This book draws on archival documents, published histories, and visual materials to argue that Qing China (1644–1912) was a strongly consumerist society, and that much of what it consumed arrived by sea, often on foreign ships. Zheng Yangwen's interest in the huge role of foreign goods in early modern Chinese consumption grows out of her earlier book on opium, which drew attention to the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century fashion for “foreign goods” (yanghuo). She argues for a major trade shift beginning during the Ming, when luxuries for use at court gradually yielded place to goods for much more general consumption. In other words, “consumer goods for the first time in history dictated the volume of maritime trade” (p. 243), and Zheng asserts that by the mid-Qing this shift was widely in evidence.
Zheng links both population growth and spreading consumption to maritime trade. At the same time, she makes...
