John Saris and the China Captain - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 74

Calm'), the first step to founding a separate dynasty. Although Zheng Chenggong
died of malaria the following year, the Eastern Calm kingdom survived on Taiwan
foranothertwodecadesbeforetheManchuscrusheditspowerandannexedTaiwan
to the Qing empire. This is how Taiwan became part of China.
The idea of an empire based more on water than on land was an innovation
beyond Li Dan's imagining. He had learned that wealth was based not on what
you owned but on how much you could trade it for, and he had turned that know-
ledge to personal advantage. The English and the Dutch would pay the price, yet
so too would he, for his family lacked the organisation to benefit from their busi-
ness and survive financial collapse. What Li did not imagine, and there is no reas-
on he should have, is that the state could be the founder and protector of private
commercial corporations. The Ming dynasty had never shown the slightest interest
in serving as an advocate of trade. The Japanese lords in Hirado and Nagasaki, by
contrast, were certainly interested in creaming the profits off his operations when
they could and in using him effectively as an informal bank to fund their deficits,
but that sort of racket could not produce a marriage between commerce and state
in Japan either.
Weshouldn'texpect abeleaguered merchant cut adrift onthe China seas topre-
dict a future no one could see. The Dutch and the English states were putting some
of their interests, and much of their futures, in the hands of private corporations.
But no one, east or west, could anticipate the age of imperialism yet to begin. Li
Dan had no reason to guess that, barely two decades after his death, his favourite's
son would attempt to build a state regime by sea rather than by land. In Europe,
though,thenewdealbetweenstateandcommercestuck.Mostpeoplelikedtothink
that de Groot was right about the sea being common to all, but even de Groot may
have sensed that Selden knew better, that the coming game was not free trade but
empire.