ABSTRACT

In the early twenty-first century, still amidst the inter-regnum of the terminal crises of neoliberalism, there is one country in particular to which one must attend in thinking about this: China. Modern China has undergone considerable, wrenching socio-political change in the past two centuries. China was already being pulled into the system-constitutive cycles of global capital through its demand for the growing volumes of silver coming from the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the New World in the 1500s. But the tale begins in earnest in the mid/late-eighteenth century when trading delegations from the new, proto-industrial north western European powers started to knock on China's door for access to its thriving markets and commerce. Moreover, the Chinese eighteenth century saw a commercial and even 'industrious' revolution that saw the emergence of significant industrial capacity and the rise of fortunes built upon market-based revenues. This was a China already showing many of the key features of a supposedly modern market economy.