ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on trade patterns in the South China Sea, what the Chinese called the Nanyang, from 1685 to 1850, and the impact that that commerce had upon agricultural land-use patterns in Guangdong province. I look first at the Chinese resurrection of the Nanyang trade after 1685, and then the creation of a domestic trade circuit of sugar and raw cotton that arose because of the Nanyang trade, before turning to a consideration of the nature and extent of European trade with China from about 1700 to 1850. What I argue is that long before European trade with China became significant for either Europeans or China, the Chinese already had established a thriving trade in the Nanyang; the size of Europe’s trade with China, I estimate, only by the end of the eighteenth century reached the level of China’s c. 1700 Nanyang trade, and the European trade reached that level only by tapping into the circuits of trade that satisfied China’s domestic market demand. We already know that China in the eighteenth century was as commercialized as the most advanced parts of Europe (Marks 1991); what this chapter suggests is that, in addition, our views of the incorporation of China into the world economy need revision as well. Moreover, both the Nanyang and the European trade precipitated important changes in land use and cropping patterns, contributing to the linked processes of the commercialization of agriculture and ecological change in South China.