The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors: Early Modern China in WorldHistory

Victor Lieberman

Social Science History, Volume 32, Number 2, Summer 2008, pp. 281-304(Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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Victor Lieberman

The Qing Dynasty and Its NeighborsEarly Modern China in World History

Peter C. Perdue’s China Marches West argues that the Qing dynasty’s ability to break through historical territorial barriers on China’s northwestern frontier re!ected greater Manchu familiarity with steppe culture than their Chinese predecessors had exhibited, reinforced by superior commercial, technical, and symbolic resources and the bene"ts of a Russian alliance. Qing imperial expansion illustrated patterns of ter-ritorial consolidation apparent as well in Russia’s forward movement in Inner Asia and, ironically, in the heroic, if ultimately futile, projects of the western Mongols who fell victim to the Qing. After summarizing Perdue’s thesis, this essay extends his comparisons geographically and chronologically to argue that between #$%% and #&%% states ranging from western Europe through Japan to Southeast Asia exhibited similar patterns of political and cultural integration and that synchronized integrative cycles across Eurasia extended from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries. Yet in its growing vulnerability to Inner Asian domination, China proper—along with other sectors of the “exposed zone” of Eurasia—exempli"ed a species of state formation that was rea-sonably distinct from trajectories in sectors of Eurasia that were protected against Inner Asian conquest.

Peter C. Perdue’s (!""#) China Marches West is the most original, ambi-tious, and successful attempt yet made to examine the formation of the Qing empire and to place that process in comparative context. Its formidable length notwithstanding, the book’s combination of theoretical sophistication, arresting anecdote, vigorous style, handsome illustration, and comparative perspective make it not only an exceptionally pro$table but a rapid and thor-

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oughly enjoyable read. The author focuses on politics and military a*airs but treats with equal facility economics, literature, religion, and cartography. At the same time, Perdue’s command of primary sources in several languages, including Chinese and Russian, and his exhaustive documentation lend this work a magisterial authority. Perdue sets himself three principal tasks. First, he seeks to explain why the Qing dynasty ('+((–','') broke through the territorial barriers on the northern and western frontiers that had constrained their predecessors the Ming ('%+&–'+(() and indeed all previous Chinese dynasties. Second, he analyzes the administrative, economic, and cultural bases of Qing imperial governance in general and the dynamics of Xinjiang’s integration into the empire in particular. Third, he compares state building in the Qing domain with other early modern empires in both Inner Asia and Europe.

How the Qing Broke the Territorial Ceiling

I shall brie-y summarize Perdue’s $ndings in each of these areas and then comment on, and in so doing attempt some ampli$cations to, his compara-tive theses. The Ming dynasty came to power as a Chinese-led “morally revo-lutionary movement” (Dardess ',,(: #&', #&+) determined to expel the Mongol Yuan dynasty, which had ruled all of China since '!),. Once the Mongols had been forced back into the steppe, the Ming sought to forestall fresh threats from that quarter through a combination of strategies, includ-ing government-supervised trade with the nomads, diplomacy designed to exploit Mongol tribal divisions, and aggressive military campaigns to '((,, followed thereafter by an increasingly defensive policy, centered on the Great Wall, that lasted to the dynasty’s end. Some of these elements the Qing later copied, but on the whole Ming in-uence over the steppe remained far weaker than that of the Qing (Perdue !""#: #'–,%). For one thing, the Ming’s Chinese ethnicity in general and their origins in South China in particular isolated them from the political environ-ment of the steppe. This made it di.cult to manipulate frontier politics and denied them easy access to cavalry allies who might compensate for China’s chronic insu.ciency of quality horses. At the same time, China’s economy in northern frontier areas remained too poorly commercialized to permit either the e.cient purchase of military horses from the steppe or the reli-

The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors !&%

able provision of grain and cloth to frontier garrisons. The Ming also lacked adequate tools of communication and administration to control nomadic and semiagrarian areas beyond the zone of Chinese agricultural settlement. Finally, the fact that virtually all of Inner Asia—including most of modern-day Outer and Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Manchuria, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan—lay beyond the control of agrarian-based authorities meant that, even in the event of defeat, the Mongols could retreat into the far steppe without fear of encirclement. In the event, overburdened, ill-supplied Ming garrisons in the northwest grew increasingly feeble and demoralized. Pre-occupied with these troubles, with the Japanese invasion of Korea, with fear of Mongol resurgence, and with debilitating $scal and factional issues in the capital, the Ming failed to prevent the ecologically mixed peoples of central Manchuria from building an independent Sinic-style state beyond the Great Wall. It was of course this newly risen Manchu state that founded the Qing dynasty and $nally swallowed the Ming in '+((. To preempt the rise of another Inner Asian military confederation such as they themselves represented, the Qing devoted considerable resources and energy to pacifying their Inner Asian (or as Perdue [!""#: #'&–!%] terms it, Central Eurasian) frontier. In pursuit of this task, the Qing, Perdue argues, had four major advantages that were the reverse of Ming weaknesses. First, as seminomadic peoples from beyond the wall, they boasted stronger military traditions than the Ming and closer religious and cultural ties to the Mongols. The high cost of land transport and China’s weak cavalry meant that imperial power could extend beyond the Great Wall only with the help of Mongol horsemen. These allies the Qing won over through an adroit mix of religious patronage, marriage alliances, diplomacy, economic lures, and force. Second, growing commercialization of the Chinese economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries let the Qing purchase grain and cloth on the markets of Northwest China and ship them out to Xinjiang more easily than the Ming. And when prices in the northwest rose sharply, the civilian granary system, another mid-Qing innovation, relieved local distress. Third, the new granary system was itself symptomatic of a general increase (both secular and cyclic) in administrative e.ciency, which enhanced central authority and allowed the new dynasty to respond more rapidly to frontier threats. In the north and northwest the Qing steadily improved logistics and communications; demar-cated territories and imposed novel constraints on tribal mobility; deployed Jesuit cartography and European-style artillery to good e*ect; and mobi-

