Book Reviews--China: Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination

• Published in: The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 75; no. 3; p. 806
• Main Author: Fiskesjö, Magnus
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Pittsburgh Duke University Press, NC & IL 01.08.2016
• Subjects: Asian studies; Chinese languages; Confucius (551-479 BC); Economics; Genre; Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell (1788-1879); Imperialism; Kinship; United Kingdom > UK; United States > US; Asia; China
• ISSN: 0021-9118; 1752-0401
• DOI: 10.1017/S0021911816000693

Early-imperial economic treatises like the transgressive Guanzi were fashioned as a fact-fiction continuum with Chinese characteristics: "[The Han] Emperor Wu's economic advisers championed a text that took the fictional character Mr. Calculate-y as its source of economic expertise" for managing the calculated expansion of monetized markets under the aegis of the state, seeking wealth and power far beyond the tribute relations of old. There was in the midst of this, argues Chin, an ideological divide between those who--much like some Western economists today, we might note--wanted to explain (and celebrate) the trade flows of commodities and currencies as a new, self-evident order of things, and those who wanted to force-assimilate the new mercantilist-imperialist reality (the "savage exchange") into the old-style moral-conceptual framework of kinship and kingship. The dual-faced coins reflect the struggle over if and how to enact a state cosmology in the supervision of markets--even when, or especially when, coins themselves were taken off the market to be buried in tombs, to buy favors in imaginary afterworlds--and in the ever-unresolved debates over the inscription of putative cosmic order in the very design and adornment of coins.