Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China (Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology) 1009334514, 9781009334518

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Public Interest and State Legitimation How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state’s proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfill its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics. Wenkai He is Associate Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology General Editors Anthony S. Chen, Northwestern University Stephanie L. Mudge, University of California, Davis Associate Editors Jenny Andersson, Uppsala University Nitsan Chorev, Brown University Manali Desai, Cambridge University Emily Erikson, Yale University Cybelle Fox, University of California, Berkeley Julian Go, University of Chicago Wenkai He, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Robert Jansen, University of Michigan Hazem Kandil, Cambridge University Greta Krippner, University of Michigan Cedric de Leon, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Isaac Martin, University of California, San Diego Virag Molnar, New School for Social Research Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study Joshua Pacewicz, Brown University Angel Adams Parham, Loyola University New Orleans Christopher S. Parker, University of California, Santa Barbara Tianna Paschel, University of California, Berkeley Sarah Quinn, University of Washington Lisa M. Stulberg, New York University Antoine Vauchez, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Melissa Wilde, University of Pennsylvania Genevieve Zubrzycki, University of Michigan Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology publishes scholarship that seeks to explain sociologically and historically significant processes and outcomes. The series conceives of historical sociology broadly and aims to publish exemplary, agenda-setting work, regardless of intellectual perspective, historical period, geographic focus, analytic scale, or methodological approach. Books in the series Wenkai He, Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Public Interest and State Legitimation Early Modern England, Japan, and China

WENKAI HE Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009334518 DOI: 10.1017/9781009334525 © Wenkai He 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: He, Wenkai, 1969– author. Title: Public interest and state legitimation : early modern England, Japan, and China / Wenkai He. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge studies in historical sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023007609 | ISBN 9781009334518 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009334525 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Public interest. | Public interest – England – History. | Public interest – Japan – History. | Public interest – China – History. | Legitimacy of governments. | Legitimacy of governments – England – History. | Legitimacy of governments – Japan – History. | Legitimacy of governments – China – History. Classification: LCC JC330.15 .H4 2023 | DDC 320.01/10942–dc23/eng/20230322 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007609 ISBN 978-1-009-33451-8 Hardback ISBN 978-1-009-33455-6 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Public Interest and State Legitimation How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state’s proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfill its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics. Wenkai He is Associate Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology General Editors Anthony S. Chen, Northwestern University Stephanie L. Mudge, University of California, Davis Associate Editors Jenny Andersson, Uppsala University Nitsan Chorev, Brown University Manali Desai, Cambridge University Emily Erikson, Yale University Cybelle Fox, University of California, Berkeley Julian Go, University of Chicago Wenkai He, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Robert Jansen, University of Michigan Hazem Kandil, Cambridge University Greta Krippner, University of Michigan Cedric de Leon, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Isaac Martin, University of California, San Diego Virag Molnar, New School for Social Research Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study Joshua Pacewicz, Brown University Angel Adams Parham, Loyola University New Orleans Christopher S. Parker, University of California, Santa Barbara Tianna Paschel, University of California, Berkeley Sarah Quinn, University of Washington Lisa M. Stulberg, New York University Antoine Vauchez, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Melissa Wilde, University of Pennsylvania Genevieve Zubrzycki, University of Michigan Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology publishes scholarship that seeks to explain sociologically and historically significant processes and outcomes. The series conceives of historical sociology broadly and aims to publish exemplary, agenda-setting work, regardless of intellectual perspective, historical period, geographic focus, analytic scale, or methodological approach. Books in the series Wenkai He, Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Public Interest and State Legitimation Early Modern England, Japan, and China

WENKAI HE Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009334518 DOI: 10.1017/9781009334525 © Wenkai He 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: He, Wenkai, 1969– author. Title: Public interest and state legitimation : early modern England, Japan, and China / Wenkai He. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge studies in historical sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023007609 | ISBN 9781009334518 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009334525 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Public interest. | Public interest – England – History. | Public interest – Japan – History. | Public interest – China – History. | Legitimacy of governments. | Legitimacy of governments – England – History. | Legitimacy of governments – Japan – History. | Legitimacy of governments – China – History. Classification: LCC JC330.15 .H4 2023 | DDC 320.01/10942–dc23/eng/20230322 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007609 ISBN 978-1-009-33451-8 Hardback ISBN 978-1-009-33455-6 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Public Interest and State Legitimation How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state’s proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfill its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics. Wenkai He is Associate Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology General Editors Anthony S. Chen, Northwestern University Stephanie L. Mudge, University of California, Davis Associate Editors Jenny Andersson, Uppsala University Nitsan Chorev, Brown University Manali Desai, Cambridge University Emily Erikson, Yale University Cybelle Fox, University of California, Berkeley Julian Go, University of Chicago Wenkai He, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Robert Jansen, University of Michigan Hazem Kandil, Cambridge University Greta Krippner, University of Michigan Cedric de Leon, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Isaac Martin, University of California, San Diego Virag Molnar, New School for Social Research Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study Joshua Pacewicz, Brown University Angel Adams Parham, Loyola University New Orleans Christopher S. Parker, University of California, Santa Barbara Tianna Paschel, University of California, Berkeley Sarah Quinn, University of Washington Lisa M. Stulberg, New York University Antoine Vauchez, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Melissa Wilde, University of Pennsylvania Genevieve Zubrzycki, University of Michigan Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology publishes scholarship that seeks to explain sociologically and historically significant processes and outcomes. The series conceives of historical sociology broadly and aims to publish exemplary, agenda-setting work, regardless of intellectual perspective, historical period, geographic focus, analytic scale, or methodological approach. Books in the series Wenkai He, Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Public Interest and State Legitimation Early Modern England, Japan, and China

WENKAI HE Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009334518 DOI: 10.1017/9781009334525 © Wenkai He 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: He, Wenkai, 1969– author. Title: Public interest and state legitimation : early modern England, Japan, and China / Wenkai He. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge studies in historical sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023007609 | ISBN 9781009334518 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009334525 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Public interest. | Public interest – England – History. | Public interest – Japan – History. | Public interest – China – History. | Legitimacy of governments. | Legitimacy of governments – England – History. | Legitimacy of governments – Japan – History. | Legitimacy of governments – China – History. Classification: LCC JC330.15 .H4 2023 | DDC 320.01/10942–dc23/eng/20230322 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007609 ISBN 978-1-009-33451-8 Hardback ISBN 978-1-009-33455-6 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Public Interest and State Legitimation How were state formation and early modern politics shaped by the state’s proclaimed obligation to domestic welfare? Drawing on a wide range of historical scholarship and primary sources, this book demonstrates that a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to early modern England, Japan, and China. This normative platform served as a shared basis on which state and society could negotiate and collaborate over how to attain good governance through providing public goods such as famine relief and infrastructural facilities. The terms of state legitimacy opened a limited yet significant political space for the ruled. Through petitioning and protests, subordinates could demand that the state fulfill its publicly proclaimed duty and redress welfare grievances. Conflicts among diverse dimensions of public interest mobilized cross-regional and cross-sectoral collective petitions; justified by the same norms of state legitimacy, these petitions called for fundamental political reforms and transformed the nature of politics. Wenkai He is Associate Professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology General Editors Anthony S. Chen, Northwestern University Stephanie L. Mudge, University of California, Davis Associate Editors Jenny Andersson, Uppsala University Nitsan Chorev, Brown University Manali Desai, Cambridge University Emily Erikson, Yale University Cybelle Fox, University of California, Berkeley Julian Go, University of Chicago Wenkai He, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Robert Jansen, University of Michigan Hazem Kandil, Cambridge University Greta Krippner, University of Michigan Cedric de Leon, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Isaac Martin, University of California, San Diego Virag Molnar, New School for Social Research Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study Joshua Pacewicz, Brown University Angel Adams Parham, Loyola University New Orleans Christopher S. Parker, University of California, Santa Barbara Tianna Paschel, University of California, Berkeley Sarah Quinn, University of Washington Lisa M. Stulberg, New York University Antoine Vauchez, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Melissa Wilde, University of Pennsylvania Genevieve Zubrzycki, University of Michigan Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology publishes scholarship that seeks to explain sociologically and historically significant processes and outcomes. The series conceives of historical sociology broadly and aims to publish exemplary, agenda-setting work, regardless of intellectual perspective, historical period, geographic focus, analytic scale, or methodological approach. Books in the series Wenkai He, Public Interest and State Legitimation: Early Modern England, Japan, and China

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Public Interest and State Legitimation Early Modern England, Japan, and China

