Quantification and Fiscal Governance in China, 1400-1800

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During this fellowship, I will complete a book project titled Quantification and Fiscal Governance in China, 1400-1800 along with a journal article that develops from my doctoral thesis. My research aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about the rise of the fiscal state in economic history, nuancing historical arguments about fiscal capacity in premodern China (Tilly, 1990; Bonney, 1999; Yun-Casalilla and O'Brien, 2012). It also aims to deliver rich and original insight into the complexities and institutional preconditions of fiscal accounting, exploring how and under what conditions fiscal accounting and budgeting can (or cannot) contribute to the building and enhancement of state capacity (Hacking, 1990; Porter, 1995).State governance requires knowledge of those to be governed, and good governance requires the state to build up the capacity to gather and utilise knowledge in the form of numerical representations. In both the premodern and modern world, numbers and calculative practices serve as an instrument to visualise and capture the world far removed from the centre of administration. Such calculative practices transform physical entities into abstract symbols; they simplify complex things into readable marks.To explore the roles of numbers and calculative practices in fiscal governance, I turn to early modern China as my case of study, tracing back to the fifteenth century when fiscal institutions began to develop alongside changes in social settings. This research finds that the introduction of silver tael as a standard numeraire in the state's statistical and accounting system enabled the central government in China to measure incomes and expenditures in local administration, to intervene in the details of fiscal management in local governments, to build up a local budget system, and to predict and monitor local spending with rigid regulations on the use of tax resources. In the face of warfare and fiscal pressure, local budget figures became the basis for actions, enabling the state to reconfigure fiscal revenues between the central and local authorities. When social order was eventually restored in the late seventeenth century, the Chinese state established a more centralised fiscal system. However, state investments in the local government became too low afterwards, causing fiscal governance in China to repeatedly linger between ambitious policy targets and difficult situations encountered by the local administration.The historical findings from my research also expect to engage with the non-academic audience, shed light on the role of calculations in policymaking, and provide historical insights on statistics and administrative capacity for the Office for Statistics Regulation and regulatory body. My research on the Chinese case provides abundant examples that can enhance our understanding of data collection and processing issues in public administrations, locating the use and abuse of numbers in government. These historical experiences provide implications on broader questions concerning institutional and infrastructural pre-conditions for governing by numbers. Being located in the Department of Accounting and Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation would provide me with a unique opportunity to develop such insights further and communicate them with relevant policymakers and regulators.