This monograph examines families registered as “military households” under the Ming dynasty. This status was part of a system intended to maintain a huge standing army while avoiding the drawbacks of other approaches common in large agrarian states, such as recruiting peasant soldiers and hiring mercenaries. But the book is not a study of the system, of its effectiveness as fiscal or military policy or of its evolution; rather, it examines how the constraints and opportunities of this status shaped families and their relationship with the imperial state.
Szonyi clearly but briefly explains the institution of military household registration, which inherited some features of its Yuan dynasty model. It was part of a broader system of classification according to which each household's obligations to the state were determined by its nominal status as artisan, military, commoner, and so forth. Registration made ordinary people visible to the state and facilitated the use of their material and labour resources. But it did not make these people transparent to the state, which interacted with them through categories that it created, which corresponded imperfectly to social realities.
One example of this disjuncture is the tension among the meanings of hu, “household”: the Ming state interacted with a society of hu, units with a variable number of members but a defined set of fiscal and labour obligation. Most of the time, each military hu had to provide one soldier to a particular unit. Since the requirement was to provide one soldier, regardless of the size of the pool, even as the patrilineal descent group grew multiple branches that did not cohabitate, these scores of people were registered as part of the same hu. This extended family group did not correspond to anyone's ordinary understanding of the “household” as a social unit – Szonyi distinguishes the latter as “families” rather than “households” – but was what the bureaucracy needed to identify the sources of its soldiers.
Families that fulfilled this obligation had to be conscious of the records the state maintained and went to great lengths to ensure that they were accurate (or served the family's interest). Szonyi recounts epic journeys across the empire whose main purpose was to update a government form. The expense involved suggests that the reward was huge. One benefit to maintaining classification as a military household was a reduced tax obligation, including exemption from some labour service. The potential cost, for men who might have to serve, was also extreme: the risks and deprivations of soldierly life.
Private efforts to correct inaccurate files are one of the many ways in which Ming subjects interfaced with their government in a relationship that frustrates simple state/society distinctions. These activities are part of what Szonyi calls “everyday politics,” meaning the ordinary activities through which people responded to, and made use of, state institutions. More particularly, they are the actions and strategies that are not perceived by the state as open resistance but through which people nonetheless attempt to optimize outcomes. This “art of being governed,” an apt nod to James Scott, was skilled work, sometimes involving ingenious strategies for making oneself or one's group pass muster. Szonyi excludes from the study acts of open resistance or disobedience, except where it affects the exercise of this art – notably, for military households, to find or replace a deserter.
Szonyi mines little-used sources, especially genealogies and records of court cases, to uncover families’ strategies for completing obligations while spreading the cost. These included rotation among branches of the extended “household” and payouts to the soldier. These arrangements were often formalized by contracts that were later enshrined in genealogies and in some cases upheld by officials when disputes led to lawsuits. Thus the Ming state seems to have been agnostic as to how its soldiers were chosen, which became an internal family matter. Families, likewise, approached this obligation with practical resignation rather than pride in military heritage or patriotic devotion.
This seemingly disaffective relationship does not mean that state and society have separate histories. Rather, the two interacted in complex but constrained ways. This analysis seems to build on studies of popular religion, such as Szonyi's own interventions in debates on late imperial religion, centring on distinctions between orthodoxy (standardized belief) and orthopraxy (proper action, especially in a ritual setting). There, the overarching question was about cultural integration: to what extent were values and beliefs shared across space and among social groups? This book asks parallel questions about structures of state power, finding beneath adherence to laws and regulations a range of strategies and actions.
The forms and lists of the bureaucracy were more than a permeable membrane between subject and state. Military service transformed families, and the state tried to manage these societal effects. For example, the Ming state tried to limit desertion by reconfiguring spatial relationships between soldiers’ families and their postings. Distant postings initially deterritorialized the soldier, making it difficult to run home, but on-the-ground practice and top-down policy led to the establishment of garrison-based branches of the family that could lose regular connections with the rest of their nominal household. These “hometown” families, or at least the ones Szonyi examines, nonetheless sought to maintain the benefits of military status, such as a lessened tax burden. As valuable as this exemption was, there is no attempt here to quantify it, making it difficult to reconstruct families’ calculus in deciding how and when to assert their status. Still, it created a powerful precedent that survived even the Ming dynasty and its household system (pp. 195–201).
Szonyi finds that military status led families to jump through bureaucratic hoops but also to create genealogical ones by defining common lines of descent for military families in garrison communities, even when these were openly fictive. They manipulated the legal and ritual aspects of the late imperial family, a flexible construct that, Szonyi finds, still affects the descendants of men who happened to be conscripted in the early Ming.
This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of how subjects creatively engaged with the late imperial state and offers a basis for comparison with other regimes and other patterns of response. It suggests many avenues for further inquiry. For example, an important tool for many of the families were contractual documents defining relationships among their members. While these papers were produced at the behest of family members, others may have participated: were specialists such as legal masters involved in shaping these documents? More broadly, how did people learn to optimize their dealings with the state, other families, and even other members of their own family? The sources cited transmit this sort of knowledge, but other mechanisms must lie in the background.
Finally, a note on the book's production. It is cleverly structured around a set of stories, headed by chapter titles resembling those of Ming fiction. Abundant maps, family trees and a dramatis familiae facilitate tracking profuse toponyms and patronyms. Less fortunately, without Chinese characters tracking references and tracing names can be impossible. Some primary sources are helpfully available in an online repository, albeit not, as promised (p. 269), through transcriptions but instead as scanned images.