WENKAI HE Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009334518 DOI: 10.1017/9781009334525 © Wenkai He 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: He, Wenkai, 1969– author. Title: Public interest and state legitimation : early modern England, Japan, and China / Wenkai He. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2023. | Series: Cambridge studies in historical sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023007609 | ISBN 9781009334518 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009334525 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Public interest. | Public interest – England – History. | Public interest – Japan – History. | Public interest – China – History. | Legitimacy of governments. | Legitimacy of governments – England – History. | Legitimacy of governments – Japan – History. | Legitimacy of governments – China – History. Classification: LCC JC330.15 .H4 2023 | DDC 320.01/10942–dc23/eng/20230322 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007609 ISBN 978-1-009-33451-8 Hardback ISBN 978-1-009-33455-6 Paperback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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To my mother Xu Xiaohua and my father He Yongshou

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments page ix

Introduction part i  

1 2 3 4

1 sources of early modern state resilience

Legitimacy and Resilience of the Early Modern State State–Society Collaboration against Subsistence Crisis Financing Public Infrastructure The Negotiation of State and Society over Redress of Grievances part ii  

37 69 107 145

the emergence of modern politics

Prologue: Limits to Early Modern State Resilience 5 A Political “Great Divergence”: England (1640–1780), Japan (1853–1895), and China (1840–1911) Conclusion: Toward a Contextualized Comparative Historical Analysis

185 193 243

Bibliography 257 Index 299

vii

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Acknowledgments

So many people and institutions have made this work possible. In the summer of 2009, I visited the Komaba Campus of the University of Tokyo. Mitani Hiroshi was my host. On the first day I went to his office, he took me to an izakaya (a sort of Japanese pub) near the campus. We talked about how to understand the political implications of the indigenous practice of “public deliberation” in Tokugawa Japan and Qing China. Mitani Hiroshi introduced me to the research of Japanese historians such as Kurushima Hiroshi and Hirakawa Arata, which prompted me to move away from the Meiji era and enter into the world of Tokugawa Japan. At the same time, Paul Slack’s work on social policy in Tudor and early Stuart England was a constant source of inspiration. The scholarship on social policies in Tokugawa Japan and early modern England resonated with my own research into the central–provincial debates in Qing China over welfare policies related to currency, famine relief, and financing of water control projects. In 2011 I began this journey of comparative historical analysis to explore state formation from the perspective of safeguarding domestic welfare rather than fighting foreign wars. The passion I felt in the early stage of research was soon overwhelmed by the huge difficulties of studying diverse issues – famine and poverty relief, infrastructural facilities, and popular petitions over welfare grievances – in three quite different early modern states. I struggled to digest the immense literature on legitimacy and early modern political thought. Although I managed to write several papers by utilizing Qing archival materials, I found it very hard to come up with a coherent framework to integrate the case of Qing China with those of early modern England and Tokugawa Japan. At points, I ix

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x

Acknowledgments

felt like I was drowning in the deep sea of historical materials. Without the kind help and encouragement of institutions and numerous individuals, I would never have been able to finish this book. I am deeply grateful to the generous support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University in 2016–2017. The Radcliffe/Yenching fellowship gave me a remarkable opportunity: access to the extremely rich English, Japanese, and Chinese collections held in the Harvard libraries, and particularly the Harvard-Yenching library; as well as an excellent working environment that allowed me to concentrate on writing and to complete a draft of the majority of this manuscript. The intellectual atmosphere of the Radcliffe Institute was highly stimulating. I particularly enjoyed discussions with Alex Gourevitch and Jal Mehta. Steven Epstein challenged me to include the concept of citizenship in my explanatory framework; I finally offer an answer in this book. Daniel Ziblatt gave me invaluable comments and suggestions. At the time, I was focusing on Tudor and early Stuart England (1533–1640); I found it difficult to respond to his questions about radicalism during the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I. These queries forced me to pay more attention to the political and social developments in England after 1640. I hope that this book can now answer some of his questions. Encouragement from Lizabeth Cohen and the late Judith Vichniac accompanied my writing at Radcliffe. Daniel Carpenter showed me many fascinating aspects of petitions in North America. Johannes Lindvall kindly read a very rough draft of the Introduction and gave me detailed comments. I am grateful for his enthusiasm and feedback throughout the process of writing. Liz Perry, who has always been my role model of integrating historical research with social science, shared with me her insights into contentious politics in China. David Howell and Andy Gordon were always available when I had questions about Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. I benefited from discussing my project with Peter Hall, Suzanne Berger, Mark Elliott, Michael Szonyi, Peter Perdue, and Richard Samuels. I thank Theo Serlin, my research assistant at the Radcliffe Institute, for looking up some primary documents related to public works in early modern England. I had finished writing most of the chapters by the time I left the Radcliffe Institute. But I was not satisfied at only demonstrating some similar patterns of state–society collaboration in public goods provision. I wanted to explore their variation by further comparing England between 1640 and 1780, Japan between 1853 and 1895, and China between 1840 and 1911. For this purpose, I visited the Department of History at the University of

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Acknowledgments

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Warwick in the fall semester of 2018. Mark Knights kindly hosted my visit even though he had not met me before. I was very lucky to benefit from his expertise on early modern English history on almost a daily basis. He often generously gave me a ride between Leamington Spa and the campus; for me, it was a mobile seminar in early modern English history. This was an unforgettable learning experience and I am deeply grateful to him. I likewise can hardly express my thankfulness to Joanna Innes, who kindly read the whole manuscript and gave me chapter-by-chapter comments, critiques, and suggestions. These were tremendously helpful. I am not certain whether my revision meets her standard, but I have tried my best. I particularly thank Brodie Waddell who graciously read the chapters related to petitions before their final submission to the Press. His comments and suggestions corrected some inaccuracy in my understanding of the relationship between the Crown and Parliament after 1688 and alerted me to the importance of active rights in petitions of public grievances in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ken Pomeranz read most of the manuscript and I am always grateful for his wise comments and suggestions. Suzanne Berger read the revised manuscript, and her sharp and insightful comments helped me to focus on its core argument as I prepared the final version. It reminded me of the good old days of writing my dissertation under her guidance at MIT. Spending the summer of 2019 at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo was a wonderful experience. Nakamura Naofumi has been an unfailing source of help and reference throughout this journey. Tanimoto Masayuki kindly gave me detailed comments and suggestions, which were very helpful to my revision. I have pleasant memories of discussing early modern English history in Tokyo with Yamamoto Koji. This book benefits greatly from his excellent research on the discourse of public interest in various domestic welfare-related projects in early modern England. Iokibe Kaoru’s enthusiasm for this project was a great encouragement. The road toward this book has indeed been long and winding. I benefited greatly from discussing with Sidney Tarrow how to connect Charles Tilly’s work on state formation with his later research on contentious collective action. I thank Philip Hoffman and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal for their input when I visited the Division of Social Science at the California Institute of Technology in the spring term of 2015. During that time, I was fortunate to meet John Brewer and Steve Hindle and to get feedback from them on my project. Steve Hindle kindly spent a lot of time answering my questions. Xiong Yuanbao hosted me at Waseda University in the

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summer of 2012 and Yoshida Seiichiro arranged my visit to the University of Tokyo in the summer of 2014; these trips allowed me to intensively explore the Japanese scholarship on Tokugawa history. Kishimoto Mio gave me many suggestions on how to understand popular contention in the Qing dynasty. During my visit to Taiwan to use the microfilms of Qing archives preserved in the Academia Sinica, I had the great pleasure to discuss historical research with Ho Hon-wai and Wu Jen-shu, who pushed me to view archival materials in a broader historical context. The archival research for this project in 2011–2013 was funded by the General Research Fund in Hong Kong (Project No. 642011). The section on financing water control in Qing China was presented at the 2013 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in San Diego. I am grateful for the comments of Pierre-Étienne Will and feedback from Philip Brown and Patricia Sippel. Parts of this manuscript were presented at the 2012 World Economic History Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa; the fourth European Congress on World and Global History in Paris in 2014; the 2015 World Economic History Congress in Kyoto; and the Hague Workshop on Evolutions and Revolutions in Water Management in 2015; as well as at workshops at the History Department of Sheffield University, the History Department at the University of Warwick (Early Modern History Workshop), the Department of Sociology at Harvard University (History, Culture, and Society Workshop), the Harvard Asia Center, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Radcliffe Institute, the Department of Sociology at Tsinghua University, the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, the Group of Japanese History in the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, the Department of Political Science at Lund University (the STANCE Workshop), the Department of Political Science at City University of Hong Kong, the Department of History at Shanghai Jiaotong University, and the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. I thank Marjolein  ’t Hart, Maarten Prak, Michael Braddick, Phil Withington, Mark Philp, R. Bin Wong, Mark Metzler, Luke Roberts, Steven Ericson, Gregory Noble, Kiri Paramore, Orlando Paterson, David Zaret, Jan Teorell, Kim Sungmoon, Luo Xin, Shen Yuan, Peng Kaixiang, Peng Gang, Peter Zarrow, Chiu Peng-sheng, Yeang Chen-pang, Li Cho-ying, Feng Xiaocai, Ma Jianxiong, Zhang Dong, Wang Liping, Tian Geng, Yan Fei, Yang Songtao, Dong Yige, and Xu Xiaohong for their valuable comments and feedback. James Lee and Kellee Tsai of HKUST offered unflagging support and trust even when the project was not progressing smoothly; I am very grateful. Two anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press

