Hans van de Ven has performed a great service as a China historian by accepting the invitation of the Vice-Director of the Number Two Historical Archives in Nanjing to help organize the far-reaching archives of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. By doing so—as he admits, following the dream of every historian—van de Ven has opened up the archives of the Maritime Customs Service and thereby extended our knowledge of its history from the 1860s to the 1950s. The Chinese Communist Party, ambivalently, eliminated the service in 1952, ending more than a century when, as with the Muslims and Jesuits in the Astronomy Bureau, foreigners were in charge of a major branch of the Chinese government. Along the way, the book paints a fascinating picture of a partnership between the Chinese state and its foreign advisors from the 1860s to the 1950s, about which, despite Jonathan Spence’s pioneering account of Robert Hart and others in To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620–1960 (Penguin Putnam, Inc., 2002), we had known little. Van de Ven now extends that story by using the Maritime Customs Service’s archives to tell us in greater detail about Robert Hart’s foundational role in establishing both the ethical and organizational ideals of the organization, which lasted from the late Qing Self-Strengthening Movement to the end of the Republican period in 1949.

To give but one example from the volume, van de Ven is at his best when he vividly employs the Customs Service’s archives to explain the service’s role as a debt collector after the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. The service made itself indispensable by establishing a fluid bond market centered in Shanghai, which included financial and political negotiations with all parties. Such bond negotiations were also needed to service the Qing dynasty’s increased debt in the aftershock of the Boxer Rebellion and in the aftermath of the 1911 Revolution, when foreigners clamored for a “piece” of first Qing and then Republican China. For example, when Japan imposed a Hk. Tls. (Hong Kong taels of silver) 200 million indemnity in 1895, the Qing initially failed to locate the funding needed from its current revenues to pay the Japanese. The Manchu government then concluded three large loans from international banking consortia, which issued bonds to raise the necessary funds. The Hk. Tls. 200 million was owed to the Japanese in eight installments to be paid over three years; a 5 percent interest charge was levied on the outstanding amounts. The Japanese accepted similar terms in the spring of 1895 for a Hk. Tls. 30 million bond from the Qing to pay for Japan’s withdrawal from the Liaodong Peninsula, even though its pulling out was forced upon it by the Triple Alliance of France, Germany, and Russia. Likewise, the Boxer indemnity of Hk. Tls. 450 million forced the Qing to accept a single bond negotiated by the Customs Service to finance a loan from the eight powers that had invaded China. During the 1911 Revolution, the new Republican state was immediately forced to turn to foreign lenders rounded up by the Customs Service to contract a 25-million-pound “reorganization loan” from international banks. The Customs Service, in effect, became a debt collector between 1895 and 1924. It was empowered by both the Chinese/Manchus and Europeans, Japanese, and Americans to pay off China’s huge loans via the international bond markets. The Customs Service was indispensable for the Qing and the Republic to pay off foreigners for the incurred, cumulative debt that accrued. Relying on this flow of bond payments—in effect, financial extortion—the Qing government still was able to hold back some funds to rearm, build a modern school system, and reform the bureaucracy before its fall in 1911.

Van de Ven stresses the cosmopolitan nature of the Qing civil service bureaucracies that emerged in the late nineteenth century. The Maritime Customs Service certainly was an anomalous fit for the Qing bureaucracy, but the precedents of the Astronomy Bureau, which allowed both the Ming and Qing states to find bureaucratic space for expert foreigners within it, is kindred in spirit, although the Customs Service’s senior staff came from around the world. From the Taiping Rebellion to the beginnings of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), however, its raison d’etre was to complement and keep weak Qing and Republican governments financially afloat. According to van de Ven, the service accounted for some 30 to 50 percent of the Qing and Republican states’ central revenue. It also built and managed China’s harbors and lighthouses, provided quarantine services, oversaw China’s bonds, and helped buy a Qing navy.

Van de Ven presents both sides of the men of the Customs Service. Filled with careerist ambitions, they could be arrogant toward China, but they were also inspired by Hart’s “do-good” beliefs, which had flowed from the minds of Great Britain’s liberal thinkers and Christian evangelicals. The Customs Service kept borders open, maintained China’s territorial and national integrity, and secured access to China’s foreign trade via fairness and an efficient bureaucracy. Van de Ven notes that when the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the Japanese official then in charge of the Customs Service still followed orders from his Chinese superior, as did many Japanese customs officers when dealing with Japan’s invasion of China. For van de Ven, the Customs Service successfully functioned inside the Chinese bureaucratic world. As an institution, it helped keep China together at critical times.

In his discussion of China’s transition to modernity, van de Ven tends to under-theorize China’s role in the rise of modern economic growth via international trade and commerce. He mentions the Qing network of tollhouses before 1800 and treaty ports after 1842; however, like John Fairbank and others, he underestimates the step-by-step growth of peaceful global trade in East China Sea waters, beginning with the eighteenth-century Canton trading system, which is ably described by Paul Van Dyke in The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (HKU Press, 2005). The Chinese treaty ports that were forced open after the Opium War (1839–42) represented a second stage of development, after what Van Dyke calls the “collapse” of the Canton System. Describing the Canton System, Van Dyke stresses that the system depended on Canton’s customs procedures, by which China was opened to the world in the eighteenth century. The late–nineteenth-century Maritime Customs Service system should be connected to its two institutional predecessors if we are to obtain a full understanding of the global interactions that the world went through from 1750 to 1950. Van de Ven gives us a lively and germane account of the last century of China’s trading and customs institutions after 1850, but that is not when the processes of global commercialization became legalized and institutionalized enough to replace the great pirate fleets and marauders—first the Japanese “wako” in East and Southeast Asian waters after 1550, and then their European counterparts after 1600. By relying on what he calls late–nineteenth-century industrialized “modernity” to describe the growth of “underdevelopment” in Qing China, van de Ven remains uninterested in unravelling the “deep pockets” of India and China during the early modern “silver age,” which have been painstakingly reconstructed over the last decade by Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Richard von Glahn, R. Bin Wong, Tim Brook, and Kenneth Pomeranz, among others.

A final minor point, perhaps, but one worth noting in this very positive review, is van de Ven’s reaffirmation of mainstream opinion that Japan's modern navy had demonstrated its superiority during its punitive expedition to Taiwan in 1874, and even more so after the Sino-French War of 1884–85, when, allegedly, “the Qing [navy] stood still” because the Manchu state “lacked the financial strength, military power, international significance, and internal cohesion to resist Japan” (pp. 104–105). If so, how could the Qing state have built up its major navy yards at Port Arthur (Luxun) and Fuzhou at all, and then still pay Japan for huge indemnities after 1895? This view of China’s late Qing military failures is based on the teleological hindsight enunciated after the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War. The late Qing regional navies that were built up at great expense at Port Arthur (the “Gibraltar” of China), Weihaiwei, Shanghai, Fuzhou, and Guangzhou were better equipped and larger in scale than the singular Meiji fleet at Yokosuka during the 1870s and 1880s. Yokosuka began to catch up in the 1880s, as van de Ven stresses, but Japan in the fall of 1894—like France in the 1884 war—still required the tactic of a “surprise attack” in East Asian waters to win the day. The Meiji fleet benefited substantially from the huge war reparations Japan received after 1895. The additions to its Yokosuka fleet of several captured Qing battleships later enabled Japan to defeat Russia’s fleet in 1904–05. Japan used the indemnities, paid for through bonds negotiated by the Maritime Custom Service, as a windfall profit at China’s expense.