The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions (Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society)

How states develop the capacity to tax is a question of fundamental importance to political science, legal theory, economics, sociology, and history. Increasingly, scholars believe that China's relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th centuries was related to its weak fiscal institutions and limited revenue. This book argues that this fiscal weakness was fundamentally ideological in nature. Belief systems created through a confluence of traditional political ethics and the trauma of dynastic change imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final 250 years of China's imperial history. Through the Qing example, this book combs through several interaction dynamics between state institutions and ideologies. The latter shapes the former, but the former can also significantly reinforce the political durability of the latter. In addition to its historical analysis of ideological politics, this book makes a major contribution to the longstanding debate on Sino-European divergence. "This is the second entry in a planned trilogy of books on how culture and ideology interacted with economic institutions, particularly legal ones, and how that interaction shaped the trajectory of Sino-European and Sino-Japanese economic divergence from the 18th Century to the early 20th. The first book, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism, was substantively completed in the summer of 2016-it was formally published in the fall of 2017-at which time I began to contemplate the possibility of expanding its core methodological framework onto a larger historical stage. It may have been somewhat foolish for an untenured junior scholar, two years out of graduate school, to plan for the long term in this fashion, but the idea that there is some sort of "grand strategy" behind the occasional mundanity of everyday work has given me much psychological comfort and a sense of direction over the years"-- Provided by publisher This survey of the fiscal history of China's last imperial dynasty explains why its ability to tax was unusually weak. It argues that the answer lies in the internal ideological worldviews of the political elite, rather than in external political or economic constraints.