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Acknowledgments

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gave me detailed and stimulating comments. Their careful and engaged reading, and their sharp and helpful critiques, forced me to think seriously about how to integrate two components of the manuscript that had been written in different periods into one coherent framework. To revise the manuscript to address their reviews has been a great intellectual pleasure. I also thank Anthony S. Chen and Stephanie Mudge, co-editors of Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology, for their enthusiasm and support. Their comments and suggestions were extremely helpful in considering how to convey my argument to a broader audience. I want to express my gratitude to the CUP editors, Sara Doskow for her enthusiasm even when the manuscript was still rough and John Haslam for his patience and help through the long process of revision. Parts of Chapter 3 were published in Social Science History (Vol. 39, No. 3, 2015) and Environment and History (Vol. 23, No. 3, 2017). I thank the two journals for permission to include the material in this book. Zhuang Ying of the Palace Museum in Beijing gave me excellent suggestions on finding images for the front cover design. My wife Ellen McGill has put tremendous effort into this book. In addition to thorough editing and citation checking, she raised many great points on how to present the argument. Her understanding and trust helped me pass the darkest moment in this long intellectual journey. My son James Yuanping He and daughter Mairead Yuanqing He grew along with this manuscript. Just as the book is now independent of me, they too are going out into the world as autonomous individuals. My mom, Xu Xiaohua, and my brother, He Yong, take care of my father, He Yongshou, who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. When my father was taken into the intensive care unit in August of 2019, I stopped my research in Tokyo and returned to Kunming. He was deep in a coma, but I kept talking to him about the progress of my work and asked him not to give up; he must see the publication of this book. And he made it! It is to my family, who have supported me throughout my life in both big and small ways, that I dedicate this work.

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Introduction

In doing research some years ago on the relationship between public finance and political transformation of the state,1 I was struck by two interesting phenomena. One was the intensive collaboration between state and society over infrastructural facilities and even defense in England between 1600 and 1640, Japan between 1820 and 1853, and China between 1820 and 1840, periods when each state was encountering sustained fiscal difficulties. Such state–society collaboration in public goods provision such as famine relief, water control projects, and even national defense contributed significantly to the resilience of these early modern states with limited fiscal capacities.2 The other was the popular demands to reduce military expenditure and the tax burden in England after the 1750s and in Japan between 1890 and 1895. The recent establishment of modern fiscal states had greatly enhanced the state capacity of both England and Japan, and yet the question of whether the state should spend more on domestic welfare or instead on foreign wars or military expansion was the subject of serious public debate. Late nineteenthcentury China, by contrast, remained a traditional fiscal state; despite a somewhat enhanced state capacity, it faced much less acute conflict over such issues than did England or Japan. The tension between domestic welfare and foreign wars poses challenges to the dominant paradigm that takes warfare as the driving force of state formation. Is the state capacity exhibited in domestic governance 1 2

Wenkai He, Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State: England, Japan and China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). He, Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State, 10.

1

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009334525.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

2

Introduction

simply a byproduct of its capacity developed for fighting foreign wars? Or is the state’s ability to take care of domestic welfare different from its capacity to launch wars? Likewise, how shall we account for the surprisingly close collaboration of state and society in public goods provision given the hierarchical political order of the early modern state? What is its relationship to the popular contention that has figured so largely in our understanding of state formation and political change? What was the political nature – and the consequences – of the participation of social actors in public goods provision in nondemocratic systems in the early modern era? Attempting to answer these questions pushed me to reexamine state formation from the perspective of how the state legitimates its power by providing public goods necessary for domestic governance. The state’s provision of public goods such as infrastructural facilities plays a vital role in both domestic governance and economic development.3 In authoritarian regimes, the state often appeals to its performance in the safeguarding of socioeconomic welfare to justify a power that is not acquired through free and fair elections.4 Even in well-governed democracies, the legitimacy of the state is also undergirded by its specific performance in social welfare.5 The failure of a democratic state to meet the basic welfare needs of its citizens can increase the likelihood of its collapse.6 3

4

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Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson, “The Origins of State Capacity: Property Rights, Taxation, and Politics,” American Economic Review 99, no. 4 (September 2009): 1218– 44; Mark Dincecco and Gabriel Katz, “State Capacity and Long-Run Economic Performance,” Economic Journal 126, no. 590 (February 2016): 189–218; Mark Dincecco and Mauricio Prado, “Warfare, Fiscal Capacity, and Performance,” Journal of Economic Growth 17, no. 3 (2012): 171–203; Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Ben W. Ansell and Johannes Lindvall, Inward Conquest: The Political Origins of Modern Public Services (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021). For the contribution of good governance to legitimating authoritarian states, see Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968); Francis Fukuyama, “What Is Governance?” Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions 26, no. 3 (July 2013): 347–68; Francis Fukuyama, “Governance: What Do We Know, and How Do We Know It?” Annual Review of Political Science, 19 (2016): 89–105; Dingxin Zhao, “The Mandate of Heaven and Performance Legitimation in Historical and Contemporary China,” American Behavioral Scientist 53, no. 3 (November 2009): 424–28. For the relationship of state performance in welfare to the legitimacy of liberal democratic states, see Bo Rothstein, “Creating Political Legitimacy: Electoral Democracy versus Quality of Government,” American Behavioral Scientist 53, no. 3 (November 2009): 311–30. Jessica Fortin, “Is There a Necessary Condition for Democracy? The Role of State Capacity in Postcommunist Countries,” Comparative Political Studies 45, no. 7 (2012): 903–30; Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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The state’s performance in public goods provision is thus closely connected to the justification of state power to society. However, the implications of the state’s provision of public goods for state legitimacy and state–society interactions in the process of state formation have long been neglected in the literature, which instead focuses on the contribution of warfare, religion, and the networks of royal households to state formation.7 Economic historians have recently noted that the development of a market economy benefits greatly from the provision of public goods by nonmarket means, particularly the active role played by local communities and regional associations.8 Inspired by historical research on early modern England, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that good governance in Tudor and early Stuart England mainly resulted from the participation in local governance of the “middling sort of people”: yeomen, craftsmen, traders, and so on. These unsalaried amateurs – rather than salaried state bureaucrats – occupied the lower levels of the early modern English state by serving as parish officials and local constables; they also managed local public goods such as repairs of roads, bridges, and river banks, as well as providing poor relief.9 The inclusion of transportation facilities, river control, and poor relief makes public goods more broadly defined than in the standard economic theory of state capacity, which mainly treats defense as a public good.10 This inclusion, however, implies that we need to go beyond the contribution of local communities that Acemoglu and Robinson have highlighted. Large-scale and cross-regional infrastructural facilities are obviously beyond the ability of local communities. Moreover, in the case of cross-regional or cross-sectoral conflicts of interest, a higher authority above local society is a necessary condition of peaceful resolution. 7

Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Philip Gorski and Vivek Swaroop Sharma, “Beyond the Tilly Thesis: ‘Family Values’ and State Formation in Latin Christendom,” in Does War Make States? Investigations of Charles Tilly’s Historical Sociology, ed. Lars Bo Kaspersen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 98–124; Julia Adams, The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). 8 Masayuki Tanimoto and R. Bin Wong, eds., Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy: Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). 9 Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “Paths to Inclusive Political Institutions” (working paper, Department of Economics, MIT, Cambridge, MA, January 2016). 10 Besley and Persson, “The Origins of State Capacity,” 1218–44.

