This is a longish post…
A long time ago, self-congratulatory citizens and academics of Western Europe and the United States would explain the ludicrous assault on Qing Imperial sovereignty in the 19th century as the simple and sad story of the emperor who said no. Poor deluded Qianlong missed an opportunity to liberalize his trade policies and join the ‘comity of nations’ when he dismissed the noble, upstanding diplomat MacCartney with a sniff, a wave, and a haughty letter to His Royal Majesty King George III which boasted that, “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own products.”
Of course this narrative was a poppycock fairy tale to justify the armed expansion of trading and other privileges by the North Atlantic powers in the 19th century.
The Qianlong Emperor wasn’t declaring a new policy, rather he was describing an economic reality: The Qing Empire at the end of the 18th century was a continent-sized trading network of markets and hubs, mines, farms, plantations, factories, merchants, banks, guilds, and relatively sophisticated systems of finance and