The Capacity of Commerce: How the Merchants Shaped Political Resource Distribution during the Taiping Rebellion
Keywords:
commerce, civil service exam, indirect taxation, Taiping RebellionAbstract
This paper investigates whether merchant organizations shaped the wartime redistribution of political resources in late imperial China. During the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), the Qing government turned to merchant networks for war finance and, in exchange, expanded examination quotas for the shengyuan degree. Using cross‑sectional data on 262 prefectures, I show that pre‑war merchant guild presence strongly predicts wartime quota increases, concentrated in battle‑affected areas. Instrumenting guild presence with Ming‑dynasty trade routes supports a causal interpretation. The lijin commercial tax is a plausible channel: prefectures collecting more lijin revenue received larger quota allocations. A difference‑in‑differences analysis confirms that quota expansions translated into higher jinshi production after 1864. The findings provide quantified evidence that fiscal contributions can purchase political selection in a premodern autocracy.
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