| This thesis traces how the world recession of the early nineteenth century affected China's state, society, and intellectual outlook. In this period, silver comprised 75% of China's money supply and more than 50% of it came from Latin America through China's foreign trade. The drop of the world's silver and gold supply by one half, caused by the Latin American emancipation movement, decreased the ability of Europe and the United States to purchase Chinese goods and led an increase in their opium export to China. The resulting 11% decrease in China's total money supply impoverished the nation, increased social tension, and threatened the state's power as never before.; Both silver appreciation, attributed to foreign invasion, and dynastic decline, which gave free rein of debased coins, had been considered the cause of the endogeneous depreciation of copper cash. This thesis finds that the copper cash supply decreased rather than increased, as the production cost of copper and copper cash calculated in silver increased and the demand for copper cash decreased, both because of silver appreciation. The fact that China's silver prices correlated with the ups and downs of the world economy but not with the importation of opium is evidence that China's close involvement with the world economy rather than dynastic decline or foreign invasion was the ultimate cause of China's early nineteenth-century crisis.; In response to this crisis, theories both to protect private interest and to increase the state's power were proposed, based almost entirely on Chinese history and thought. Private interest gained in vigor due to the powerful market force, and its corresponding intellectual currents also came to the fore. This development revealed China's strain of ideas which understood market spontaneity. Similar intellectual changes which took place during China's two silver crises in the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries imply that "enlightened" ideas were interpreting the times rather than seeking the ontological aim of "enlightenment."... |
