Compared with the nation states of the twentieth century, early modern empires had much more limited budgets and capacities for governing their populations. While many empires used their limited resources to raise large armies and wage war, most of them were much less capable of paying police or other officials to maintain order on an everyday basis. As a result of this basic fiscal fact, in most places everyday disputes - even of a serious nature - were handled by community intermediaries.
An earlier generation of scholars, exemplified by Karl Wittfogel, sought to typify those systems and evaluate them in totalizing, moralistic terms. But empirical research over the last several decades has yielded a much blurrier picture of “negotiation” between empires and local communities under their rule.
Drawing especially on the case of the Qing baojia system, this paper returns to that question of typology. Is it still a useful question? And if so, is it one with a clear answer? Historians of the Qing have largely rejected earlier ideas about Orientalism despotism, but they likewise kept their distance from utopian visions of premodern harmony free of an overweening state. Ottoman historians have likewise complicated ideas about harmonious self-governing religious communities managed under the so-called millet system. In this paper’s contribution to the roundtable, I offer some initial thoughts on how to build back towards some systematic comparative understanding of neighborhood governance in early modern empires. Recent research has in particular highlighted the different structures of different religious communities as well as the importance of fiscal systems.
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