Under Mo Tianci, The Port continued to thrive as a resource exporter, emporium, and monetary center. In fact, it expanded beyond its immediate surroundings of the water world and Cochinchina, stimulated by commercial growth, social change, and official policies within the regional powers of China, Japan, and the VOC. As a result, The Port played an essential role in the offshoring of the Chinese economy, attracting surplus laborers from China to Southeast Asia and supplying them with goods from Guangzhou. The Port’s expanded jurisdiction after the late 1750s also allowed for a greater specialization of functions. Bassac and other minor ports handled trade with maritime East Asia and received support from the Hong merchants of Guangzhou. The urban center focused more on finance, influencing the money supply of Cochinchina and becoming a center for copper and silver in Southeast Asia. The Port’s fortunes got a further boost when the fall of Ayutthaya to the Myanmar forces removed a major competitor along the Gulf of Siam littoral.

Chapter 2 is the first of five chapters that highlights the interconnections between Western and non-Western agency in the making of the first global economy (FGE), which existed between roughly 1500 and 1850. This chapter re-introduces China as an agent of the FGE, adopting a via media between the Sinocentrism of key parts of the California School on the one hand and Eurocentrism/Eurofetishism on the other (i.e., China's role in the FGE was more important than Eurocentrism allows for but was less pronounced than Sinocentrism presumes). Overall, it reveals how China was open to global trade and was an important (though not the key) driver of it. It critiques all of the standard Eurocentric claims concerning China's isolation from foreign trade, revealing as myths: the realisation of the state's official bans on foreign trade (section 1); the dominance of the Europeans in Chinese trade and the dominance of China over Britain (section 2); the Chinese tribute system (section 3); the Canton System (section 4); and China's heavily protectionist trade regime (section 5). The chapter closes with a detailed analysis as to why Qing China moved to freer trade after 1684 while Britain moved in the opposite direction to extreme protectionism.

This chapter discusses the two wars between Great Britain and the Qing Empire in 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. Usually viewed separately it makes sense to consider the two together. Both conflicts were about two sets of concerns: First, the British wanted a framework where British merchants had access to multiple ports, limited taxes, no restrictions on who they could trade with, and legalized imports of opium. Second, the British wanted a new system of diplomatic and political relations.Rejecting existing Qing systems of diplomatic relations such as the tribute system, the British wanted to utilize European diplomatic practices and international law as an institutional framework. Victory in both wars allowed Britain to redefine the frameworks of both trade and diplomacy in the manner they saw fit, creating the treaty system that would last until World War II.