A study of the Account records of Wanli and the fiscal sovereignty in the late Ming dynasty = 《萬曆會計錄》與晚明財政主權研究

Abstract

 Using the Account Records of Wanli 萬曆會計錄 as a starting point, this dissertation argues that the late Ming imperial court faced a “structural silver deficit”. The high costs of border defense, military expenses, and vassal remunerations were in sharp contrast to the extremely low salaries of officers. This imbalance rendered the entire imperial court’s fiscal budget unreasonable and unsustainable. In addition, failure to keep records of corvee service was a major loophole in the fiscal management of the late Ming Dynasty that gave rise to abuses and corruption. Furthermore, the fixed budgetary taxation system, which had been considered a virtuous form of governance in the early Ming dynasty, became a stumbling block when the imperial court aimed to implement effective governance in the late Ming Dynasty. All of the above problems originated from an influx of silver caused by globalization. As a result, the imperial court lost its “monetary control power” due to its originally weak currency sovereignty. The institutional arrangements for local officials in charge of the gentry—a class of officials established in the early Ming Dynasty—also underwent a qualitative change under the general trend of silver monetization, resulting in the partial loss of the imperial court’s “taxation power”. This dissertation groups these two powers together under the heading “fiscal sovereignty”; their loss resulted in fiscal patterns where “the imperial court gets the land tax whereas the corvee is shared and business tax is outsourced”. Finally, behind these fiscal phenomena, it can be discerned that the Confucian value system was being subjected to the challenges of a new social value system arising from silver monetization. Obvious changes include the rise in the social status of merchants and the emergence of scholar merchants and officials conducting business.