After the Crisis: Rethinking the Politics of Early Qing State Building, 1644–1712

After the Crisis: Rethinking the Politics of Early-Qing State-Building, 1644-1712

Historians studying state formation and sociopolitical change in early-modern Eurasia have long been interested in the ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’ as a site for comparison. They have, to date, focused largely on the crisis itself and its origins. This is despite the injunction of Jack Goldstone, who, in a pathbreaking essay (Goldstone 1988), encouraged Qing, Ottoman, and Western European historians to compare responses to the crisis, examining the ideological and material pressures shaping their respective societies’ divergent trajectories following their post-crisis reconstruction. Inspired by Goldstone’s agenda, as well as renewed scholarly interest in the ideological and political-economic effects of the Ming-Qing transition (Zhang 2023), my paper reconstructs and contextualizes a range of early Qing political-economic tendencies that took the mid-century crisis as their starting point. Some of these, like the adoption of ‘fiscal conservatism’ and quotaism and the emergence of a localist critique of central authority, are better known both to scholars of early-modern China and comparativists; others remain relatively obscure, including debates about land reform among officials and elites in the 1650s, conflicts over commercial and urban taxation in the 1670s, and controversies over the central state’s rising share over total imperial revenue in the 1680s and 1690s. My paper situates these debates within what I argue was a process of contentious state building, revealing a spectrum of political possibility in the early Qing broader than often realized, and pointing to a complex inheritance for eighteenth and nineteenth-century imperial policymakers. I also offer, by extension, a possible approach to the late-seventeenth century post-crisis "settlements" in other polities: that those outcomes can be productively understood as the result of a contested process, in which institutional alternatives were both left on the table and integrated into the resulting conjunctures.