Public Lecture | “Global Powers in South China Sea”: Governing Dynamics and Equilibrium of Interest in the Road to the Opium Wars, 1680-1840
Public Lecture | "Global Powers in South China Sea": Governing Dynamics and Equilibrium of Interest in the Road to the Opium Wars, 1680-1840
25
Jun
The Conference “Global Powers in South China Sea” will take place on 25 June from 18:30 at the Rui Cunha Foundation.
About the Talk:
“Global Powers in South China Sea”: Governing Dynamics and Equilibrium of Interest in the Road to the Opium Wars, 1680-1840
This book offers a new perspective on Qing economic and political practices, as well as the dynasty’s geopolitical tensions, through a local lens on foreign trade networks. Employing a reciprocal comparative framework, it illuminates the deep structural interconnections between Western and Chinese market systems. It offers an interdisciplinary inquiry into Nash’s governing dynamics theory that shaped global power transitions, with particular attention to the strategic logic underlying elite decision-making. By utilising the innovative GECEM Database, which cross-references Western and Chinese primary sources to mine new archival data, the study constitutes a methodological advance that presents novel approaches beyond the Great Divergence debate. It is an essential reading for specialists in global and economic history, sinology, East Asian studies, early modern history, as well as for economists and scholars of Sino-European relations.
About the Speaker:
Manuel Perez-Garcia
Manuel Perez-Garcia 马龙 is a Tenured Professor at the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China). He was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant under the Horizon 2020 / EU Funding for Research & Innovation program to lead the GECEM project (Global Encounters between China and Europe: Trade Networks, Consumption and Cultural Exchanges in Macau and Marseille (1680-1840) which examines market integration between China and Europe.
He is the founder and director of the Global History Network in China (GHNC). Previously, he was Associate Professor at Renmin University of China and postdoctoral researcher at Tsinghua University. He earned his PhD in 2011 from the European University Institute (Italy) and the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley (USA). He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University of British Columbia, University of Tokyo, UNAM in Mexico, among others.
His extensive publication record includes books and articles in Web of Science (WoS)-indexed journals, as well as works published by leading academic presses such as Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press. Recent publications: Global Powers in South China Sea Governing Dynamics and Equilibrium of Interest in the Road to the Opium Wars, 1680-1840 (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2026); Great Trade Walls in Imperial China, and Spain: Global goods, power struggles and bankruptcy, 1644-1840 (London: Routledge, 2024); Global History with Chinese Characteristics. Autocratic States along the Silk Road in the Decline of the Spanish and Qing Empires, 1680-1796 (Singapore: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2021); Blood, Land and Power: The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Nobility and Lineages in the Early Modern Period (XVI-XIX centuries), Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2021). He has designed the GECEM Project Database to analyse complex historical realities in China and Europe, whose design has been published in the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (Oxford University Press, 2023) and the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History (Cambridge University Press).
Details:
Date: Thursday, 25 June, 2026
Time: 18:30 – 19:30
Location: Rui Cunha Foundation, Av. da Praia Grande, Nº749-R/C, Macau
Language: This conference will be held in English
Organisers: Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Saint Joseph Macao, and Rui Cunha Foundation
*This is a free event and open to the general public
