TY - JOUR
AU - Baldanza, Kathlene
AB - Michael Szonyi’s book focuses on the ‘everyday politics’ deployed by members of military-registered households of the south-east coast of China to manage their relations with the Ming state (1368–1644). As indicated by the title, Szonyi’s work complements James Scott’s influential 2009 study, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Instead of analysing methods of evasion and resistance to state power, as Scott does, Szonyi studies the more widespread methods of mediation, negotiation and optimisation. He also extends his period of study further back in time, making the case that pre-modern states, specifically Ming China, also sought to map territory and people to make them ‘legible’ in the fashion of modern states, though their technologies differed. The Ming dynasty implemented a military registration system that required each military household to provide a soldier for service, to be replaced in perpetuity. It was the family’s responsibility to designate the serving individual, creating some leeway for the way they chose to fulfil the requirement. The transition from Ming to Qing (1644–1911) rule did not entirely erase the influence of the Ming registration system. Although organisation of the military was transformed, at least in some places and time periods, the Ming military registration system continued to shape communities, lineage formation, and tax collection. Rather than write an institutional history of the military registration system, Szonyi focuses on the people affected by it. He has teased individual narratives out of genealogical records (including some held in private family collections), filling in the gaps with field work, oral history, government registers and official histories. He reveals the local and personal impact of decisions made at the centre and the strategies that families used to promote their own interests. In the process, he challenges common assumptions about Ming history, showing that common people were not merely at the mercy of an autocratic government or a commercialising economy, but had the space to negotiate the terms that governed their lives. Szonyi uses two phrases to capture the ways people worked the system to their own advantage: ‘everyday politics’ and ‘regulatory arbitrage’. The first refers to the kinds of actions people take in daily life to manage their relations with the state. The second refers to profiting from differences between two regulatory systems or between institutional regulations and the real life situation. Examples of both abound throughout. In the first case, families sometimes compensated a particular branch to take up the burden of military service on behalf of the larger lineage, or even paid an outside family to take over the responsibility. Once relocated to a garrison town, military families sought to create ties to the local community through marriage and the sponsorship of temples and schools. In the second case, to give just one example, military families sometimes treated land allotted to them by the state as private property that could be sold, and in other cases claimed it as inalienable patrimony whose profit belonged to them, even when the title no longer did. In contrast to the people of Scott’s anarchic upland Zomia, Szonyi’s subjects could not escape the state. Nor can we simply label their actions as resistance. They complied with, adjusted to, or contested state policies as the situation demanded; sometimes the informal institutions they established at the local level were even supportive of state goals. Szonyi provides vivid stories of specific families and localities: the temple uneasily shared between two gods; unrelated families joining in fictive lineages in order to be legible to the state and taxed appropriately; military officers teaming up with pirates to engage in smuggling; or military officers founding Confucian schools to build stronger ties with the local community. These are all examples of everyday politics: people strategising to improve their own lot, sometimes using the language of the state to reinforce their claims. Szonyi makes a series of important secondary arguments or suggestions. First, he challenges the idea that familism or the formation of strong lineages is a timeless element of Chinese culture. Strong lineage groups arose not in a vacuum of state power, but in response to specific policies. The military registration system unintentionally fostered lineage cohesion and the development of corporate estates. Rather than viewing maintenance of family ties over long distances as a cultural predisposition, we should see it as conditioned by state institutions. Soldiers stayed in touch with extended families in order to receive remittances, and families at the original site of registration maintained connections with the soldiers in order to identify the person fulfilling their labour obligation. Second, Szonyi suggests a link between Ming military families and China’s position in global trade networks. Although soldiers were posted to garrisons along the south-east coast in order to police and limit international trade, they ended up participating in smuggling and trade themselves. In fact, descendants of military households in Fujian were ‘among the first Chinese to settle abroad’ (p. 107), forming merchant communities across South-east Asia. They developed contractual solutions and corporate estates that were also useful in trade. Commercial development from the fifteenth century onwards has some connection then with the military household system. Third, he suggests that the complex ways Ming military families negotiated with the state may apply to other early modern states. He ventures a new definition of the early modern: a period when ‘new patterns of everyday politics’ were generated by people who wanted to be seen by the state on their own terms (p. 233). Szonyi’s narrative is clear and engaging; his arguments are persuasive. His book is a corrective to studies that take Ming autocracy for granted without looking to the grassroots. It provides a broadly applicable model of the way people managed their relations with the state with the greatest advantage to themselves and their families. © Oxford University Press 2019. All rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China, by Michael Szonyi
JF - The English Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ehr/cez158
DA - 2019-09-10
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-art-of-being-governed-everyday-politics-in-late-imperial-china-by-nGFaLTsysV
SP - 983
EP - 985
VL - 134
IS - 569
DP - DeepDyve
ER -