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The central theme of this book is to explore the political nature, process, and significance of the state’s involvement in public goods provision in state formation. I argue that such participation is vital to domestic governance, the legitimation of state power, and the development of state capacity. Instead of viewing state formation simply as a process of overcoming resistance from society, I emphasize an interdependence between the state and society in overcoming various problems of domestic welfare. In particular, I argue that the state’s role in public goods provision is intimately tied to its efforts to legitimate its power to society by proclaiming a duty to safeguard the public interest of the realm. This public interest-based discourse of state legitimation provides a common normative platform upon which both state and social actors can collaborate to complement their respective weaknesses in the public goods provision vital to domestic governance. The state capacity exhibited in and developed by such provision is of a different nature from that measured by fighting foreign wars. Before I discuss the logic of case selection and comparability of England between 1533 and 1780, Japan between 1640 and 1895, and China between 1684 and 1911 in this comparative historical analysis of state formation, let us first look more closely at the meaning of public interest. In particular, the organic conception of public interest is the linchpin connecting provision of specific public goods to the general issues of domestic governance and state legitimacy in early modern politics, as is the conception of “passive rights” derived from the state’s duty to the public interest. This theoretical framework that connects discourses on public interest with state performance in domestic governance ultimately casts new light on the ramifications for state formation of state–society interactions surrounding public goods. Public interest or the common good is widely held to be vital to state legitimacy.11 In the early modern world, public interest was typically substantive; it was often associated with concrete public goods: relief from famine or disaster, or provision of infrastructural facilities, for example. But public interest as a concept is, and was, flexible. Its different dimensions might include domestic welfare, national interest, and/or a nonmaterial good, such as a particular religion or a specific conception of a good life.12 Then as now, it could be stretched and adapted by state and social actors to respond to changing socioeconomic conditions. 11 12

See Bruce Gilley, The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 4. In this book I use “public interest,” “public good,” and “common good” interchangeably to refer to the interest believed to be common to one political community or to the state. When referring to public interest in regard to domestic welfare, I sometimes use

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In modern liberal democracies, public interest has become less substantive than its early modern counterpart. Neoliberalism often views public interest as a consequence of rights-conscious individual citizens pursuing their private interests in an idealized free market economy.13 Liberals committed to egalitarianism take “public interest” as the necessary background condition of basic political and economic institutions so as to attain the goal of treating all citizens as equals.14 In contrast, a substantive definition of public interest such as economic growth or social harmony is often found in present-day authoritarian regimes that stress a corporate conception of society as an organic whole rather than an assembly of rights-conscious individual citizens; Singapore or China comes to mind. This organic conception of public interest has been largely discredited among advocates of a liberal democracy that values inalienable individual rights or human rights over any substantive collective goal. However, in early modern states, as in many nondemocratic states today, the public interest was conceived as an organic one that ties members of a hierarchical political system into one united entity. Official declarations by the state of its duty to protect public interest cannot be – and were not  – taken at face value. Yet such proclaimed responsibility constituted much more than an empty discourse; it was embodied in providing specific public goods through various welfare policies. These included infrastructural facilities and particular institutions and measures to address welfare concerns of the populace. The state’s provision of concrete public goods was thus inherently connected to the general idea of public interest, and the acceptance by social actors of such norms of state legitimacy rested to a large extent upon the same conception of public interest. The welfare of various communities and even that of individuals were in principle coherent components of an organically conceived public interest. The acknowledgment of the state of its duty to safeguard the organically conceived public interest therefore allowed social actors to engage with the authorities in domestic governance. This conception of public interest shared by both state and social actors thence constituted a common normative platform upon which state and society could interact

13 14

“public welfare” or “general welfare.” The nonmaterial conception of “public good” is often seen in contemporary communitarianism. See a typical presentation of this view in Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). A representative example is John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

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over how to deliver concrete public goods to safeguard the public interest in specific circumstances. In this way, the obligation of the state to protect the public interest opened up a space for political participation as it entailed certain rights to the subordinates; most importantly, a right to petition the authorities for redressing welfare grievances so as to safeguard public interest. Such rights were, however, passive, as they were derived from the obligation of the state to protect the public interest. In contrast, active rights, at the level either of the local community or of the individual, are conceived as independent of the state.15 While passive rights are derived from obligation, active rights are often held to be entitlements of individuals. Examples of such inalienable rights include absolute private property rights or human rights, or freedom of conscience in religion. These are crucial to justify political constraints on the sovereign viewed as a delegate of the people.16 Popular protests instigated by theories of active rights were revolutionary because they were not simply based upon obligations of the existing state authority.17 Such theories were crucial to justify armed resistance to kings of another faith in the religious wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe.18 This conception of active rights independent of the state has greatly influenced the classic work on contentious politics, which considers the rise of democracy and expansion of citizen rights in Western Europe as victories attained by rights-conscious social movements.19 This scholarship accordingly views nondemocratic state regimes as repressive and 15

16

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18 19

On the difference between a passive right and an active right, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 6; Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625 (Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 3. On the rise of the active conception of rights in Western Europe, see Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, chs. 3–7. On the importance of an active conception of private property rights to constrain state power, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). Examples include the American and French Revolutions, as well as the radical element in the English Civil War that rejected the legitimacy of divinely ordained sovereignty. See Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). Quentin Skinner, “Humanism, Scholasticism and Popular Sovereignty,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 2 Renaissance Virtues (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 245–63. Charles Tilly, “Where Do Rights Come From?” in Democracy, Revolution, and History, ed. Theda Skocpol with the assistance of George Ross, Tony Smith, and Judith E. Vichniac (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 55–72.

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their state–society relationships as confrontational.20 However, the intellectual history of theories of active rights is different from the political and social history of popular contention in Western Europe. Let us look briefly at how this unfolded in the classic example of England and consider how a different understanding of this dynamic might lead us to rethink both contention and state formation. After 1688 and well into the nineteenth century, the protests and collective actions justified by active natural rights were persistently repudiated by the English state. During the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War, they were characterized as dangerous “continental radicalism” or “republican radicalism,” and leaders and organizers faced charges of sedition and even high treason.21 Demands made by the national Chartist petition campaigns for universal manhood suffrage, repeal of property qualifications in elections, an annual Parliament, and secret ballots were likewise rejected, as the state authorities could not accept their grounding in an active conception of rights.22 This hostility on the part of the state forced even radical petitioners to phrase their demands as based on passively conceived rights: imagined Saxon constitutional rights, the rights of “free-born English,” or the Bills of Rights of 1688.23 Dressing radical political demands in the familiar and relatively acceptable vocabulary of passive rights entailed by the state’s duty to protect the public interest made such claims less threatening to the authorities and more likely to receive a hearing. The calls to reform parliamentary elections in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to make Parliament more representative 20

21

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Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 56–60; Charles Tilly, Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 30; Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2 and 62. T. M. Parssinen, “Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament in British Radical Politics, 1771–1848,” English Historical Review 88, no. 348 (July 1973): 504–33; John Stevenson, “Popular Radicalism and Popular Protest, 1789–1815,” in Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815, ed. H. T. Dickinson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 61–84; Robert Poole, “Petitioners and Rebels: Petitioning for Parliamentary Reform in Regency England,” Social Science History 43 (Fall 2019): 553–79. On how the Chartist demands rested upon conceptions of active rights, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 77–99; Peter J. Gurney, “The Democratic Idiom: Languages of Democracy in the Chartist Movement,” Journal of Modern History 86, no. 3 (September 2014): 566–602. James A. Epstein, “The Constitutional Idiom: Radical Reasoning, Rhetoric and Action in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Journal of Social History 23, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 553–74; Josh Gibson, “The Chartists and the Constitution: Revisiting British Popular Constitutionalism,” Journal of British Studies 56 (January 2017): 70–90.

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of an industrializing nation and thus to better serve the public interest were largely presented upon the basis of passive rights; claims framed in this way resonated with reform-minded ruling elites as well.24 In England in the early nineteenth century, popular petitioners often invoked the state or the crown as the “Father of the people” who was bound to protect the livelihood of the ruled, albeit on a much larger scale in an industrializing economy.25 Organizers of petitions consciously presented the welfare grievances of the working class and middle class as common components of the organically conceived public interest.26 In response, the English state accommodated redress of specific welfare grievances such as high food prices, factory conditions, and unemployment.27 The idea that a government should safeguard the organically conceived public interest remained strong and politically efficacious in England even in the late nineteenth century, despite facing increasing challenges from radical advocates of inalienable individual rights.28 Given the distinction between passive and active rights and the state’s different reactions to them, we need to reexamine the role of passive rights in popular contention in England before the mid-nineteenth century. For this time period, the work of Margaret Somers has been particularly influential, especially her careful examination of the legal rights to which textile workers appealed in demanding wage and apprenticeship regulations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such contention was truly important in the transition toward democracy; however, these rights should not be understood as actively conceived general citizen 24

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For the extension of suffrage and the reform of parliamentary elections as the means to achieve better representation of the Commons rather than viewing voting as a fundamental individual right, see Robert Saunders, “Democracy,” in Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. D. Craig and J. Thompson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 142–67; Joanna Innes, “People and Power in British Politics to 1850,” in Re-imaging Democracy in the Age of Revolution: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–1850, ed. Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 135–38. Robert Poole, “French Revolution or Peasants’ Revolt? Petitioners and Rebels in England from the Blanketeers to the Chartists,” Labour History Review 74, no. 1 (April 2009): 6–26; Poole, “Petitioners and Rebels.” Gareth Stedman Jones, “Rethinking Chartism,” reprinted in Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 90–178. Robert Saunders, “Chartism from Above: British Elites and the Interpretation of Chartism,” Historical Research 8, no. 213 (2007): 463–84; Innes, “People and Power in British Politics to 1850,” 129–48. James Thompson, “Good Government,” in Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. D. Craig and J. Thompson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 21–43.