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lized grain, horses, soldiers, and weapons with unprecedented alacrity. To strengthen in-uence over the periphery, the Qing also placed non-Chinese territories under Manchu o.cials outside the regular civil service, stream-lined reporting procedures, and concentrated decision making at $rst in the “inner court” and later in the Grand Council, both dominated by Manchus rather than Chinese. Fourth, Qing expansion bene$ted from simultaneous Russian conquests in Inner Asia. As Russia and China, who signed frontier treaties in '+&, and ')!), divided the steppe between themselves, the space for nomad maneu-ver contracted. Henceforth refugees and tribespeople would be $xed as sub-jects of either Russia or China. For three generations the western Mongols or Zunghars strove with astounding energy and imagination to construct an independent empire, but, trapped between the Qing hammer and Romanov anvil, their project $nally collapsed in the ')#"s. For their part, the Russians were motivated not only by a strategic concern to protect their own expand-ing domain but by the lure of the China market, and without Chinese com-mercial prosperity, this Sino-Russian condominium might not have materi-alized (Perdue !""#: '+'–)%, !''–!)). Qing victories over the Zunghars in what is now northern Xinjiang were followed by campaigns that brought a large part of the Turkic oasis-dwelling population of southern Xinjiang under imperial control. In response to a Zunghar invasion, the Qing also established a protectorate over Tibet in ')!", reinforced in ')#". These areas, together with their original Man-churian homeland, trans-Amur and trans-Ussuri areas, Taiwan, Qinghai, and China proper, comprised an imperial territory more than twice as large as that of the Ming. By '))# the Qing therefore could boast something no previous dynasty had achieved: ending the two-millennia threat to China from the Inner Asian steppe and joining Inner Asia and China proper in a stable, uni$ed polity (ibid.: ##')./

Integrating the Realm

These Inner Asian acquisitions were governed relatively lightly, with con-siderable deference to local custom, at least initially. Perdue shows, for example, that in Xinjiang three civil administrative structures, organized on an ethnic-cum-territorial basis, operated in the late ')""s: one Chinese, employing Chinese jurisdictions, law, and tax obligations; another of Mongo-

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lian origin, with distinctive nomenclature and legal procedures; and a third of Turkic origin that followed Islamic jurisprudence and property rights (ibid.: %%&–(!). Yet Perdue also makes clear that territorial conquest both anticipated and re-ected a persistent, if lurching, movement toward administrative integration. Mongol tribes were allotted lands whose $xed boundaries con-trasted with the open pastures and untrammeled mobility of preconquest times. At any given moment we $nd in the northwest and Xinjiang a gradient of administrative structures that became progressively less subject to Inner Asian custom and more comparable to administration in China proper as one moved from west to east. With time, moreover, conventions in the west approximated ever more closely those farther east. Thus civil administra-tion in Gansu paved the way for the administrative incorporation of Qinghai, which paved the way to the incorporation of Xinjiang, which became a full--edged Chinese province in '&&(. Administrative consolidation in Xinjiang bene$ted from o.cial e*orts at agrarian and commercial development. These projects sought simulta-neously to supply local garrisons, to relieve population pressure in impov-erished areas of Northwest China near Xinjiang, and—most critically—to tie Xinjiang more $rmly to the center by constructing a new settler society from interior migrants. Frontier security and garrison self-su.ciency, not economic growth per se, were the primary goals. Colonization began with Manchu and Chinese military colonists, followed by criminals exiled from the interior, followed by state-subsidized civilian Chinese settlers, followed by Muslim settlers from southern Xinjiang itself. Agrarian intensi$cation in turn attracted commercial, industrial, and mining enterprises, the latter under military control (ibid.: %%+–#)). Perdue is careful not to overstate the success of these centralizing projects. The cultural and social heterogeneity of Xinjiang immigrants and con-icts between Manchu and Mongol landowners and Chinese tenants, and between Muslims and non-Muslims, created social tensions that only increased as imperial subsidies for the territory declined in the nineteenth century. Nor should we imagine even during the high Qing that the Manchus sought a Chinese cultural template for all peoples within their diverse realm. On the contrary, Perdue emphasizes, as a non-Chinese conquest elite deeply committed to preserving the system of ethnic privilege on which their entire enterprise depended, they promoted a supraethnic imperial ideology calcu-

