Wenkai He. Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: England, Japan, and China.

Reviews of Books W ENKAI H E . Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: Eng- land, Japan, and China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2013. Pp. x, 313. $55.00. The fiscal breakdown of Qing China, which opened the way for the Chinese revolution of 1911, was surely one of the most important events of the twentieth century. But why was the Qing state vulnerable to fiscal break- down? It had a productive system of land taxes and ex- cises. Responsibility for assessing and collecting taxes was in the hands of salaried bureaucrats who were se- lected by competitive examination and subject to rig- orous bookkeeping requirements enforced by annual audits. A developed market economy provided those bureaucrats with resources to tax, central points for tax A MERICAN H ISTORICAL R EVIEW collection, and price information that they could use to assess liability. It also provided them with credit instru- ments and banking networks that they could have used to remit payment over long distances. Why didn’t all of this add up to a reliable stream of revenues? According to Wenkai He, the answer is that Qing of- ficials were averse to debt, and therefore deprived themselves of an important means to smooth their rev- enues over crisis periods. By contrast, He offers the ex- amples of governments in England (1642–1752) and Ja- pan (1868–1895) that successfully issued unsecured short-term debts to meet urgent and unexpected mil- itary expenses. The need to refinance those short-term debts led to a period of sustained fiscal experimenta- tion, culminating in a formula that He calls “the mod- ern fiscal state”: a permanent debt consisting of long- term government bonds backed by a stable stream of revenues from centrally collected custom duties and ex- cises. This formula, he argues, was the key to the fiscal resilience of those empires. The Qing state could have hit on this formula, too. He draws on archival sources to reconstruct debates among Qing officials. He shows that they attempted to issue paper notes to meet unexpected military expenses in the 1850s. But those notes did not create a chronic debt crisis; instead, they simply failed to circulate, be- cause the state was fighting regional rebellions that had disrupted domestic trade and credit networks. Revenue officials therefore directed their creative energies to- ward finding new ways to meet immediate fiscal needs out of current revenues. The absence of paper notes complicated attempts to centralize tax revenues, be- cause the roads were not safe for movements of large quantities of specie. Officials therefore improvised an increasingly baroque system of “assignment orders” by which they directed excise tax revenues from provincial treasuries toward specific public expenditures in neigh- boring provinces without first collecting them into a central account. This system suppressed tax revenues by leaving excise duties in the hands of provincial gover- nors who competed to attract long-distance trade. It also eroded the quality of information available to the central government as provincial officials resorted to creative accounting to circumvent increasingly rigid earmarks. The decentralized system ultimately de- prived the Qing state of the ability to mobilize resources where and when it needed them. The juxtaposition of three such different histories necessarily strips each narrative of much of its context. Some such sacrifice is inevitable in any comparative his- tory on this scale, and the reward for this decontextu- alizing move, when it is done well, is that stripping away context can reveal the skeleton of an alternative nar- rative. Here it is done well. Among the book’s most in- teresting and provocative arguments are claims about which contextual factors did not matter. He argues, for example, against the classic argument of Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, that Parliament is rel- atively unimportant to explaining the long-term cred- itworthiness of the English state. He also argues, A PRIL 2014 Downloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on April 11, 2014 Why does Belmessous examine these particular case studies? Unfortunately, she does not offer much of an explanation. Few direct comparisons are drawn among the three cases, and the broader patterns she discerns deserve greater attention than they receive. She argues, for example, that the differences between the early modern French case and the nineteenth-century British case reveal a shift by both empires from a religious to a legal conception of assimilation, a conclusion that is problematic both because it fails to provide compara- tive evidence that the French and British pursued the same assimilationist policies in each of these periods and because it asserts in the British case the ideological representativeness of a single individual, Saxe Bannis- ter, while ignoring the fact that the contemporaneous evangelical movement and missionary enterprise ex- erted enormous influence on British attitudes toward indigenous peoples. Other promising lines of compar- ative inquiry receive scant attention. Belmessous ac- knowledges that settlers were key players in the struggle over assimilationist policies in each of her case studies, but she gives no comparative consideration of their con- tributions. She notes that miscegenation loomed large in the strategy of assimilation introduced in French North America, but neglects its contribution in the other two cases. Australian officials, for example, sought to “breed out” Aborigines by means of misce- genation. And Belmessous might have acknowledged that the indigenous elites who embraced assimilation in colonial Algeria had counterparts in other colonies. For all its limitations as a comparative study, Assim- ilation and Empire is an informative, valuable work. The geographical and chronological range of its inquiry is impressive, and each case is investigated in consider- able depth, with evidence drawn from a plenitude of primary and secondary sources. Moreover, Belmessous has much to say that is fresh and illuminating about French and British policies toward indigenous peoples. Above all, her book serves as a useful reminder that the utopian desire to remake other peoples in the idealized image of oneself was an integral aspect of both coun- tries’ imperial projects. D ANE K ENNEDY George Washington University