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rights, which became dominant largely after the late nineteenth century.29 They were in fact still passive rights granted by the Tudor Statute of Artificers, which incorporated the state’s paternalistic responsibility to protect labor’s livelihood as a component of the organically imagined public interest of the realm. The difference between passive and active rights is also important in recognizing continuity and discontinuity in popular contention. Between the 1760s and 1830s, both the volume and number of signatures on petitions presented to Parliament increased dramatically.30 Charles Tilly views the remarkable rise of contentious collective actions on a national scale in eighteenth-century England as representing a discontinuous development of contentious claim-making from local to national and from specific issues to general political concerns.31 However, growth in the scale and organization of contentious collective actions does not necessarily imply discontinuity in popular political participation if petitions were about redressing specific welfare grievances and the claims made were still justified by the political duty of the state to safeguard the organically conceived public interest. The dominance of passive rights derived from the state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest in England before the mid-nineteenth century suggests that we should not underestimate the significance of passive rights to political change. The responsibility of the state to the public interest empowers subordinates to expect or even demand that the state fulfill its proclaimed duty through popular petitioning and even protests. Social actors who justify their claims by terms acceptable to the state are not necessarily obedient subjects. Instead, the political duty of the state to protect the public interest allowed and even invited society to make rightful – that is, passive right – claims on the state. Contentious collective actions were thus often a means to remind the state to fulfill its officially proclaimed duty to safeguard the public interest or to contest the effectiveness of specific state welfare policies. Even in nondemocratic states, the significant expansion of popular political participation in the form of collective petitioning or 29

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Margaret R. Somers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 5 (October 1993): 587–620. Richard Huzzey and Henry Miller, “Petitions, Parliament and Political Culture: Petitioning the House of Commons, 1780–1918,” Past and Present 248, no. 1 (August 2020): 123–64. Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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Introduction

protests thence does not necessarily indicate resistance to or rejection of state authority if such protests are justified by the duty of the state to protect the public interest.32 State formation, then, is a political process in which state and social actors interact upon a common platform of a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation and contend over how to provide specific public goods essential for domestic governance and how to safeguard that public interest by redressing grievances. Moreover, passive rights derived from a state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest can be found not only in early modern England, but also in non-Western countries such as Tokugawa Japan and Qing China; this is not a peculiarly English or European phenomenon. Such a comparative investigation of state formation through public goods provision can thus help us better reconceptualize the relationship between state formation and popular contention and build a more general and robust model of state formation. We cannot properly understand state–society collaboration in public goods provision, however, if we view the state–society relationship as fundamentally confrontational before the rise of liberal democracy. Such a vision grows out of understanding the state mainly as a violent machine: “war makes the state.”33 According to this bellicist view, the state first emerged through a series of wars to wipe out political rivals, and the growth of the state apparatus in Europe is often attributed to the increasing cost of war, particularly after the military revolution in the mid-sixteenth century.34 The incessant wars in Europe have been linked to the political incentives of rulers to prize glory.35 Although Charles Tilly 32

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These sorts of petitions in a hierarchical nondemocratic system are politically different from the petition in a democracy, where it complements the operation of formal representation. For the latter, see Daniel Carpenter, Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021). Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 170. Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, 3–83; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 32; Philip T. Hoffman, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

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distinguishes two different methods used by the state to extract resources from society, a capital-intensive one in the capitalist mode of economy and a coercion-intensive one in less commercialized economies, both serve the same purpose of fighting wars.36 Some scholars have shifted the focus from fighting foreign wars to suppressing domestic opponents; however, they continue to view the state mainly in terms of violence.37 This important body of scholarship has taught us much about how states came into being, how they acquired many of their effective powers, and how violence plays an inescapable role in politics. This paradigm, which is derived largely from European experiences, has also been applied to non-European parts of the world such as ancient China and Latin America.38 Yet the intense focus on war and coercion has in other ways skewed our understanding of the nature of the early modern state and its relations with society, and has overlooked the political space of participation provided by the very terms of state legitimacy. From a methodological perspective, the bellicist approach suffers from a subtle yet serious problem of selection bias caused by the preference in traditional political history for “high politics.”39 The revenue and spending recorded by the central government in early modern times were mainly for wars and diplomacy; yet many important state functions, such as local welfare provision, typically occurred outside the center, though not isolated from the guidance and coordination of the central

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Press, 2015); Philip T. Hoffman, “What Do States Do? Politics and Economic History,” Journal of Economic History 75, no. 2 (June 2015): 315. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990–1992 (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Sidney Tarrow, War, States, and Contention: A Comparative Study (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). Edgar Kiser and Yong Cai, “War and Bureaucratization in Qin China: Exploring an Anomalous Case,” American Sociological Review 68, no. 4 (August 2003): 511–39; Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Cameron G. Thies, “War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (July 2005): 451–65; Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Mark Dincecco and Yuhua Wang, “Violent Conflict and Political Development over the Long Run: China versus Europe,” Annual Review of Political Science 21 (2018): 341–58. See the discussion of the selection bias caused by uncritical use of the work of historians in Ian S. Lustick, “History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 3 (September 1996): 605–18.

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government. This is particularly the case in a decentralized fiscal system in which a great deal of the funds spent on local infrastructure or welfare provision were raised and spent locally without going through the central government.40 Theories of state formation built upon this kind of traditional political history thus tend to give too much weight to the contribution of warfare. The stress on violence as the driving force of state formation makes the state appear as an entity externally imposed upon society. Society for its own self-protection has to resist the state’s ever-increasing demands for resources and penetration; such resistance manifests itself in various forms of anti-tax protests and social movements.41 However, to conceive the state–society relationship only in confrontational terms makes it hard to understand the state’s role in providing public goods, as well as social actors’ demands that the state intervene in issues related to the public welfare of communities. One solution to this problem is to look at the social origins of state power. In this view, the provision of public goods by the state resulted from demands by an assertive and strong society. For example, Michael Mann argues that the early modern state prior to the availability of modern communication and bureaucratic techniques could still achieve high “infrastructural power” by seeking society’s cooperation and consent; such consent endowed the early modern state with a better capacity to coordinate social resources and implement policies than would be the case with a despotic state that only relied upon violence.42 But how could the state collaborate with society if the state is conceived by society primarily as a machine of violence? Neoclassical political economists have sought answers in the bargaining power of society over the state. If property-owning elites could force the state to grant political concessions by allowing more representation and autonomy in local governance, they would be willing to contribute money to the state, which enhances the infrastructural power of the 40

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Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 12; Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 16. Tarrow, War, States, and Contention, 21–24. For a characterization of state formation as a process of societal resistance, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 47–49. Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results,” Archives of European Sociology 25, no. 2 (November 1984): 185–213; Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, 479–81.

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state.43 If economic elites consider the political agenda of the state to go against their interests, they could block the efforts of the state to develop capacity, leading to a weak state.44 In Western Europe, it has been argued, where the society still possessed late medieval political legacies such as rural assemblies, urban self-governments, and territorially based representative bodies, these institutions could force the ruler to make political concessions in return for the consent to contribute taxes. The negotiations produced a constitutionalist state with strong infrastructural power. In contrast, if the state could depend upon foreign loans or nontax revenue to suppress resistance, then absolutist regimes would emerge, despite their limited capacity to mobilize resources from society.45 In this view, despotic states would prevail in regions lacking a tradition of self-governance and representative bodies; such societies would have little bargaining power vis-à-vis the state. However, the stress on the social origins of state capacity leaves little space to even imagine the state’s autonomous role in domestic governance and public goods provision. In constitutionalist regimes, these would be the responsibility of self-governed local communities, whereas despotic states would only be interested in extracting resources from society. Acemoglu and Robinson have further proposed a model of coevolution of state and society so as to explain the emergence of a strong state

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For theories that rest on bargaining and negotiation between the state and elites, see Richard Lachman, “Greed and Contingency: State Fiscal Crises and Imperial Failure in Early Modern Europe,” American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 1 (July 2009): 39–73; Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “The Political Economy of Absolutism Reconsidered,” in Robert H. Bates, Avner Greif, Margaret Levi et al., Analytic Narratives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 63–108; Philip T. Hoffman, “Early Modern France, 1450–1700,” in Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government, 1450–1789, ed. Philip T. Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 226–52; Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Francisco Garfias, “Elite Competition and State Capacity Development: Theory and Evidence from Post-Revolutionary Mexico,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 2 (May 2018): 339–57. Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Ertman emphasizes that Otto Hintze had developed this insight in his later work on state formation, yet it was ignored by Charles Tilly. See Thomas Ertman, “Otto Hintze, Stein Rokkan and Charles Tilly’s Theory of European State-Building,” in Does War Make States? Investigations of Charles Tilly’s Historical Sociology, ed. Lars Bo Kaspersen and Jeppe Strandsbjerg (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 52–70.