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lated to appeal to Tibetan, Mongolian, Muslim, Manchurian, and Chinese constituencies. Perdue analyzes the language and semiotics of Qing edicts and of multilingual stone tablets erected by the Qing in Beijing and key sites in Xinjiang to commemorate historical victories in Inner Asia. Despite a cer-tain crossover from one cultural tradition to another, with Manchu often serving as the bridge, Qing pronouncements spoke to di*erent traditions; as such, they deliberately sought to reinscribe di*erences between Chinese and non-Chinese traditions (ibid.: '!!–!,, %%&, (%"–%+, ()%–)+, #(!). Yet by implanting Chinese-style administration on the frontier, by pro-moting Chinese migration to the northwest, and by fostering commercial and economic exchange, the Qing did in fact strengthen ties between minority populations on the imperial periphery and the overwhelmingly Chinese population of the old Ming ecumene. Moreover, as Perdue (ibid.: (!+–!), #(') acknowledges and as others also have demonstrated, in Taiwan and along much of China’s southern frontiers two intertwined pressures pushed toward ethnic integration far more persistently than in Xinjiang, Qinghai, or Mongolia (see also Lombard-Salmon ',)!; Shepherd ',,%; Herman ',,); Andrade !""'; Rowe !""': %'+–'), (')–!+, ((&; Sutton !""%). On the one hand, o.cials strove periodically to Sinicize non-Chinese. Again, this impulse could con-ict with fear of instability and with Manchu sensitivity to safeguard ethnic di*erence. But the greater agricultural potential of south-ern regions compared to Inner Asia, their proximity to large populations of land-hungry Chinese, the fact that southern tribes (unlike the Mongols) o*ered the Qing no military bene$t, and the “raw” (barbarian) nature of southern tribal culture led o.cials to try to “cook” such groups by sponsor-ing Chinese agricultural techniques and schools and pressuring tribal elites to adopt Chinese family norms, dress, and speech. On the other hand, from the early ')""s rising demand for mineral and agricultural products from the southern frontier joined massive Chinese immigration to create a sphere of social relations that was substantially beyond government control but that also eroded the autonomy of indigenes and encouraged various degrees of Sinicization. In these ways, both by design and by chance, the Qing empire presided over a marked expansion in the Chinese cultural sphere. These themes Perdue explicates with sophistication and grace. One of the most appealing attributes of the book is his deft alternation between nar-rative and analysis, which enriches both features while keeping the reader fully engaged. The book’s $ve parts exhibit this contrapuntal rhythm. Part

The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors !&)

One describes the development between c. '("" and '+)" of those “Cen-tral Eurasian states”—namely, Muscovy, the Zunghar state, and the Chinese empire—that between them would decide the fate of Inner Asia. For each realm Perdue considers both political factors and the inherent constraints of the steppe environment, transport, and trade. Part Two narrates with verve and arresting anecdote the increasingly intense diplomatic and especially military interaction of these three states from the accession of the ambitious Qing ruler Kangxi to the $nal collapse of the Zunghar state and the genocide of the Zunghar people. The third part backtracks to consider the material and administrative structures of the de$antly ambitious, if ill-fated, Zunghar state and of the mature Qing regime. Part Four considers the cultural per-formances and symbolic representations of Qing authority in cartography, frontier markers, and imperial historiography.

Eurasian Context

Finally, Part Five directly and other sections en passant place Qing expan-sion in a wider context both by critiquing theories of nomadic and Eurasian state formation and by demonstrating empirically that Qing achievements—territorial consolidation, frontier delimitation, administrative reform, the promotion of unifying symbols—characterized other Eurasian states, espe-cially nonmaritime powers, in the same period, c. '+#"–'&"" (Perdue !""#: #'%–(+, #+'–+!, plus #'–,%, '!!–!,, '+'–)%, %%#). Given the Zunghar’s limited resource base, Perdue’s principal compara-tive focus is Romanov Russia.0 Both the Qing and the Romanov states, he argues, were led by forest peoples in close contact with the steppe, and both were heavily in-uenced by Mongol contacts. From the early '+""s both knit together far--ung areas through a mix of military and institutional reform, trade, systematic colonization, cultural circulation, and a variety of military and technical advances. Both exhibited an eclectic, a pragmatic, and, in the case of China, a somewhat counterintuitive openness to external models and sources of power (this was also a notable feature of Zunghar state build-ing). Both Qing and Romanov pyramided the advantages of settled agrarian society to pacify nomadic populations that historically preyed on agricultur-alists; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, therefore, both reversed the momentum of steppe-sown interactions since at least the thirteenth cen-tury. Conquests in Inner Asia and, in the case of Russia, Siberia made the

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Qing and Romanov domains the largest empires in eighteenth-century Eur-asia. And by denying nomads sanctuary—by $xing, enumerating, taxing, and co-opting those hitherto untamed populations on their mutual interface—the two imperial projects, I already suggested, powerfully reinforced one another. In e*ect, Russians and Manchus divided Inner Asia between them. Perdue also casts his gaze to the west, albeit more cursorily than with Russia. Building on the theoretical insights of Immanuel Wallerstein, Charles Tilly, R. Bin Wong, and others, Perdue suggests that similar chronologies and processes of incorporation, centralization, and assimilation de$ned Qing and western European state formation. Thus he draws attention to the fruc-tifying e*ects of international trade, in particular to rising world stocks of silver bullion; to the dissemination of European-style $rearms and cartogra-phy; and to a shared imperial logic that placed a premium on routinization, cultural standardization, and symbolic statement. Particularly arresting are his comparisons of cartography in China, western and central Europe, and the Zunghar state and his discussion of Jesuits and other Europeans, includ-ing Swedish prisoners, as agents of technical di*usion. Yet as he explores analogies, the empirical richness of his material and his sensitivity to mul-tiple independent sources of power leave him skeptical of both Wallerstein’s monocausal e*ort to explain Eurasian coordination in terms of Eurocentric trade -ows and Tilly’s attempt to segregate coercion-rich and capital-rich paths of state development (Perdue !""#: #!#–!,).

