Profit and Statecraft in Nineteenth-Century China
本文比较了两本关于十九世纪中国精英如何理解利润与治理的著作，探讨其相似性与差异，尤其关注鸦片战争和太平天国等重大事件前后的思想变化。
Similarities between William Rowe’s Speaking of Profit and Peter Lavelle’s The Profits of Nature are not hard to find. Both are focused on the lives of elite men enmeshed in the political world of nineteenth-century China, explain and analyze their views of proper governance and their places in the intellectual milieu of the era, and cast an eye toward global comparisons. Both also feature the word “profit” in the title, and not by coincidence. However, their respective focuses lie on opposite ends of the momentous ruptures of China’s mid-nineteenth century, most notably the Opium (1839–1842) and Taiping (1850–1864) wars. Reading these two books together poses the provocative question of whether their similarities outweigh this considerable difference.