CANCELLED – Global Powers in South China Sea – 2026.05.21

The Rui Cunha Foundation will host today, Thursday, June 25th at 6:30pm, a presentation of the theme “Global Powers in South China Sea: Governing Dynamics and Equilibrium of Interest on the Road to the Opium Wars, 1680-1840”, based on the book with the same title by Manuel Perez-Garcia, a Tenured Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, to be issued in August 2026 by the New York publisher Palgrave-Macmillan.

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, the study illuminates the deep structural interconnections between Western and Chinese market systems», according to the promotional information from the publishers. 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.

The book «situates these dynamics within critical geopolitical junctures: the establishment of maritime customs under the Kangxi emperor in 1680, the closure of trade and rise of the Canton system under Qianlong in 1756, and the outbreak of the Opium Wars in 1840. These turning points illuminate transformations in trade strategies, local economies, state capacity, and relations between merchants and officials across the Ming–Qing transition».

Manuel Perez-Garcia is currently a Tenured Professor in the Department of History at the Faculty of Humanities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, after serving as an Associate Professor at Renmin University of China and as a postdoctoral researcher at Tsinghua University. He earned his PhD in 2011 from the European University Institute in Italy and was a researcher for the Department of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, in the United States. He has been a visiting researcher also at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the University of British Columbia, the University of Tokyo, the UNAM in Mexico, among others.

He is the founder and Director of the Global History Network in China (GHNC) (www.globalhistorynetwork.com). His extensive list of publications includes articles and previous books such as: “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, 16th-19th Centuries”(USA: Chicago University Press, 2021).

The session will be conducted in English by Priscilla Roberts, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of History and Heritage at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of University of Saint Joseph – Macau (USJ), as moderator of the presentation.

Admission is free.
Don’t miss it!
For Macau, Further and Higher!