Extending Perdue’s Parallels Geographically and Chronologically

What I propose to do in the remainder of this essay, however schematically, is both to extend Perdue’s parallels between China and other sectors of Eur-asia and to suggest some ways China remained distinct from other sectors of Eurasia. First, the parallels. I would argue that the analogies Perdue explicates can be extended both geographically and chronologically. Geographically, my work on the chief states of mainland Southeast Asia and my reading of sec-ondary works, not only on Russia but also on France and Japan, suggest that between '+#" and '&#" all these realms exhibited an accelerating tendency toward territorial consolidation, administrative centralization, and cultural integration (see Lieberman !""% and forthcoming). Administrative reform

The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors !&,

a*ected not only frontier regions, on which Perdue focuses, but interior provinces. In each realm we $nd a sustained tendency for outlying zones to assimilate to the status of intermediate provinces, for intermediate provinces to assume characteristics of the closely governed core, and for administration in the core to grow more routinized and e.cient (although in Qing China, it must be said, this last movement came up against unique problems of demo-graphic scale). In each realm, cultural integration was both horizontal—that is, outlying zones entered into more sustained dialogue with capital norms—and vertical, whereby elite and popular conventions in-uenced one another more directly. At a workable level of abstraction, moreover, the dynamics of political and cultural integration in the chief realms of mainland Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, and Qing China were comparable. In essence, I would argue, in each polity between c. '+#" and '&#" four phenomena—expansion of material resources, new cultural currents, intensifying interstate competition, and diverse state interventions—combined to strengthen privileged cores at the expense of outlying areas. Each dynamic had a certain autonomy, but all four constantly reinforced and modi$ed one another. Material expansion, under which rubric I include demographic and agrarian growth and Smithian specialization as well as the importation of $rearms, magni$ed the physical superiority of emergent cores over less favored districts. This it did in two ways: (') by providing core regions—the Irrawaddy lowlands, the lower Chaophraya basin, the Vietnamese low-lands, the Volga-Oka inter-uve, the Paris basin, the Kinai-Kanto axis, and coastal, riverine, and lowland China—with a growing absolute superiority in manpower and wealth and (!) by facilitating via monetization the cen-tralized extraction and disbursement of resources. In most realms we thus $nd a long-term movement from land grants to stipends and from in-kind exactions and labor services to cash taxation (Tokugawa Japan was a par-tial exception). At the same time, by boosting popular literacy, multiplying market linkages, speeding the circulation of texts and cultural agents, and encouraging frontier colonization, economic growth tended to enhance the cultural in-uence of imperial centers at the expense of outlying regions. Yet these long-term bene$ts of economic growth should not blind us to the fact that in the short term, whether by stoking in-ation or by intensifying social and regional resentments, growth could be severely dislocative. New cultural currents refer to both the local generation of religious or

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cultic reform and the dissemination of languages, ethnicities, religious motifs, and other symbolic practices promulgated by imperial centers. Religious or cultic reform strengthened royal authority ideologically, by idealizing the throne as the font of morality and bulwark against anarchy, and practically, by creating clerical-led infrastructures of social governance: schools, law codes, community rituals, charities, and models of family organization. By attempting to render rural life more literate and civilized, such infrastruc-tures compensated for the chronically meager cadre of royal o.cials on the local level. As with Chinese Neo-Confucianism, religious or cultic reform also sought to promote an ethic of self-discipline, moral obligation, and emo-tional mastery that provided a psychological underpinning for paci$cation. In these ways, notwithstanding obvious di*erences in regulatory ambition and practical success, the social penetration of Neo-Confucian, Theravada, Russian Orthodox, and Counter-Reformation doctrines recalls those Cal-vinist transformations—the “disciplinary revolution”—that Philip Gorski (!""%) claims was critical to the growth of state power in parts of north-western Europe between '##" and ')#". The analogy holds even if, as seems probable, cultic reform in China, Southeast Asia, Russia, Catholic Europe, and Japan was less psychologically intrusive and socially coercive than its Calvinist counterpart. By enhancing identi$cation with the throne, the dis-semination of o.cially sanctioned written or spoken languages, ethnicities, aesthetic styles, and public rituals produced similar integrative pressures. Circulation proceeded both through diverse forms of o.cial patronage and through the growth of popular literacy, demotic literatures, and new com-mercial circuits. As noted, these integrative e*ects were both horizontal, as o.cial norms radiated from capital regions to outlying provinces, and ver-tical, as practices $ltered down (and in the process were modi$ed) from the elite to the popular strata. As states, nourished by these economic and cultural forces, became more powerful, warfare—more or less constantly in mainland Southeast Asia and Europe and for more limited periods in Japan and China—grew in scale, duration, and expense. Interstate wars and frontier con-icts tended to reinforce the appeal of capital cultures by increasing popular dependence on the throne and identi$cation with its welfare. Yet warfare also placed each state’s $scal and administrative system under growing strain. Likewise, by eliminating bu*er states and incorporating ever more distant principalities, territorial expansion could amplify the twin dan-

