The chapter focuses on the debate over the aims of tort law, both in China and in the West. It starts by reviewing the intellectual history of discussions over tort law aims. It then demonstrates that these debates are often unaware of both the empirics of tort law and the cultural frameworks that sustain the adjudication processes of tort law disputes, inside and outside courtrooms. This is a major gap, insofar as both the empirical and cultural dimension are crucial in order to put any vision of the aims of tort law within its own proper context. In this perspective, the paper tries to shed light on the variety of factors that should be considered in framing whichever theory on the aims of tort law.

Chapter 4 examines institutional and intellectual trends in the early Qing, up to the end of Kangxi’s reign. It focuses on the intellectual and political response to the Ming collapse, which spurred a large wave of arguments, both scholarly and political, in favor of light taxes and a noninterventionist state. In contrast to the heavily moralistic tone of Ming fiscal conservatism, the trauma of the Ming-Qing transition drove early Qing elites toward a fiscal worldview that was both more “realist,” but also far more hostile toward state taxation. This hostility stemmed directly from a mainstream historical interpretation of Ming collapse that placed much of the blame on late Ming tax increases, which, in turn, seemed to have cognitive roots in Qing elites’ deep-rooted moral skepticism of state extraction. Mindful of this “history lesson,” and of ethnic tensions between Manchu and Han populations, the Qing political elite committed itself, both rhetorically and institutionally, to very low agricultural tax quotas. At the same time, however, no such commitment was made towards nonagricultural taxes due to the specific circumstances of the Ming collapse.

The Conclusion briefly identifies avenues for future research. In particular, it returns to the question of Sino-Western economic divergence mentioned at the beginning of this Introduction, and explores the possible connections between Qing fiscal undercapacity and China’s relative economic decline in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The most promising of these appears to be that government taxation can be an effective - albeit not exclusively so - way to concentrate capital and acquire the economies of scale often necessary for industrial takeoff, and therefore that the Qing’s fiscal weakness deprived it of a capital accumulation tool that some of its main competitors, notably Japan, used to great effect. The Conclusion also discusses the various connections between fiscal capacity and the broader concept of state capacity, and whether the ideological narrative presented here offers more general insights into the sociopolitical decline of Confucianism in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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 7 discusses the potential theoretical ramifications of this ideological narrative. It begins by discussing some of the theoretical strengths and weaknesses of ideological analysis, seeking to identify a number of methodological “best practices.” From there, it considers whether the distinctions and interplay between normative and empirical elements of ideological worldviews studied here shed any light on the theoretical analysis of other major ideologies, or of paradigmatic changes in modern politics. The creation of a descriptive and ostensibly empirical social theory to support normative positions is, of course, commonplace, but what is perhaps more interesting is that those empirical theories often develop an intellectual identity and sociopolitical lifespan quite separate from their original normative foundations. As the example of Qing fiscal policy demonstrates, empirical beliefs can often be more influential than normative ones. This has important ramifications for our general understanding of how political ideology affects legal and political institutions. In particular, it highlights and questions the role that the state plays in certifying and “discovering” politically relevant information, and how the state-driven centralization of information is as important a tool of ideological entrenchment as more normative kinds of state action, such as lawmaking.

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.