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Edit, since the "edit title" function has disappeared in this board: I mean "everyone" by "anyone," in that not everyone would have been exploitative as Europe, not that no one would have been as exploitative as Europe. One user downthread was confused about this and I thought I'd clear this up.

A common excuse for the various misdeeds of European imperialism is that "anyone would have done what the Europeans did if they had the chance." Well, is this true? Let's compare British India with a hypothetical Qing India, in light of the recent thread on the colonial peripheralization of indigenous economies.

I'll quote Roy Bin Wong, a Chinese economic historian (emphasis mine):
Whether we consider institutions or ideologies, European and Chinese systems of political economy exhibit basic differences. European mercantilism gave competing European states a common interest in expanding the spatial dimensions of their economies. Early modern colonialism was one project to build the wealth and power of European countries. One country's successes came from displacing another from some colonial site or by beating others to new unclaimed spaces. The fates of the societies into which Europeans inserted themselves was not part of the mercantilist calculus. European states were especially interested in competition with their rivals for resources, products, and money. Strong economies competed with each other to amass money and exploit gains to be made from colonies.

This logic of political economy stressing competition with foreign states had little in common with China's stress on domestic exchange expected to benefit all parties. The Chinese state supported the expansion of production and trade but could not imagine, let alone approve, of a scheme in which a competitive zero-sum game pitted provinces against one another. Chinese officials expected commerce to be generally fair and effective in distributing goods according to supply and demand. Where commerce was poorly developed, the state invested money to promote production and exchange. Rather than extract resources from peripheries, the Chinese state was more likely to invest in them. Political expansion to incorporate new frontiers committed the government to a shift of resources to the peripheries, not extraction from them. Late imperial Chinese political economy obeyed a set of principles very much at odds with those of mercantilism. (China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, page 148)​

Furthermore, the Qing are unlikely to drastically favor Chinese over Indians, considering that the Manchus themselves are non-Chinese, feared Chinese merchants becoming overpowered, and perceived India to be as civilized as China[1] (while the Chinese had a vaguely racist view of dark-skinned peoples, I doubt it would develop into European-style racism without widespread slavery, and the historical prestige of India would compensate for Indians' blackness). And since Qing merchants do not have and will not create a monopolistic and bureaucratically developed company, the Chinese will not be able to enforce low prices on Indian merchants[2] or limit the rights of Indian weavers. We can imagine that our hypothetical Qing India will not have its wealth robbed by the Qing state, in the same way that the British empire forcibly transitioned India into the archetypal colonial economy. Much to the contrary, the pro-merchant stance of the Qing state and its far greater stability compared to 18th-century Indian governments would give much greater liberty to Indian capitalists, who can essentially exploit the best of both worlds; take advantage of the weaker Indian neighbors of the Qing to continue their old prerogatives (like the right to tax certain areas) and take advantage of Qing stability and protection to secure basic rights.

European imperialism and its imitations (e.g. Japanese imperialism) were an exceptional phenomenon, and Qing maritime imperialism would not resemble it in the degree of economic exploitation it involved.

[1] Along with the Ottoman empire. Qing writer Qishiyi remarks that the Ottomans "are not part of the Chinese or barbarian realms," while the Qianlong emperor considered China, India, and the Ottoman empire to be the three "great countries" of the world.

[2] This ruined the Tamil portfolio capitalist class; the European Companies demanded low prices for textiles even as political instability due to Mughal collapse was raising wages. See The Trading World of the Tamil Merchant: Evolution of Merchant Capitalism in the Coromandel.

(If you're questioning how the Qing end up with India in the first place, there are a number of political reasons - e.g. an offense to national prestige (guo ti, lit. "face of the state"), a concept which involved the Qing in a series of bloody wars against Burma in the 1680s. But this is a hypothetical comparison anyways.)
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