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Course: World History Project - 1750 to the Present > Unit 1
Lesson 3: Scaling to Two Places in the World | 1.2- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Unit 1 Overview
- WATCH: Unit 1 Overview
- READ: Unit One Overview — The World in 1750
- READ: European States and Empires
- READ: Qing Dynasty
- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Macartney’s Expedition and the Global Economy
- WATCH: The Macartney Expedition and the Global Economy
- READ: Global Production and Distribution in 1750
- Scaling to Two Places in the World
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WATCH: The Macartney Expedition and the Global Economy
In 1793, the world economy was beginning a huge transformation. Yet, most people weren’t aware of it. Though Britain and Western Europe would soon emerge as dominant global empires, in 1793, China and South Asia remained the most important regions in the global economy. This video considers the global economy through an encounter between Britain and China. In 1793, Lord Macartney launched an expedition from Portsmouth. He traveled to meet with the Qianlong Emperor in China to request more trade between England and China. His failure highlighted several facts about the shifting global economy.
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Want to join the conversation?
- I love how the Qianlong Emperor just straight up told the guy Britain's broke(16 votes)
- Is it called Portsmith or Portsmouth(2 votes)
- I think the latter.(1 vote)
Video transcript
TREVOR: In 1793, the world's economy was beginning a great transformation. But hardly anybody knew it. Hello, I'm Trevor Getz. NICK: And I'm Nick Dennis. There are many ways to study the
changing global economy of the mid-18th century. You can focus on a particular
trade good, like silver, or tobacco, or porcelain. Or you can focus in on an
individual, or small group of people to see how they experienced these changes.
Maybe you can look at one location and try to see how it is connected to the
rest of the world. Or you could look at a single event to see how it exemplified bigger trends. We're here in Portsmouth, England to use a variety of these techniques.
We're going to look at the 18th century global economy through a place, Portsmouth, through the experiences of a person, George Macartney, and through an event,
Macartney's Embassy to the Qianlong Emperor of China. TREVOR: And our story begins here in Portsmouth, on the southern coast of England. Like many other important trading cities around
the world, Portsmouth is a naturally occurring harbor. An inlet where ships
could be protected from the heavy weather of the English Channel, or the
ships of enemies. In fact, this is the most fortified city in Europe - because
there were plenty of enemies. In the third century, when Rome occupied the
island they built a fort here to repel Saxon Raiders. In the 14th century, when
England was locked in 100 years of conflict with France, the French burned
the town at least three times. Then, in the 15th century, King Henry the 8th turned this into England's first major naval base. Its
docks manufactured some of the largest European vessels of the day, including
Henry the 8th's flagship, the Mary Rose. NICK: By the 18th century, the city was
bursting at the seams with sailors, soldiers, and traders, including many from
the Caribbean, Africa, and southern Europe. Trading ships left from Portsmouth to
conduct commerce around the world, or just across the channel in France.
Convoys left from here to transport convicts and debtors to Australia, where
they would be resettled in brutal circumstances. From its naval base,
Britain's modern fleet departed to fight great battles. The town itself was
dominated by the shipyards, which rapidly expanded as Britain updated its fleets,
protecting its growing trade and empire. It was in this period that the great ships
of the British Imperial Navy were built in industrial shipyards like Portsmouth,
Woolwich, and Chatham. Most, like this vessel, the HMS Victory, which led
Britain's naval victory against Napoleon's fleet at Trafalgar, were at one time or another posted here, in Portsmouth. TREVOR: Despite its growing naval power and trading fleet, Britain was not the world's greatest economic power in the
late 18th century. The real economic center at the time was in Asia, where
China and India were the biggest producers of manufactured products
before industrialization. These two vast economies produced much of the world's
high-quality, expensive goods - those goods that were worth transporting long distances. China, in particular, produced luxury goods that were in high
demand in Europe - ceramics, silks, and tea were profitable enough to ship thousands
of miles across the world from China to England. But these Asian countries, and
their neighbors in Southeast Asia and Korea and the Philippines, had such large
populations that they largely focused on producing goods for themselves and their
nearby neighbors. Massive local and regional markets meant that they had
generally little interest in trade with Europe. By contrast, European states
competed mightily with each other to control the lucrative trade to Asia.