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without appealing excessively to the negotiating power of society vis-àvis the state. In this model, the active participation in local governance by social actors could effectively defend the interests of society against the intruding state. Social actors were thus not afraid to see state capacity develop. Instead, once the national economy became integrated, local actors would demand the state provide large-scale public goods.46 State capacity thence grew as a result of competition with an assertive civil society that had enough power to tame, rather than merely bargain with, the leviathan in order to advance the interests of society. Such coevolution ultimately gives birth to what they call “inclusive political institutions” in which the state has a strong capacity to deliver public goods, yet political power is widely enough distributed to make the state accountable to society. The inclusive state, which for Acemoglu and Robinson is exemplified by Tudor and early Stuart England, differs from both the despotic state, whose capacity is constrained by its lack of accountability to society, and the weak state, which cannot promote the public interest either due to resistance from powerful social groups, or because the weakness of society precludes the competition that would stimulate state capacity.47 Steven Pincus and James Robinson demonstrate that such mutually reinforcing interactions between local political participation and the development of state capacity in England continued with the ascendance of parliamentary sovereignty after the Glorious Revolution in 1688, and the fiscal-military state in Britain also contributed significantly to domestic welfare improvement, which Joanna Innes has called the domestic face of the military-fiscal state.48 However, this theory of the coevolution of state and society still attributes public goods provision to local self-governance. It neglects fundamental differences between local governance in small communities 46

47

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Acemoglu and Robinson, “Paths to Inclusive Political Institutions”; Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (New York: Penguin Press, 2019). Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, “The Emergence of Weak, Despotic, and Inclusive States” (working paper, Department of Economics, MIT, Cambridge, MA, May 2018). See more discussion of the inclusive state in Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012), 79–82. Steven Pincus and James Robinson, “Challenging the Fiscal-Military Hegemony: The British Case,” in The British Fiscal-Military States, 1660–c.1783, ed. Aaron Graham and Patrick Walsh (New York: Routledge, 2016), 229–61; Joanna Innes, “The Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal State,” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (London: Routledge, 1994), 96–127.

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and domestic governance of a country that consists of various regions. Examination of the actual provision of large-scale cross-regional public goods shows that the inherent free-rider problem is often resolved by the use of compulsory means to raise money, not by depending upon the voluntary collaboration of the communities at stake. The political authority of the state is indispensable to such compulsory collection of funds backed up by the threat of coercive power.49 Meanwhile, interregional or intercommunal conflicts of interest in public goods provision are quite common, and local authorities are frequently incapable of resolving them. In other words, the wide dispersion of political power in a society does not necessarily imply a consensus held across communities or across the social spectrum on how to resolve clashing interests and secure the general interest of society. The authority of the state is a necessary condition for a fair and impartial resolution of interregional and intersectoral conflicts of interest. What motivates the state to participate in the creation and management of large-scale infrastructural facilities that local communities are unable to afford and to intervene in conflicts of interest over public goods provision? Acemoglu suggests that fiscal incentives may lead the state to initiate investment in public goods provision even without demands by social actors; this self-interested motivation can be applied to both despotic and inclusive states.50 State investments in public goods provision do contribute to meeting fiscal need, particularly by consolidating a future tax base through famine relief or repairing infrastructural facilities. However, fiscal need is not the only purpose of the state in public goods provision. For example, the state’s arbitration of conflicts of interest among different communities is not determined by its fiscal needs. Why should communities expect the state to provide impartial arbitration in interregional or intersectoral conflicts of interest if that state is perceived by social actors as simply a violent machine or revenue maximizer? Therefore, in order to fully understand the state’s involvement in public goods provision for domestic governance, we need to go beyond a positivist understanding of the state and investigate how the state legitimates its power to society by claiming to safeguard the public interest of society. If such terms are accepted by society, they would then serve as a common 49

50

See the classic discussion on the use of coercive means to resolve the free-rider problem in Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Daron Acemoglu, “Politics and Economics in Weak and Strong States,” Journal of Monetary Economics 52, no. 7 (2005): 1199–226.

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platform on which society and state could interact for the provision of public goods. In this manner, the political discourse on state legitimacy studied by intellectual historians and political theorists can be linked to the empirical research on public goods conducted by socioeconomic historians. Let us thus turn to the complex question of state legitimation. Legitimation is one crucial component in the Weberian definition of the state as a governing apparatus that monopolizes the legitimate use of violence over a delimited territory.51 The legitimacy in Weber’s theory is either source based (such as the charisma of the leader or the established laws) or procedurally derived (such as a bureaucracy or a democracy with fair and competitive elections).52 Both these conceptions, however, suggest a one-directional conveyance of authority from the ruler to the ruled; neither says anything about how such transmitted or presented legitimacy is evaluated and accepted by the ruled. The appeal to popular belief to demonstrate state legitimacy runs the danger of circular argumentation: The state is legitimate because the people believe in it, and the people believe in a legitimate state.53 Thus the measurement of legitimacy in survey research in terms of social actors’ belief in state authority may not capture the substance of legitimacy in practice.54 Furthermore, a perfectly source-based or procedure-based state legitimacy can produce absurd consequences in practice: for example, rules of imperial succession that put an infant on the throne.55 This top-down, 51 52

53

54

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Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 78. Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 213–66. Reinhard Bendix follows Weber’s theory of source-based legitimacy to study the legitimacy of premodern kings; see Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). For a recent example of applying source-based legitimacy to the role of the state in economic growth, see Jared Rubin, Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 30–35. David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 90–97. For critiques of the Weberian norm-based or belief-based concept of state legitimacy, see Robert Grafstein, “The Failure of Weber’s Conception of Legitimacy: Its Causes and Implications,” Journal of Politics 43, no. 2 (May 1981): 456–72; Xavier Marquez, “The Irrelevance of Legitimacy,” Political Studies 64, no. 15 (2016): 19–34. For belief-based measurement of state legitimacy, see Margaret Levi, Audrey Sacks, and Tom Tyler, “Conceptualizing Legitimacy, Measuring Legitimating Beliefs,” American Behavioral Scientist 53, no. 3 (November 2009): 354–75. For critiques of the Weberian definition of legitimacy from a substantive perspective, see Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State, ed. John Keane (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 135.

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one-directional conception of legitimacy can also be found in the study of how the state appeals to ideological slogans, symbols, rituals, or the hiring of Western experts to strengthen its legitimacy.56 Yet legitimacy that rests upon symbolic power can be superficial and even misleading if it cannot secure the substantive consent of social actors. As James Scott has pointed out, the public transcript of legitimacy in authoritarian states is often mocked and ridiculed by subordinates who appear obedient and respectful to authority on public occasions.57 State legitimacy has not been taken seriously in classic Marxist scholarship, which views the state simply as a machine of suppression wielded by the dominant class.58 Scholars of state autonomy and state capacity treat legitimacy as a derivative product of a state that is capable of effectively maintaining social order and defeating foreign threats. Theda Skocpol contends that legitimacy only refers to acceptance of state authority by the politically dominant class. In this light, the loss of legitimacy is equivalent to the alienation of the dominant class to the state.59 If the autonomy and capacity of the state are simply instrumental to achieving the goal(s) set by state actors, then the embeddedness of an autonomous state as emphasized by Peter Evans mainly serves the function of incorporating expert knowledge from dynamic classes, such as drawing on industrialists in making effective development policies.60 However, this

56

57 58

59 60

Mara Loveman, “The Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power,” American Journal of Sociology 110, no. 6 (May 2005): 1651–83; Matthias vom Hau, “State Infrastructural Power and Nationalism: Comparative Lessons from Mexico and Argentina,” Studies in Comparative International Development 43, no. 3 (2008): 334–54; Joel S. Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 52; Calvert W. Jones, “Adviser to the King: Experts, Rationalization, and Legitimacy,” World Politics 71, no. 1 (January 2019): 1–43. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). See a synthesis of the instrumentalist theory of the state in Marxism and Leninism in Clyde W. Barrow, “Ralph Miliband and the Instrumentalist Theory of the State: The (Mis)Construction of an Analytic Concept,” in Class, Power and the State in Capitalist Society: Essays on Ralph Miliband, ed. Paul Wetherly, Clyde W. Barrow, and Peter Burnham (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 85–87. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 32. Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). For a discussion of instrumental state autonomy, see Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 9–14.

