Slaves of the Emperor: Service, Privilege, and Status in the Qing Eight Banners - Couverture souple

Porter, David C.

 
9780231212779: Slaves of the Emperor: Service, Privilege, and Status in the Qing Eight Banners
Couverture souple
ISBN 10 : 0231212771 ISBN 13 : 9780231212779
Editeur : Columbia University Press, 2023

Synopsis

Shortlisted, 2024 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association

China's last imperial dynasty governed a vast and culturally diverse territory, encompassing a wide range of local political systems and regional elites. But the Qing empire was built and held together by a single imperial elite: the more than two million members of the hereditary Eight Banner system who were at the core of both the military and the bureaucracy. The banner population was multiethnic, linked by shared membership in a clearly demarcated status group defined in law and administrative practice. Banner people were bound to the court by an exchange of loyal service for institutionalized privilege, a relationship symbolically conceptualized as one of slave to master.

Slaves of the Emperor explores the Qing approach to one of the fundamental challenges of early modern state-building: how to develop an effective bureaucracy with increasing administrative capacity to govern a growing polity while retaining the loyalty of the ruling family's most important supporters. David C. Porter traces how the banner system created a service elite through its processes of incorporating new members, its employment of bannermen as technical specialists, its imposition of service obligations on women as well as men, and its response to fiscal and ideological challenges. Placing Qing practices in comparative perspective, he uncovers crucial parallels to similar institutions in Tokugawa Japan, imperial Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Slaves of the Emperor provides a new framework for understanding the structure and function of elites both in China and across Eurasia in the early modern period.

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À propos de l?auteur

David C. Porter is faculty lecturer in history and East Asian studies at McGill University.

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
Columbia University Press
Date d'édition
2023
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0231212771
ISBN 13 
9780231212779
Reliure
Broché
Nombre de pages
352
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible

Autres éditions populaires du même titre

9780231212762: Slaves of the Emperor: Service, Privilege, and Status in the Qing Eight Banners

Edition présentée

ISBN 10 :  0231212763 ISBN 13 :  9780231212762
Editeur : Columbia University Press, 2023
Couverture rigide