The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors !,'

gers of external invasion and provincial rebellion. Across Eurasia, states that survived these Darwinian pressures were obliged to upgrade their military forces, to develop new provincial controls and administrative procedures, to exalt cultural symbols emblematic of the state, to improve resource exaction, and to expand their economic and manpower base. Qing support for settle-ment and economic intensi$cation in Xinjiang was representative of a much broader set of state initiatives. Meanwhile, generally independent of policy and often unnoticed, the sheer growth of the state tended to cut commercial transaction costs by reducing domestic disorder, suppressing tolls, standard-izing weights and currency, enlarging legal jurisdictions, and concentrating market demand in the capital and provincial towns. In these ways, albeit to di*erent degrees and in highly distinctive institutional contexts, state aggrandizement and economic expansion in Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, and China proved mutually reinforcing. Programs of administrative and eco-nomic reorganization commonly responded to escalating warfare or political breakdowns precipitated by war. Administrative integration thus had both a secular and a cyclic dimension. What is more, to extend the argument, the speci$c chronology of linear and cyclic construction that we $nd in China correlated remarkably well with patterns in Southeast Asia and Europe and, less consistently, in Japan. It is well known that the Qing represented the last in a series of administrative (or dynastic) cycles starting with the Qin-Han uni$cation in the third century BCE. As political, cultural, and commercial ties between subregions grew tighter, as imperial integration grew more normative, the state grew more stable, and successive interregnums tended to become both shorter and less institutionally and culturally disruptive. Although one can debate speci$c dates, I submit that China’s $rst major imperial interregnum, the so-called Age of Division following the e*ective Han collapse in ',", lasted some %,, years. The second, from the onset of severe Tang debility to the Song recon-quest of the south, lasted roughly '', years. The third, from the collapse of the Northern Song to the Yuan conquest of the south, was '#! years. The fourth, from the outbreak of anti-Yuan revolts to Ming accession, was some ') years, as was the $fth, from the mushrooming of anti-Ming rebellions to the Manchu conquest of Yunnan. The ratio of major Chinese imperial interregnums therefore was in the order of %,,:'',:'#!:'):'). In mainland Southeast Asia and northern Europe progressive consolidation began over ',""" years later than in China. But the same pattern of decreasingly severe

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and prolonged interregnums—or conversely, ever more secure integration—obtained. Thus in Burma, for example, the ratio of the $rst three inter-regnums was !#!:'(:#. In France the $rst interregnum, from Carolingian debility to early Capetian vigor, lasted some !!" years; the second, corre-sponding to the Hundred Years’ War, lasted ''+ years; the third, the Wars of Religion, lasted %+ years; and the fourth, severe disorders associated with the French Revolution, lasted less than ! years. In Russia, which had only two genuine interregnums (those between Kiev’s collapse and Muscovite regen-eration and between the onset and conclusion of the Time of Troubles), they lasted !'" and '# years, respectively. Consider $nally that between c. &"" and '&"" periods of economic-cum-political vigor were coordinated across these far--ung sectors of Eurasia. Such synchronization re-ected the combined e*ects of hemispheric climate rhythms; pan-Eurasian disease regimens; intensifying long-distance trade, including rising international bullion -ows; Mongol in-uences; the coordi-nated impact of European $rearms; and parallel institutional experiments. Furthermore, as global commercial links grew more rami$ed, the $t between distant regions grew more precise. For all or part of the period between c. ,#" and '%""—which saw unusually propitious agrarian conditions (in-uenced in part by the Medieval Climate Anomaly), an associated expansion in long-distance trade, and social transformations prompted by rapid growth—main-land Southeast Asia, the future territories of France and Russia, and China all experienced what by local standards was unprecedented demographic and economic vigor. In each case such growth spurred novel e*orts at political integration. Thus between c. ,#" and '%"" we $nd in Southeast Asia the charter states of Pagan, Angkor, and Dai Viet, with their remarkable temple complexes; in Europe, the High Middle Ages and Capetian state building; in Russia, rapid agrarian settlement, new trade links, and the Kievan federation; and in China, the $rst commercial revolution, the Song Neo-Confucian revo-lution, and the creation of an unprecedentedly bureaucratic, examinations-oriented government. All these regions su*ered major economic and politi-cal disorders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—the result of direct and indirect Mongol mediations combined with the strains of unsustainable growth—which in every case yielded to a new phase of economic and politi-cal vigor starting in the late '(""s or early '#""s. After another round of crises (albeit relatively mild) at various points between '#+" and '+#", we $nd a $nal phase of economic expansion and political vigor extending from the early ')""s well into the nineteenth century.

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Of course, judged in absolute terms, the power capacities of these varied polities di*ered enormously, but each late-eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century state represented the pinnacle of local achievement. Judged in terms of market integration and demographic capacity, the same may be said of local economic systems. These characterizations $t Tokugawa Japan no less well than its European, Chinese, and Southeast Asian counterparts. In other words, Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, Restored Toungoo/Konbaung Burma, Late Ayudhya/Chakri Siam, Nguyen Vietnam, Romanov Russia, and Bour-bon France all may be seen as species within the same early modern genus.

Four Di!erences between Early Modern China and the Protected Rimlands of Eurasia

These, then, are potentially signi$cant parallels between China and other sec-tors of Eurasia. I turn now to consider four categorical distinctions between China, on the one hand, and sectors of Eurasia that I term the “protected rimlands,” on the other. The criteria I am about to employ hardly exhaust the possibilities for intra-Eurasian classi$cation—using other perfectly valid indices, one could produce no less insightful but very di*erent alignments—but these measures do speak to what I consider major di*erences in political ethos, political structure, and the chronology of state formation. The $rst and most basic di*erence concerns the role of Inner Asian con-quest elites. In interpreting the Qing, Perdue (!""#: #(!–(%) distinguishes between the so-called Altaic school and the Eurasian Similarity school. The former stresses the Qing’s Inner Asian origins, the Qing’s cultural and ethnic distance from the host population, and the ensuing gap between the Qing and the Chinese Ming dynasties. The second school emphasizes the Qing debt to Chinese civilization, joins the Ming and Qing together in a single his-torical period often termed “early modern” or “late imperial,” and focuses on long-term processes of economic and cultural development in the Chi-nese imperial core that resembled processes elsewhere in agrarian Eurasia. Some of these convergences I have just sought to explicate. Now, however, I would revisit the Altaic school and place it in a wider context. What principally distinguished China during the late $rst and most of the second millennia from mainland Southeast Asia, western and northern Europe, and Japan, I submit, was that in China alone political integration depended to a considerable degree on Inner Asian conquest elites. In '!), the Mongols reunited North and South China, which had been severed since

