From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China.

Roy, Kaushik

From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China, by Matthew W. Mosca. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2013. viii, 398 pp. $60.00 US (cloth).

The rise of the West in the early modern era is partly related with the fall of Asia. Any debate about the relative decline of Asia vis-a-vis Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has to touch China and to a lesser extent India. China and India together comprised a significant chunk of demographic resources and economic assets of the pre-modern world. Hence, any analysis regarding the Great Divergence has to take into account the reasons behind the collapse of China's Qing/Manchu Empire. Matthew W. Mosca's From Frontier to Foreign Policy indirectly touches upon the Great Divergence debate.

Mosca on the basis of large amount of data in Chinese language studies the later Qing Empire's attempt to tackle the "hat wearers" who were encroaching on the margins of the "heavenly" Middle Kingdom. Mosca's basic thesis is that the Qing Empire had frontier policies for different parts of the extensive land and maritime borders of China. This policy till circa 1770 worked well when the Qing Empire faced regional threats like the Zunghars along a particular tract of its frontier. Different policies for separate frontiers were formulated by the officials who were in charge of particular sections of the empire's frontier. There was no central coordinating machinery for collating and analyzing the diverse policies churned out by the officials stationed at different parts of the Qing Empire's frontier. It means that the Qing Empire had no grand strategy. Nevertheless, it was not of much importance as there was no all-encompassing threat for all the frontiers of the empire.

In 1757, with the absorption of Jungharia, the Qing Empire reached its height. Generally, the Qings used a combination of trade incentives, religious and cultural pressures along with military coercion to solve their frontier problems. However, by circa 1830s, the strategic elite of the Qing Empire realized that the time had come to craft a grand strategic policy (national security policy in modern parlance) to meet the challenges of the multi-front threat posed by the British who were now active in Afghanistan, Bengal, and Burma (now Myanmar). However, Qing policy in this regard was hampered by disjointed governmental practices, the textual tradition in Chinese literary-governmental circle and absence of precise geographical data. Before the late Qing, foreign geography was studied through words rather than images. Despite possessing a plethora of data from divergent sources, the Qing understanding of frontier geography was hazy. This is because in Qing textual geography, the process of reasoning was more important than the provisional conclusion. To quote Mosca: ... it was precisely this reasoning that a map could not illustrate" (p. 39).

Mosca, like a trained storyteller, shows how the Qing public officials and private intellectuals tried to overcome these obstacles. During the first half of the nineteenth century, some of the private Qing scholars took advantage of Jesuit maps but could not trust such foreign sources completely. The court officials also challenged the veracity of the merchants' accounts regarding foreign lands they had visited in the course of their business enterprises. The Qing bureaucrats fell back to their time tested traditional sources. The West's advantage lay in the field of voyages of discovery and introduction of mathematical cartography from the sixteenth century onward. Astronomically and mathematically derived locations were expressed on a grid of latitude and longitude. Unlike in the West, cartography in China did not become a science with a paradigm. Hence, unlike the post Renaissance Western scholars, the Chinese literate elite failed to reach a consensus about the outline of the world. The net result was that multiple names and contradictory information was amassed about a particular geographical zone. All this caused increasing confusion as the court officials got bogged down in an immense quantity of data. Even though the Qianlong Emperor (1736-95) devoted adequate economic resources to reduce the geographic confusion (resulting from linguistic roots), he tolerated divergent cartographic representation of the outside world so that older palace maps would conform to newer survey results. Ultimately, geographic confusion, absence of multi-frontier coordination and the Qing emperor's reluctance to engage in long distance alliances to maneuver strategically against the British threat stretching from Canton, Burma-North-East India to North-West India and Central Asia prevented the emergence of a truly Chinese sponsored anti-British alliance in Asia.

This reviewer has a minor issue with Mosca. True, before circa 1800, China had no grand strategy as European polities like the Spanish Empire had. This was not a weakness of the Qing Empire, which did not evolve such a strategy because there was no necessity for it. However, it would be erroneous to think that the Qing Empire before the above mentioned date had only separate and segmented, uncoordinated frontier policies. When the Junghars threatened the Qing Empire, the Beijing Government realized that the Mongolian nomads could pose a threat along the Korean, Manchurian, North Chinese as well as South-West China Tibet frontiers. So, a sort of multi-front frontier policy or a continental grand strategy evolved. However, the steppe nomads had no maritime capacity. And the Japanese pirates who posed a threat to coastal China had no capacity to pose a threat along the land frontiers of China. Hence, integration of maritime strategy and continental strategy did not occur in Qing Empire before the advent of the British. In the 1830s, when the Qings realized the necessity of crafting a multidimensional grand strategy, it was too late. The Opium War (1840-42) intervened and then internal rebellions broke out within China.

Overall, using a plethora of sources, Mosca has written a brilliant, path breaking book. Rather than technological, the Qing Empire's problem, according to Mosca's interpretation, was the product of managerial and textual & intellectual factors. West Europe's map-centered geography triumphed over China's text-centered geography. To conclude, Mosca's monograph will remain a model about the late Qing's relationship with the rising power of Britain in Asia.

Kaushik Roy

Jadavpur University