China's Incorporation Process into the Capitalist World-Economy, 1780s-1890s

The purpose of my dissertation project is to investigate China’s incorporation process. Incorporation studies, based on world-systems analysis, aim to illustrate the long-term integration process of external arenas into the capitalist world-economy. I intend to trace China’s transformations with a focus on China’s incorporation process in the nineteenth century (1780s–1890s), which represents a watershed era in the relations between China and the capitalist world-economy. This conceptual framing contrasts with a dominant sociological and historical preconception that views nineteenth-century China as “a dark age” or “a sleeping giant.” I instead consider the nineteenth century as a time of rapid and revolutionary change for China. This analytical lens helps to grasp the destructive nineteenth-century Chinese crisis and an integrative and constructive history.
To provide detailed descriptions of China’s incorporation process and reframing nineteenth-century China at the center of my research, I analyze archival and primary sources. A variety of material sources (e.g. maps) and textual evidence (e.g. Westerners’ travel essays, British and American government documents, the writings of Qing Empire’s intellectuals and bureaucrats, and diplomatic documents of Qing Empire) enable us to reconceptualize China’s unprecedented changes; these also enrich our understanding of big changes in the labor conditions of Chinese workers, such as the rise of tea planters and coolies, China’s geographic changes, such as the rise of port cities, the appearance of city-hinterland relationships, and of the Qing government’s acceptance of (Western-oriented) inter-state system logics.