, Mosca under-theorizes somewhat China's parallel role in the rise of modern economic growth via growing international trade and commerce. Like John Fairbank and other sinologists before him, Mosca underestimates the step-by-step growth of peaceful global trade in the East China Sea, beginning with the late Ming “Silver Age,” followed by the eighteenth-century Canton trading system, which is ably described by Paul Van Dyke in The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (HKU Press, 2005). The Chinese treaty ports that Britain forced open after the Opium War (1839–1842) represented a third stage of development, after what Van Dyke calls the gradual “collapse” of the Canton System that was developed to handle trade and customs in Qing China after 1750. Describing the “Canton System,” Van Dyke stresses that the system depended on Canton's customs procedures by which China had already opened its doors to the maritime world in the eighteenth century.

The late nineteenth-century Maritime Customs Service System described by Hans van de Ven in his Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (Columbia University Press, 2014) should also be connected to its institutional predecessors—the Canton trade in particular—and evolving Qing foreign policy regarding trade, if we are to obtain a full understanding of the global interactions that the Chinese world went through from 1750 to the 1880s. Van de Ven gives us a lively account of the last century of China's customs institutions after 1850, but that is not when the processes of global commercialization became legalized and institutionalized enough to replace the great pirate fleets and marauders, first of the Sino-Japanese “wako” in East and Southeast Asian waters after 1550, and then their European counterparts after 1600, all of whom the Ming and Qing kept records on. Because England comes at the end of a long line of such trading marauders, challenging and confounding Qing China's views of its neighbors, Mosca's book usefully hints at these increasingly globalized interactions, and the “deep pockets” of India and China during the early modern silver age, which have been painstakingly reconstructed over the last decade by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Richard von Glahn, R. Bin Wong, Tim Brook, and Kenneth Pomeranz, among others.

With this impressive first book, Mosca is now a leader in using Manchu, Mongolian, Chinese, and European texts to rethink over five hundred years of Asian historiography. He demonstrates his erudition and deep knowledge of multi-lingual sources on almost every page of his book. His argument about the global convergence of historiography in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries is very significant, as is his presentation of Chinese analytical sophistication and interpretive imagination. He has outlined a series of compelling questions and issues for the book and his future work: 1) addressing the geographical knowledge of the British and Qing Central Asian expansion, and the role of scholarly Qing collaboration and networks; as well as 2) dealing with the translation and reception of Mongol sources within the Qing empire and across Eurasia in his new project, a sort of Asian “Republic of Letters” encompassing Eurasian scholarly communities.