While researching the projects on timber and bird’s nests, I encountered several interesting cases of commercial disputes between Han Chinese merchants and people from other ethnocultural groups both within and beyond the Qing empire. Involved in these cases were the Miao people in southwestern China, who competed with the Han in the business of timber brokerage, as well as the Sulu Muslims in Southeast Asia, who accused some Han merchants of committing fraud in dealing with their bird’s nests. 

Although separated by a vast space, these cases hinted at some common underlying logic in the Qing empire’s approach to dealing with economic engagement between the different ethnocultural groups it directly ruled or came into contact with, a topic that has yet to receive any comprehensive discussion in the scholarship, not the least due to the usual divides of subfields that tend to cut the different frontiers of the Qing empire into separate spheres of scholarly concerns. 

PROGRESS

This article investigates the framework under which the 18th-century Qing empire dealt with accusations brought against indebted Chinese merchants by external parties in the maritime trade. I stress the importance of bringing Sino-Western and intra-Asian cases into a single analytic frame to reflect the Qing empire’s comprehensive approach to the maritime frontier. 

In similar cases that involved Sulu and British complaints, the Qing emperor intervened to help foreigners recover their funds and even assumed unbound liability as a last resort.

I argue that buttressing such practices was a foundational principle of the Qing imperial formation: that the emperor’s claim to universal sovereignty rested upon his utmost impartiality toward the “inner and outer”—a contrasting pair based on shifting relativity rather than fixed territoriality. With its imperial power constructed on such a discourse, the Qing behaved rather differently than the British empire’s willingness to actively defend private British interests in the wider world when the two empires clashed over the issue of Chinese debts. 

This study highlights the importance of understanding the different modes of mutual constitution between how an empire imagined and managed different groups of people it ruled over or encountered and the practical parameters of its political economy in global history.