In Service of the State: Qing China and the Employment of Imperial Relatives

In the early seventeenth century, disparate groups of semi-nomadic peoples living in autonomous tribes in northwestern Eurasia united under a single leader, called themselves Manchus, and aligning with agrarian Chinese went on to form one of the largest land-based empires in history, the Qing dynasty, which ruled China and parts of Central Asia from 1636-1911. In the course of state formation and empire building, struggles among the Manchu elite led to a unique arrangement for the relatives of the ruler: the imperial relatives were given official positions and integrated into the administrative apparatus. Unlike the previous Song and Ming dynasties, which excluded all imperial relatives from political activity, or the Mongol Yuan dynasty, which kept imperial relatives at arm’s length, the Manchus put the imperial relatives in service of the state. The employment of the relatives in this way created a group of political actors who were both insiders and outsiders—they were part of the outer court administration but also confidants of the inner court. This enabled institutional innovation in the military and bureaucracy that facilitated a massive expansion of territory and the efficient rule of empire.