Boundaries and Trade in the Early Modern World: Negotiations at Nerchinsk and Beijing

In 1689, representatives of the Russian tsar and the Qing emperor met at the small garrison town of Nerchinsk in eastern Siberia to negotiate a treaty defining the borders of the two empires and future commercial and diplomatic relations between them. The treaty produced by these negotiations was the first one signed by the Qing empire with a Western nation. Just over one hundred years later, in 1793, Lord George Macartney arrived in Beijing to conduct negotiations for the British regarding trade relations with the Qing empire. This essay looks at these two imperial encounters together in order better to understand the particular changes over the course of the eighteenth century that account for their very different results.