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the late ninth or early tenth century, albeit in part by earlier Inner Asian inva-sions. Without the Mongols, we cannot assume that North and South China, which Marco Polo regarded as separate countries, would have come together again. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is Perdue’s central thesis, the Manchus again transformed China’s condition by joining China proper with vast Inner Asian regions to form a domain over twice as large as that of the Ming. Furthermore, although or because the Manchus, lacking an independent sophisticated literate tradition, copied Ming precedents whole-sale, they brought Chinese administration to unprecedented levels of e.-ciency—not least because, as an alien conquest elite, they were determined to show skeptical literati that they could operate Chinese systems better than the Chinese themselves. In cultural and ethnic terms as well, Inner Asian rule in China carried peculiar signatures that testi$ed to the insecurity of small conquest elites. Although, as just noted, the Manchus sought to demonstrate their Confu-cian bona $des, like the Khitans, Jurchen, and Mongols before them, they also sought a separate authority that Mark C. Elliott (!""': !–&, ,&–'"', ''+–')) terms “ethnic sovereignty” or “Manchu apartheid.” Less than ' per-cent as numerous as their Chinese subjects, the Manchus strove to maintain their cohesion, hence domination, by monopolizing key positions, by instill-ing fear, by allying with other non-Chinese populations, and by maintaining strict legal, residential, institutional—in short, ethnic—distinctions between themselves and the Chinese. Within the empire at large, moreover, as Perdue argues, they sought to balance Chinese in-uence by appealing to distinctive non-Chinese Inner Asian regional cultures. This policy, far less Sinocentric than Ming or Song policy and rooted in speci$cally Turco-Mongol tradi-tions, reduced China to one of several imperial audiences and placed the Qing ruler at the apex of a genuinely universal, multiethnic empire in which if any ethnicity was privileged, it was not Chinese but Manchu. By contrast, in western Europe, mainland Southeast Asia, and Japan the question of sustained Inner Asian domination never arose. These Eurasian rimlands were “protected” insofar as distance, inadequate pasture, malarial climate, or oceans insulated them against Inner Asian occupation. Even in Russia, which paid tribute to Mongol-Tatars from '!(" to the mid-'(""s and which borrowed substantially from Inner Asian military and adminis-trative traditions, the Mongol-Tatars never attempted direct rule. Authority therefore remained in the hands of Russian princes, whose ethnic, linguis-

The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors !,#

tic, social, and religious identi$cation with the population they ruled was far more extensive than that of Inner Asians in areas that they subjected to garrisons and settlement. In the fourteenth and early $fteenth centuries, at the height of Mongol-Tatar in-uence, Muscovy portrayed itself proudly and explicitly as an Orthodox Christian polity. In any case, in contrast to China, where Inner Asian in-uence increased throughout the second millennium, in Russia it receded sharply after '(#". Thereafter, until the Petrine Revolu-tion of the early ')""s, cultural and religious bonds between the Muscovite elite, on the one hand, and Russian peasants and townspeople, on the other, only deepened. Russia never emulated the Qing attempt to balance multiple Inner Asian constituencies in a universal, supraconfessional domain. Even under Peter and Catherine—the latter of whom used Enlightenment notions of unilinear development to place Russian Christians at the apex of human evolution—the court continued to champion Orthodox religion and Great Russian ethnicity as symbols and instruments of domination over Muslims and pagans in Siberia and the steppe (de Madariaga ',&'; Khodarkovsky ',,!, !""!). But if it di*ered in these respects from Russia and other protected rim-lands, in its exposure to growing Inner Asian political in-uence and its sub-jection to Inner Asian conquest elites China had much in common with Safa-vid Iran, Mughal South Asia, and the Ottoman lands, all of which I term the “exposed zone” of Eurasia. This is not to claim, invoking anachronistic nationalist views, that political authority in the exposed zone was somehow less legitimate or stable than in the protected rimlands. On the contrary, in every case, conquest elites rendered empire more powerful, more secure, more e.cient than indigenous rule. But this analysis does suggest that in the exposed zone alone warrior elites from Inner Asia became the chief political agents of early modernity. A second major di*erence between China and the protected rimlands, a di*erence I can only mention in passing, was that in China, as in other sec-tors of the exposed zone, namely, North India, the Fertile Crescent, and the eastern Mediterranean, imperial state formation began far earlier than in the protected rimlands. As a novel political uni$cation that provided a territorial and civilizational charter for all subsequent generations, the Qin-Han uni-$cation in the late third century BCE resembled the foundation of imperial Pagan (c. '""" CE), imperial Angkor (c. &""), independent Dai Viet (,%,), the Kievan federation (c. ,#"), the Carolingian empire (c. )#"), and ritsuryo