Hence the need for large fleets and for modern industrial shipyards like
Portsmouth. Among European powers, Spain was the first to effectively break into
that Asian marketplace. You see, the one thing that the big Asian states did need
was money to keep their huge economies afloat. And that money came largely in
the form of silver. By the 17th and 18th centuries, most of that silver came from
mines in the Americas, and most of those mines were in the Spanish American
colonies. Other European states, like Portugal and the Netherlands, didn't have
access to the Spanish silver mines and couldn't provide silver in exchange for
Chinese or Indian goods. So they found other ways to join this trade. The
Portuguese, for example, served as middlemen, offering their ships as a
transport service and making a small profit. The Dutch, by contrast, invaded
islands in Southeast Asia, and began growing spices and other goods that they
could transport and sell in Europe. But anyone who wanted to trade with
China still had to buy goods using the one thing China needed: silver currency. Like other Europeans, the British wanted
to find a way into the Asian economic system, but Britain had no silver mining
colonies to produce the money to buy Chinese goods. So, late in the 18th
century, an expedition was prepared to try to get China to accept something
else as payment. King George the 3rd of Britain sent out an ambassador, Lord
Macartney, from these docks in Portsmouth to the Chinese Qianlong Emperor, hoping
to convince him to allow British merchants to try to sell goods produced
in Britain or its colonies. NICK: Macartney left Portsmouth in September, 1792. His small convoy of ships traveled mainly via ports owned by the Portuguese, who were
allies of the British. They sailed down to the west coast of Africa, then to Rio
de Janeiro in Brazil, and then onward around the southern tip of Africa, and
then stopped in Jakarta on the island of Java. The embassy reached the Portuguese colony of Macao on the edge of China in June, 1793 - a 10-month journey. After some negotiations, they proceeded upstream in barges along the High River to Beijing,
and then to the city of Jehol, where the Qianlong Emperor was residing. Macartney finally reached the court of the emperor in August, 1793, where there
was a brief argument about whether he would bow down before the Qianlong
Emperor, and if so, how deeply and how many times. It was usually expected that
visitors meeting the Emperor would bow down on both knees, so that their
forehead touched the ground. Being an experienced diplomat, and wanting the
mission to be a success without compromising British pride, Macartney
decided that he would lower his body by bending on one knee to the ground in the
same way he would do before his own king. Finally, the Emperor received Macartney.
The Ambassador offered gifts, friendship, and everything he could to convince the
Emperor to allow the British merchants to pay for Chinese goods with something
the British could produce, like rice or the drug, opium, grown in British
territory in India. Despite his efforts with the Emperor, Macartney's embassy
produced no change in Chinese policy. After a year of travel
across thousands of miles and three oceans, he came home empty-handed.
Declining to change the conditions of trade, the emperor wrote that China:
"already possessed all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within
its borders. There is therefore no need to import the
manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce. In addition, Britain should know its place in the world by strengthening its
loyalty and swearing perpetual obedience so as to ensure that your country may
share the blessings of peace." Think about this amazing message for a second. It may turn everything you thought you knew on its head. Here is Macartney, the
representative of Britain, which we are taught was the world's greatest
industrial economy, being turned away and being told that Britain should swear
loyalty to China. Here is the emperor of China, which we
know was to lose three major wars and become a victim of imperialism in the
century to come, stating that China was so strong that it needed nothing from
Britain. In fact, the failure of the Macartney mission tells us quite a lot
about the global economy of the mid-18th century. We are used to thinking of this
era as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that would drive Britain and
all of Europe into a position of global economic prominence for about 200 years. But in the 1790s, the Industrial Revolution was just beginning. China, and
to a lesser degree, other parts of Asia, were still the engines of global trade.
270 years later, Asia is once again at the center of
global trade and manufacturing in the 21st century. Any look at global
economies today would probably start on a dock in Shanghai, the world's largest
port, and not in Portsmouth, which is still comparatively tiny. But Britain's
turn was about to come. And industrialization was already beginning
to turn it from the country that would plead for trade with the emperor of
China, into the world's largest economy... for a while.