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elite-based approach to state legitimacy underestimates its general significance and ignores the possibility that social actors outside the politically dominant class could turn the discourse of state legitimacy to negotiate with the state. A proper understanding of state legitimacy is thus crucial to fully appreciate the importance of state autonomy. In the case of contemporary advanced capitalist societies, Gramsci argues that there is a sophisticated combination of coercion and consent. The cultural hegemony of the ruling class is embodied in its ability to speak as the representative of the general interest of society. However, this hegemonic class does so by relying upon the state to engineer the consent of the rest of society to the dominance of the ruling class as the representative of public interest to the rest of society.61 Both Ralph Miliband and Bob Jessop point out that the state in an advanced capitalist society proclaims itself as the “guardian of the good of all” or the “national interest,” rather than as a servant of the narrow interest of the capitalist class.62 However, consent is not the only possible result of the autonomy of the state defined by its duty to safeguard the public interest; such a definition can serve as a platform from which subordinates are able to criticize the dominant class for sacrificing the public interest to its own narrow interest. The importance of the general interest or public good of the society as the normative basis of state legitimacy is not unique to modern capitalist society. We can trace its historical roots in the process of state formation. From the late medieval era, political discourse on the meaning of kingship in Western Europe stressed the guarding of the common good or public interest of the kingdom or city-state.63 The monarch was presented as 61

62

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See the discussion of the consent manufactured by the dominant class to justify coercion in Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Books (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 228. See more discussion of the Gramscian conception of the hegemonic representation of the general interest of society by the dominant class in Dylan Riley, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 12–14. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 75; Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 174. Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 25–28; J. H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship, and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy, 1400–1525 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 67; Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 232–36.

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a public figure who would safeguard the public interest, which was different from the monarch as a private person.64 The rise of absolutism in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also carried a normative implication that the monarch as the public figure of sovereign power had ultimate political authority within the territory under his or her jurisdiction.65 Even pro-absolutist political thinkers such as Hobbes insisted that the divinely ordained absolute sovereign was subject to the duty to “procure the common interest” embodied in the welfare of the subjects: the “commonweal” or “commonwealth.”66 Recognition of the vital connection between the state’s responsibility for the public interest and its legitimation is important to both normative and empirical studies of the state. When the state provides public goods and services that go beyond the capacity of local communities, its coercive power, exemplified in the collection of taxes, can be justified to and accepted by the ruled. Meanwhile, to the extent that it is perceived as protecting the general welfare of society, the state becomes morally autonomous of the special interests of particular social groups or classes. This is the normative basis for state autonomy. Empirically, the grounding of state legitimacy in public interest is connected to specific state performance in addressing actual welfare problems caused by famine, calamities, economic disruptions, and so on. In such an organically conceived public interest, the concrete common interests of communities are viewed as integral components of the general interest. However, the complex and multifaceted linkages between public interest and welfare concerns in specific circumstances imply that the discourse over public interest is both interactional between state and society and dynamic, as socioeconomic changes often disrupt the extant balance between general interest and particular interests. Meanwhile, the scale and scope of “public” in the term “public interest” vary greatly. Different scales of public goods exist, ranging from those common to a small community or a city-state; to those of concern to multiple regions 64 65

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Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). On the development of an impersonal early modern state in Western Europe, see Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978); Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State. Quentin Skinner, “From the State of Princes to the Person of the State,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 381; Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 162 (2009): 343.

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consisting of many different communities; and finally to those associated with the entire realm under the jurisdiction of the state. The complicated relationships between these different levels compound the negotiation and contestation between state and social actors over how to safeguard the “public interest” in specific circumstances. Given this interdependence between state and society, state capacity should not be measured only by the amount of resources directly mobilized by the state for fighting foreign wars or held solely at the discretion of the central government.67 The capacity exhibited in providing public goods for domestic welfare shows that the state could appeal to its normative justification of power to mobilize resources across regions for the purpose of safeguarding the public interest; and in so doing it could rely on broad cooperation from social actors. Such cooperation, predicated upon sufficient acceptance of state claims to legitimacy, complements the state’s ability to directly deliver public goods, which in early modern states is rarely adequate. The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation is thus performance based or outcome based.68 Nevertheless, the measurement of such performance is not monopolized by the state, because the state’s efficacy in public goods provision and redress of specific welfare grievances can be measured and evaluated by social actors independent of the state. This is crucial to understand the interactions between state and society upon a common platform of state legitimacy. An empty belly cannot be filled with symbolic power or empty words; nor can the state entirely control or monopolize the interpretation of a legitimacy evaluated by its delivery of public goods. Social actors with specific stakes can judge the state’s performance independent of the official discourse or ideology; more importantly, they have some room to contest rightfully whether or not the state is fulfilling its proclaimed duty in concrete welfare issues. Performance-based state legitimacy therefore does not necessarily imply rejection of political participation. 67

68

The measurement of state capacity by the resources directly controlled by the state is quite common in quantitative studies of state capacity. See typical examples in Mark Dincecco, “The Rise of Effective States in Europe,” Journal of Economic History 75, no. 3 (September 2015): 901–18; Mark Dincecco, Political Transformation and Public Finances: Europe, 1650–1913 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See the discussion of performance-based legitimacy in authoritarian states in Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 50; Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 6–7.

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The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation that is embodied in concrete public goods provision thence serves as a common normative platform to allow state and society to interact in two opposite directions. On the one hand, the state can initiate or intervene in largescale public goods provision in the name of serving the public interest. On the other hand, social actors are legally and morally justified in calling on the state to discharge its acknowledged responsibility to resolve specific welfare grievances. For example, when a market economy threatens the social order, social actors can demand that the state protect society from being ruined by unregulated market forces.69 Social actors can also contest the fairness of the state’s adjudication of interregional or intersectoral conflicts of interest in similar terms, as both parties in disputes are members of a political community tied together by an organically conceived public interest. Because in practice the connections between specific welfare issues and the “public interest” are complex, such state–society interactions are processes of negotiation and even contestation, in which neither state nor social actors have total control over the interpretation of public interest. These two-directional state–society interactions thus represent an important space of political participation for both elites and nonelites. On the one hand, such engagement with the state in the form of popular petitions or even protests is not in essence a challenge to state authority: It rests upon the same set of norms regarding the duties of the state. Contention does not automatically imply rejection of state authority. This contrasts sharply with the appeal to a “hidden transcript” to evade the state or the use of passive resistance to undermine the state’s authority, as James Scott has brilliantly described.70 On the other hand, its roots in concrete policies and particular interests make such contestation different in nature from the debates over general political ideas or abstract principles held in the print media or coffee houses of eighteenth-century Western Europe described by Habermas.71 Nonetheless, its intimate 69

70 71

Polanyi’s classic work pays attention to the state’s role in regulating the market economy but not the state’s political duty to protect the public good. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957). Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). For the distortion and manipulation of “public opinion,” rather than the rationality assumed by Habermas for eighteenth-century Western Europe, see Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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connection to state legitimacy lends it a general political significance. Petitioning and contentious claims over specific welfare grievances justified by the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation are therefore inherent components of the political process of state formation. Having proposed this theory of state formation in which a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation serves as a common basis for state–society collaboration in public goods provision, how might one test it? For this purpose, I conduct a comparative historical analysis of England between 1533 and 1780, Japan between 1640 and 1895, and China between 1684 and 1911. Each case has been prominent in the scholarship on state formation. Just as importantly, these are all cases with an extensive historical literature, as well as rich primary sources, in languages of which I have a reasonably good command. Relatively equal familiarity with the cases studied and competence in their respective scholarships are, I would argue, vital to a truly contextualized comparative analysis.72 The empirical strategy adopted throughout is to delve deeply into the respective historical contexts of state formation and bring each case into dialogue with the others. This methodology of contextualized comparative historical analysis allows me to identify similar patterns across seemingly different cases, as well as continuity and discontinuity in the development of state–society interactions. The theory of state formation developed herein is thus more general in nature, but still well grounded in historical context. Moreover, by integrating domestic governance with state legitimacy, it casts new light on the transition from early modern to modern politics; in particular, it helps us rethink the nature and role of popular contention in that process. The analysis is divided into two parts. Part I examines an earlier period for each state and focuses on how public goods provision secured state legitimacy in domestic governance. Part II looks at a later period in which the understanding of the public interest expanded to include nonmaterial dimensions, and how that expansion transformed state–society interactions. Let us begin with the earlier episodes: Tudor and early Stuart England between 1533 and 1640, Tokugawa Japan between 1640 and 1853, and Qing China between 1684 and 1840. These three cases are comparable in important ways in examining state formation from the perspective of public goods provision in domestic governance. All were early modern states that legitimated their power 72

I will return to the importance of contextualization in comparative historical analysis in the Conclusion.

