| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Helen Dunstan. State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 273.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. xv, 523. $54.95.

In the past year the Harvard University Asia Center has published two major works on Qing political economy, each of them many years in the making. The two—the present work and Man-houng Lin's China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808–1856 (2006)—deal with eras roughly a century apart and with different sectors of the economy, Dunstan with grain and Lin with currency. Both authors, however, see the central choice facing imperial authorities as the same: whether to use bureaucratic means to effect desired economic ends, or to rely on the private market for such purposes. Both term the former approach "interventionism," but while Lin calls its opposite "accommodationism," Dunstan more pointedly terms it "liberal" (pp. 8, 429) or "proto-liberal" (p. 414). She is hardly disengaged from this debate; there are, indeed, a spirited defense in this book of "state welfare activism" (p. 444) and a palpable anger at efforts to replace this by "regressive" and "intolerant" policies (pp. 451–452).

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