Constructing a New Order

Control of territory and access to technology as well as a comprehensive knowledge of the peoples of Asia provided by field agents permitted British domination in the nineteenth century. The depository of knowledge acquired by British archivists permitted the Europeans an opportunity to transform naked political power into a managable entity for exploitation of human and material resources.

Paperwork permitted the transportation of faraway things to be reproduced at distant sites for little cost an infinite amount of times. To rule over a territory, the British needed to superimpose an alien coding over an ancient area that usually produced complete misreadings of an area. Trending toward empiricism as the expanding British presence in the region provided further opportunities for ways of more efficient organization of information. Classification schemes abetted the world market for Chinese art goods, providing a greater respect for the accomplishments of the Qing. Organizing material became difficult.

Standardization of language allowed the publication and cross-referencing of dictionaries and bibliographies, and encouraged the systematizing of data. Maps of China, for instance, allowed for the imposition of Western style demarcation that created a new reality suited to the biases of the cartographer.

Transaction costs in the market could to be lowered by alleviating the transferable cost incurred by ignorance of language. Textbooks on Chinese symbols began appearing. Essays on Chinese law, weather, wildlife, geology, medicine, geography, traditions and cultures began appearing from men who had spent time in China. This mindless empiricism created a new China accessible to an audience literate in English that expanded the British imagination of China. This allowed a better informed public to access British activity in China. An alien empire in less than half a century had been decoded and made available for mass consumption.

Missionary, commerical, and diplomatic exercises also reordered Chinese society. On the one hand, these groups provided secure channels through which information could flow, but they also penetrated deeper int China and reordered locales and linking the resulting formulations into global networks. The British sought to instruct Chinese bureaucrats in the science of Western rationality and science. Missionaries working for the Chinese government linked innerparts of China with a global network of Chrisitan outeach.

For knowledge to have value, however, it needed to make the world safe for empire: in China this meant preventing another flare-up or war. For the British, this meant imparting on the reclariant Mandarin elite their position of relative weakness in the realist world of great power competition. To change minds, the British hoped to recalibrate Qing sensibilities of Englishmen. When the Chinese tried to pull a fast one on the British ambassador by citing an arcane use of language employed in the treaty, the diplomat turned the tables on the linguistic trick and imparted upon the frustrated Qing a lesson in the extent of resources on their culture available to the adversary.

In having his ambassadors bow before Queen Victoria and his officials supervised by a British agent, the Chinese emperor often treated much like a native prince under British indirect rule. Qing elite, those educated, began arguing in Western language for greater rights for Chinese sovreignty. Learning the intracies of international alw and diplomatic practices as well as acquiring European weaponry became top objectives for the Qing. The English taught proper intercourse in diplomatic as well as military discipline. While Qing Westernization couched in the language of mutual benefit made the Chinese government more amenable to some British pressure and sensibilities, the deterritorialzing effects of global forces undermined these appartent gains.