Recent scholarship highlights the role of commercial credit, often backed by the power of the state, in creating conditions of subordination in the expansion of European empires. Less attention has been paid to how such indebtedness was understood and handled by the counterpart states, thereby missing the opportunity to appreciate other modes of interaction between private credit and imperial construction. This article investigates the framework under which the eighteenth-century Qing empire dealt with accusations brought against indebted Chinese merchants by external parties. I stress the importance of bringing Sino-Western and intra-Asian cases into a single analytic frame to reflect the Qing empire’s comprehensive approach to the maritime frontier. In these cases, the Qing emperor intervened to help foreigners recover their funds and even assumed unbound liability as a last resort. Buttressing such practices was a foundational principle of the Qing imperial formation: that the emperor’s claim to universal sovereignty rested upon his utmost impartiality toward the ‘inner and outer’ – a contrasting pair based on shifting relativity rather than fixed territoriality. This study highlights the importance of understanding the different modes of mutual constitution between how an empire imagined and managed different groups of people it ruled over or encountered and the practical parameters of its political economy in global history.

Following victory in the Russo-Japanese War, the Meiji government sought to expand its maritime influence in Northeast Asia by developing pelagic fisheries in the newly acquired Kwantung leased territory, but it encountered immediate resistance from the Qing court, which had just embarked upon ambitious reform to strengthen maritime defence through the building of a national fishing industry. The dispute first emerged as a clash between Japanese and Chinese fishery protection companies on the seas adjacent to the Chinese city of Xiongyue. It then gave rise to a protracted Sino-Japanese legal debate on the question of whether the Xiongyue fishing ground was in the free sea or part of Chinese territorial waters. However, the 1912 settlement agreement made no mention of the legal status of the fishing ground. By examining this oft-neglected dispute, this article not only provides a rare East Asian case that illustrates the tension between the requirements of national sea borders and the principle of navigational freedom, but also explores how the Meiji and Qing governments perceived and practised international maritime law at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that neither government viewed international maritime law as the only referential framework to solve the dispute, especially when it contributed little to the conflict settlement and contradicted their perceptions of the historical relations between East Asian countries.