Bill Kelson

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

Abstract: The so-called “developmental states” of late-nineteenth and twentieth century East Asia were defined by long-run economic planning—top-down policy pursued by bureaucrats in close collaboration with private enterprise, contra Soviet-style planning. Late-Qing China (1842-1912) is often held up as that developmental state’s antithesis, Japan after 1868 its exemplar. This is, in part, because a late-Qing military modernization and industrialization program—the Self- Strengthening Movement (1861-93)—was long treated by scholars as a quixotic folly. More recently, however, historians have shed older assumptions and drawn on new sources to revise that dour story, though only for armaments, not industry. In this paper, I address the latter, arguing that Qing Self-Strengthening efforts constituted a fully-fledged import-substitution industrialization plan, one focused on steam-powered transportation, industrial plant, and—above all —fossil fuels. Qing bureaucrats in what I call a “proto-developmental state” attempted, with the aid of ample customs revenues, to channel trade profits into state-backed, merchant-run, equity-financed industrial firms. The first of these was a steamship line; the rest (or most of the rest) were coal and iron mines, since Qing statesmen correctly identified coal and iron as the bedrock of energy-intensive industrialization elsewhere. This “striving for wealth” is often overlooked, if understandably, since almost all but the famous Kaiping Mines went bankrupt in a major financial crisis in 1883. Here I draw on unused and underutilized archival sources to reconstruct, as fully as possible, the largely untold history of the Self-Strengthening mines, which were founded in many Qing provinces with the assistance of foreign engineers. That reconstruction shows some companies to have been wildcat mines whose early 1880s share prices exceeded any true production prospects. Many more, however, were viable enterprises with growth potential and ready markets. Absent the 1883 crisis and its ensuing subsidy and capital scarcity, state-led, coal-fired industrialization in China might well have been different.

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: When a globalized banking system emerged in Qing China in the late-nineteenth century, it did so thanks to key intermediary figures who linked the Chinese and foreign halves of that system in Shanghai and Hong Kong. This paper suggests that these compradors and other intermediaries, by facilitating bank-to-bank and bank-to-state lending between Qing imperial and British imperial institutions, served a transimperial function—one largely to the mutual benefit of both sides. However, the social and legal foundations of that intermediation were fragile. And when a major financial crisis broke out in the early 1880s, triggering a wave of Sino-foreign bankruptcies, it laid bare how little foreign bankers in China knew about the fine print of the guarantor contracts that secured their local intermediaries (and thus underpinned the financial system). The 1880s crisis, this paper argues further, therefore served as a catalyst for bankers to place Sino-foreign credit relations on a sounder footing.