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SUMMARY:The Capacity of Commerce: The Political Participation of Merchant 
 Groups during the Taiping Rebellion - Heqi Cai (LSE)
DTSTART:20231016T120000Z
DTEND:20231016T123000Z
UID:TALK206671@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:113473
DESCRIPTION:How could commercial groups and individual merchants participa
 te in politics and influence the allocation of political resources? Using 
 253 prefectures from late Qing China as the historical context\, this pape
 r examines the effect of commercial development (as measured by the number
  of guilds) in reshaping the distribution of quota for shengyuan (this reg
 ulated fixed number of county-level exam passers experienced an unexpected
  increase during the shock of Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864)). By looking i
 nto this natural background\, the study finds that one more commercial gui
 ld in the prefecture would lead to a 0.833 increase in the quota for sheng
 yuan during Taiping time\, indicating the more commercially developed area
 s would earn more opportunities for examination candidates to participate 
 in political bureaucrats. The positive relationship between commercial gui
 lds and the increase in quota can be attributed to a reward mechanism: the
  indirect taxation (lijin)\, which was initially established to collect mi
 litaryexpenditures for Taiping during this war period\, simultaneously pro
 vided merchants with a channel through which they could make monetary dona
 tions. It demonstrates that prefectures with one more lijin station raised
  the quota for shengyuan by 0.2 in Taiping-affected prefectures\, indicati
 ng that when driving the quota for shengyuan reallocation\, the capacity o
 f commerce occurred through the indirect taxation system. However\, the ef
 forts made by merchants pursuing political upward mobility did not work as
  expected: this paper uses a difference-in-difference model to test how th
 e increase in quota for shengyuan was related to the change in actual numb
 er of jinshi within the same prefecture from1850to the abolishment of civi
 l service exam in 1905. It shows that in the prefecture where the quota fo
 r shengyuan increased noticeably\, successful passers at the final stage d
 id not exhibit a matching increase. So merchants’ capacity truly stopped
  at the first stage while attempting to engage in the examination selectio
 n procedure\, showing a failure to obtain upward mobility for continued po
 litical participation in late Qing China.
LOCATION:Room 12\, Faculty of History
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