James Louis Hevia

The Macartney Mission to the court of the Qianlong Emperor has long been seen as a clash of cultures. The classic Fairbank treatment, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast, argues that the Qing court was inherently conservative and unreceptive to foreign trade and ideas. They wished to deal with Europeans as they did their neighbors, through a tribute system that provided prestige and legitimacy to the Qing court. The Qing insisted that Macartney kowtow to symbolize his acknowledgment of Qianlong's superiority. When he refused, the mission failed.

Hevia provides an alternate way to conceive of the mission. Rather than seeing Qing intransigence as the problem, he saw English arrogance and ignorance as the source of the mission's failure. Macartney could not understand the Qing cosmology that had the emperor as over other sovereigns. Hevia argues that the imperial structure of the Qing Empire was incompatible with that of the British Empire.

Although Hevia appears to take on Fairbank's interpretation, his only major disagreement is where to lay the blame. His alternate construction of the clash of empires seems to be one of tone rather than substance. That said, tone matters. Fairbank reads like a triumph of western civilization, even though his interpretation is more nuanced than that. Hevia provides a very good alternative.… (altro)