!,+ Social Science History

Japan (c. )#"). By these lights, Chinese political uni$cation antedated com-parable developments in the protected rimlands by some ,)" to ',!!" years. Imperial precocity and external vulnerability in the exposed zone may have been linked insofar as the same physical openness that permitted Inner Asian conquest also favored the early and unimpeded circulation of stimuli from other Eurasian cores. In North China as in North India and the Fertile Crescent, early imperial projects climaxed long periods of economic intensi-$cation and political experiment that bene$ted from the importation of met-allurgy, new crops and domestic animals, modes of warfare, and (more debat-able in China) concepts of writing from other Eurasian cores. Conversely, for many centuries the same relative isolation that would later protect them against Inner Asian military incursions tended to insulate northern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Japan from cultural and material aids to state formation. That is, the protected rimlands had less direct access to the chief east-west routes of Eurasian cross-fertilization. However, once political consolida-tion in the protected rimlands did get under way in the late $rst millen-nium, because these areas could access prepackaged, demonstrably success-ful religio-political (Hindu-Buddhist, Confucian, Christian) and technical complexes (including writing), state formation typically proceeded far more rapidly than in older Eurasian cores, which in the absence of comparable blueprints had moved forward by laborious trial and error (Higham ',&,: chaps. (–#; Diamond ',,): %!,–%" and pts. !–( passim; Piggott ',,); Mair ',,&, ': (–((, ,(–''%, !!!–%+, and !: +"(–(%; Puett ',,&: +,,–)'#; Maisels ',,,: chaps. %–+; Hansen !""": %,, (", +", ')%; Di Cosmo !""!: chaps. ', !; Cook !""%: '%!–%(, '(&–#+, '),–&', !'"–',, !+)–+&; McNeill and McNeill !""%: ('–&', '!'; Scarre and Fagan !""%: chaps. '–+; Trigger !""%).1 Along with Inner Asian conquest and early state formation, a third fea-ture distinguishing China from the protected zone of Eurasia was the enor-mous size of China’s imperial territories, on a scale comparable to that of the Mughal and Ottoman realms, and of China’s population, which was in the same order of magnitude as that of Mughal India but far larger than that in any protected-zone realm under review. Enormous size and population in turn imposed limits on progressive centralization stricter than in most protected-zone realms. Admittedly, Russia, which I include in the protected zone, ruled a larger territory than the Qing, but Russia’s population ((' mil-lion in '),#) was only about a ninth that of China (%#" million) and was concentrated in a sector of the empire appreciably smaller than China proper

The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors !,)

(cf. Hartley ',,,: ''–'!; Lee et al. !""!: +"", table '). In e*ect, Russia faced problems of coordination and control on a scale not radically di*erent from those of France and Japan (with populations in '&"" of !, million to %' mil-lion each) but considerably less daunting than those of Mughal India (with perhaps '," million) and Qing China. In part, the Mughal and Qing ability to dominate extensive but densely populated territories re-ected the power of Inner Asian military forces, par-ticularly cavalry. In part, it re-ected the openness of the North China and Indo-Gangetic plains, whose internal divisions were less sharp than those that hemmed in Japan, France, and the three chief Southeast Asian realms. More particularly, in China the size and recurrent coalescence of empire re-ected the bene$ts of an e.cient system of interregional water transport, including the Grand Canal, and the marvelous power of three nonpareil instruments of politico-cultural integration: (') a nonalphabetic, logographic script that permitted written communication among literati with di*erent tongues and that simultaneously inhibited the phonetic expression of regional languages; (!) an intensely prescriptive doctrine of sociopolitical organization, namely, Confucianism; (%) civil service examinations that, along with a standard-ized examination curriculum, enmeshed local literati in expressly supralocal thought systems. Given the dispersal of a vast population over extensive territories and given preindustrial limits on communication and transport, it is hardly sur-prising that both Indian and Chinese empires faced unusually daunting chal-lenges to stability and local penetration. Although over the long term Indian empires tended to grow larger and more powerful, political evolution on the Indian subcontinent was far less continuous than in protected-zone states. For much of its history, in fact, South Asia oscillated between relatively short-lived periods of modest uni$cation and long eras of polycentrism that recall the condition of Europe at large. In China—by virtue of the Grand Canal and the cultural features just mentioned—continuities between successive empires were far more pro-nounced than in South Asia, interregnums were shorter, elite culture was far more uni$ed, and regional literary cultures were conspicuously anemic, if not altogether absent. Yet in contrast to medium-scale protected-zone states in Europe and mainland Southeast Asia, in all of which the ratio of appointed o.cials to subjects grew dramatically between '""" and '&"", China dur-ing the same period was obliged by size and population to reduce that ratio

