ABSTRACT
There are many walls in China but there is no ‘Great Wall’ understood as a unified structure built for a given purpose. The Great Wall is a social rather than a physical construction erected not in China itself but instead in the minds of Europeans. The Great Wall existed because the Europeans decided that it had to exist, and before long they had found similar walls everywhere throughout the country. In early modern Europe, when mercantilism was the reigning economic doctrine, the Great Wall was admired; in the nineteenth century, when ideas of free exchange were dominant, it was regarded as an abomination. The eventual result of this work of the imagination was an aggressive European posture and a policy of imperialism.
