Forms of Governmentality and the Status of China in Sino-British Relations, 1792-1842 (original) (raw)
At the end of the 18th century, Great Britain began to actively contest the rules laid down by China regarding Beijing's conduct of political and economic relations with foreign entities, by demanding interaction on the basis of equality. Half a century later China was brought under the rules set up by the British as a result of the first Opium War. The changing status of China in the eyes of Britain in the intervening period can be fully understood neither by taking it as a reflection of expedient power relations nor as following from a 'deep generative grammar' of an expanding European international society. Instead, I argue that the available status positions and the status of a particular country depends on the principle of differentiation upon which such 'differential regard' is established, and that in Sino-British relations these principles of differentiation were provided primarily by a governmental problematisation of the commercial circulation between Britain and the East Indies. I provide an analysis of the shifting governmental rationalities of the British administration and of the standing China had in light of those rationalities.
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