!,& Social Science History

sharply, to devolve societal management from o.cials to local elites, and to compensate with a greater emphasis on cultural instruments of control and on ad hoc understandings between o.cials, subbureaucrats, and wealthy local gentry. This is not to conclude that by some absolute standard levels of local control and extraction in Burma and Siam in '&"" necessarily exceeded those in Qing China. But I do claim that Burma and Siam, with small populations and modest domains, had yet to exhaust the potential of preindustrial admin-istrative technologies, whereas China probably reached those limits as early as the Southern Song (''!)–'!),). Thereafter, for the bureaucracy to have expanded at the same rate as the Chinese population would have exceeded the center’s capacity for administrative coordination and control, threaten-ing systemic breakdown. During the Qing, moreover, such expansion, which perforce would have relied overwhelmingly on the Chinese, would have upset the ethnic balance within the bureaucracy between Manchus and Chinese. In fact, the Qing’s modest provincial infrastructure joined rapid population growth to weaken its ability to contain elite activism and mounting social pressures even before the European challenge of the '&("s.2 This in turn relates to the fourth and $nal distinction between China and most protected rimlands, namely, the relative weakness of military impera-tives to state formation in China.3 To be sure, as Joanna Waley-Cohen (!""%: %!(–#") has argued, the historiographical tendency to downplay Chinese militarism and to emphasize the civilian over the military ethos can be over-drawn. As I have already suggested, threats from the northern frontier domi-nated strategic thinking during the Song (,+"–'!),) and the Ming (see also Johnston ',,# and Lorge !""#). And for the better part of &" years during the Qing, Perdue has emphasized, Inner Asian campaigns absorbed imperial resources and energies. After '))', however, such pressures ended.4 More-over, even at their height, I would argue, military competition remained less critical to policy and administration in China (and possibly Mughal India) than in Europe or mainland Southeast Asia, where early modern states were locked in more or less permanent competition with rivals of comparable size and power and where the common price for failure was extinction à la Cam-bodia and Poland. In other words, although the Qing and the Mughals fought refractory frontier states and fretted from time to time about tribal inroads, their ability, especially in the case of the Qing, to dominate vast subcontinen-tal spaces meant that, after initial conquests, they rarely faced foes whose latest techniques they had to master as the price of survival. Qing China,

The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors !,,

rather more than Mughal India and in far sharper contrast to Southeast Asian and European states, was a world unto itself. Accordingly, in China the limited role of interstate competition reduced pressures for improvements in military technology—$rearms and related systems of supply and organi-zation made little progress after ')""—and, more critically, for $scal maxi-mization. Early Ming and Qing emperors set a low ceiling on the land tax, the chief impost, that was honored, despite countervailing pressures, for the remainder of each dynasty. In truth, this ideology-cum-practice of $scal self-limitation may have been less luxury than necessity. For if we accept the above proposition that size mandated an unusual level of gentry-led $scal and administrative autonomy, then to have attempted to extract taxes on the same scale as Euro-pean states well might have imperiled the imperial-gentry alliance in key regions. By best estimates, the proportion of national wealth collected in taxation by the central government in late-eighteenth-century China was only !+–(" percent of that collected in eighteenth-century France, England, or Russia.5 Along with vast size and deep-seated Qing suspicion of anti-Manchu sentiment among their Chinese subjects, the absence before '&(" of exter-nal threats also reduced the spur to protonational mobilization and state-sanctioned politicized ethnicity that became ever more prominent not only in European states but in Burma, Siam, and Vietnam between '+"" and '&%". So too, in contrast again to western Europe—though, in this case, not Southeast Asia—China lacked a public sphere in which patriotic opinion could freely critique economic and political institutions in the name of national competi-tiveness and e.ciency (see Wakeman ',&+; Huang ',,%; Wong ',,%: )–(,). In sum, if, as Perdue shows, state formation in Qing China exhibited a variety of intriguing similarities to trends in Russia and other parts of Europe, in other no less critical dimensions China’s political experience was reason-ably distinct.

Notes

' Of course, the Yuan had attempted the same feat, but their success was short-lived.! Russian-Qing comparisons are found in Parts One and Five.% Note too the observation that Mongols entered the Mideast along ancient trade

routes leading from Iraq to Inner Asia (Abu-Lughod ',&,: '().

%"" Social Science History

( On the intersection of cyclic and secular pressures, see Skinner ',)), whose thesis of secular devolution has been quali$ed but not rejected by subsequent research; Will and Wong ',,': chap. (; and Han !""#. On the evolution of Chinese central and provincial administration, in addition to Perdue, I rely on Hucker ',+,; McKnight ',)'; Huang ',)(; Hymes ',&+; Liu ',,"; Bartlett ',,'; Esherick and Rankin ',,%: pts. '–!; Elman and Woodside ',,(: pt. !; Cha*ee ',,#; Wong ',,); Bossler ',,&; Rawski ',,&; Mote ',,,; Buoye !"""; Elman !"""; Hansen !""": pt. %; Reed !"""; and Struve !""(.

# Japan was a protected rimland exception proving the rule insofar as weak military stimuli contributed to an exceptionally conservative pace of institutional change for most of Japanese history. Conversely, the period of most intense administrative and $scal experiment, namely, the Warring States period ('(+)–'+""), also was the era of most sustained military con-ict.

+ “After the mid-eighteenth century this dynamic changed. Now there were no autonomous armed rivals beyond the reach of imperial control” (Perdue !""#: #!)).

) Eighteenth-century imperial taxes in China averaged some # percent of national income. Perkins ',+,: ')+ (“perhaps only # to + percent of total grain output” in ')#"); Feuerwerker ',&(: !,&–%") ((–& percent); Wakeman ',&+: !' (“less than six percent” in the late '&""s, including new customs revenues); Naquin and Rawski ',&): !', (“no doubt . . . less than # percent”); Vries !""!: ,# (“about $ve percent”). See too Rawski !""(: !'%–'&, whose best case for Qing tax increases looks quite threadbare; and Perdue !""#: %%). This compared to over '! percent in France, '!–'# percent in Russia, and over ', percent in Britain. See Mathias and O’Brien ',)+: +"&–'%; Kahan ',&#: %(# ('!–'# percent for Russia in the ')""s); Crouzet ',,%: +"; Hellie !""!: ++ (about '!.# percent for the '+#"s); and Vries !""!: ,(–,#. On imperial taxes, see too Huang ',+,; Fairbank and Goldman ',,!: '%!–%); Shepherd ',,%: #; Lee and Feng ',,,: '!&, arguing that heavy labor services compensated for light taxes; and Hsu !""": #,–+%.

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