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by safeguarding an organically conceived public interest that entailed passive rights to subordinates. None was involved in consecutive and expensive foreign wars, so state power was mainly used for domestic governance and public interest was defined primarily in terms of domestic welfare. Moreover, the interactions between each state and society in public goods provision crucial to domestic governance were largely independent from each other. In contrast to the focus on the extraction of resources in the conventional scholarship of state formation and state capacity, I pay special attention to the spending on public goods provision vital to domestic governance and maintenance of social order. These three cases varied greatly in territorial size, population, political institutions, and culture. In particular, early modern England and Tokugawa Japan were much smaller than Qing China. Still, their territorial scale was large enough to generate many cross-regional welfare problems that self-governed local communities simply could not resolve by themselves. Furthermore, all had serious defects in their respective fiscal institutions. Decentralized fiscal systems seriously weakened the fiscal capacity of the royal government in early modern England and the shogunate in Tokugawa Japan. The Qing state possessed a centrally managed fiscal system, yet its fiscal capacity was restricted. This was due to the fixed quota in both tax collection and government spending, as well as a rigid fiscal management that did not give even provincial governments independent budgets. Given the inadequacy of state capacity to fulfill state obligations, a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was crucial to domestic governance and is common to these three cases. Upon this normative platform shared by state and social actors, similar patterns appear of state–society collaboration to deliver public goods vital to domestic governance. The direction of the collaboration, however, might differ. In Tudor and early Stuart England and Tokugawa Japan, the limitations of self-governed communities in building and maintaining large-scale public infrastructure were complemented by intervention from the royal government and the shogunate. In Qing China, the weakness imposed by a rigid central fiscal system was to some extent compensated by the active local participation in public goods provision encouraged by the Qing state. This common pattern of state–society collaboration was the major cause of the relatively good governance achieved in all three cases, despite the quite limited fiscal capacity of each state relative to its territory and obligations. The empirical identification of such similar patterns across mutually independent cases strengthens the generality of the

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theory of state formation that integrates domestic governance with state legitimacy. The comparative methodology used here is to uncover congruence among apparently different cases.73 In examining the resilience of the early modern state with a weak fiscal capacity, the beginning and end year of each earlier episode are determined by the nature of the state and its circumstances. None was engaged in consecutive and expensive warfare. Each case had an early modern state characterized by the institutionalization of a governing apparatus that asserted sovereign power over a delimited territory. As Quentin Skinner has pointed out, the emergence of the early modern state is a watershed in the development of the state, one that is embodied in the usage of the term “state” in its modern sense.74 The early modern state is modern in the political sense as the state is conceived as an impersonal governing apparatus, which distinguishes itself from the ruler as a private person. It is early modern as it has not yet developed centralized institutions of public finance to regulate economy and society. The characterization of the early modern state as such does not imply a teleological trajectory to a modern state. A transformation into a modern state, as well as the resilience of an early modern state, can occur in different historical circumstances at different times. The treatment of England (1533–1640) starts from the break with Rome that made the crown the head of both the secular government and the Church of England. England’s involvement in continental power struggles during this time was limited in both scale and duration, which contrasted sharply with the almost continual and increasingly expensive foreign wars that it fought with France and its allies after the Glorious Revolution in 1688.75 In Tudor England, by the mid-sixteenth century, increasingly complex formal procedures in administration and legislation led to exponential growth in the amount of written documentation  – proclamations, writs, and statutes  – involved in the process of transmitting information and orders between the center and local offices. The personal rule of the monarch became impractical. The “Tudor revolution in government” described by G. R. Elton captures the core feature 73 74

75

Dan Slater and Daniel Ziblatt, “The Enduring Indispensability of the Controlled Comparison,” Comparative Political Studies 46, no. 10 (October 2013): 1303. Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 117–18; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 349–58. Brewer, The Sinews of Power.

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of this institutionalization of the royal government, even though the speed of institutional development and the degree of continuity before and after Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) are debated.76 By the late sixteenth century, the English state had transformed into an impersonalized governing institution clearly distinct from the monarch as a person.77 As Michael Braddick has pointed out, the English state in the early seventeenth century referred to the entire political apparatus; the center acted as the ultimate political authority and coordinated a network of offices within a delimited territory; and serving the public interest of the realm was held to be the duty of officeholders.78 The royal government inculcated such a public duty into officeholders across the country even though they were unsalaried. Over time, the discourse of public interest engendered a sense of public duty among officeholders and a significant degree of public trust in the offices of the state, even though corruption remained widespread in practice.79 Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868) was not a tributary state of Qing China or any other power. After suppressing the Shimabara Rebellion in 1638, Tokugawa Japan entered into the Great Domestic Peace (tenka taihei; 1640–1853), the period examined as our first episode for Japan. This is a rare case of state formation in peaceful times without external wars at all. The year 1640 represented the beginning of the transition of the Tokugawa regime from a system of military mobilization to one of civil administration, and of the samurai from mostly illiterate warriors to well-educated administrators.80 The formation of the early modern state in Tokugawa Japan was characterized by parallel processes of state formation both in domains governed by lords known as daimyo and in territory directly governed by the bakufu (the shogunate). In the domestic peace that ensued after 1640, the political authority of both the shogun and the daimyo was justified by safeguarding the welfare of the subjects in the territory under 76

77 78 79 80

G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1953). For the continuity of the Tudor administrative revolution before and after Henry VIII, see Christopher Coleman and David Starkey, eds., Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 352. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 9, 69–72. Mark Knights, Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and Its Empire, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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their respective rulership.81 With the increasing complexity of the economic and social landscape over the course of the eighteenth century, both the shogunal and domain governments became more institutionalized. From the early eighteenth century onward, collective deliberation dominated the making of major policies in both the shogunate and domain governments; governance was based upon a massive corpus of codified laws and administrative regulations and precedents.82 In consequence, the shogunate and ruling daimyo households (ie) emerged as impersonal governing apparatuses distinct from the shogun or daimyo as a private person. From the mid-eighteenth century onward, both shogun and daimyo often used the term kokka (guojia in Chinese), or “state,” to characterize the impersonal institutional nature of the governing apparatuses upon which they relied to rule their respective territories. Major daimyo, particularly the “outside” (tozama) daimyo, were autonomous in legislation and could even mete out the death penalty to their subjects without the sanction of the shogunate.83 Nonetheless, the use of kokka by daimyo and their retainer-officials should not be taken to mean “sovereign 81

82

83

The consciousness of the public rather than personal characteristics of the daimyo’s power originated late in the Warring States period (1467–1615) when the daimyo realized the importance of good governance of subjects to increasing its military power. See Ike Susumu, “Chiiki kokka no bunritsu kara to¯itsu kokka no kakuritsu e” [From the decentralization of regional states to state unification], in Shintaikei Nihonshi, vol. 1, Kokkashi, ed. Miyachi Masato, Gomi Fumihiko, Satō Makoto et al. (Tokyo: Yamagawa shuppansha, 2006), 234– 37; Katsumata Shizuo, “Ju¯go-ju¯roku seiki no Nihon” [Japan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon tsu¯shi, vol. 10, Chu¯sei (4), ed. Katsumata Shizuo, Asao Naohiro, Amino Yoshihiko et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), 32–33. For the institutionalization of the shogunate, see James W. White, “State Growth and Popular Protest in Tokugawa Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 14, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 1–25; Daniel V. Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 15–19; for a similar process of institutionalization in major domain governments, see Takano Nobuharu, “Daimyo¯ to han” [Domain lords and domains], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon rekishi, vol. 11, Kinsei (2), ¯ tsu To¯ru, Sakurai Eiji, and Fujii Joji (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2014), 37–70; Fujii ed. O Jo¯ji, Bakuhan ryo¯shu no kenryoku ko¯zo¯ [The power structure of the lords of shogunate and domain] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002), ch. 13. Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan. For important works on the autonomy of major domain governments in Tokugawa Japan, see Philip C. Brown, Central Authority and Local Autonomy in the Formation of Early Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Mark Ravina, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Luke S. Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Luke S. Roberts, Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012).

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state”; they were well aware that they were subject to the shogunate as the higher political authority in many important aspects such as mintage of currency, foreign relations, map-making, and national defense.84 To characterize the Tokugawa political system as a “composite state” or even a conglomeration of independent states ruled respectively by the shogunate and various daimyo recognizes the autonomy of daimyo in their own territories, particularly before the mid-eighteenth century.85 By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the growth in the shogunate’s authority over daimyo, not only in national defense but also in safeguarding the wider domestic welfare across the boundaries of domains, changed the political nature of their relationship. Indeed, the delegation theory of shogunal power developed by the late eighteenth century highlighted that the normative basis of the shogunal authority over daimyo rested upon the duty of the shogunate to protect the public interest of Japan on behalf of the emperor.86 This later Tokugawa state was very similar to a quasi-federal state in which the shogunate served as the higher political authority over daimyo.87 In China, the state as an impersonal apparatus of governance appeared earlier than it did in Tudor England or Tokugawa Japan. The meaning of the term guojia in China underwent similar changes to the word “state” in English: From originally referring to the status and condition of the emperor, it came to refer to a set of impersonal governing institutions. Before the middle of the Tang dynasty (618–907), guojia was often used 84

85

86

87

Mizubayashi Takeshi, Ho¯kensei no saihen to Nihon-teki shakai no kakuritsu [The reorganization of the feudal system and the establishment of Japanese society] (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1987), 280–81; Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Sugimoto Fumiko, Kinsei seiji ku¯kanron: Sabaki, o¯yake, “Nihon” [Early modern political history in terms of spatial theory: Judgements, public sphere, and “Japan”] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuappankai, 2018), ch. 3. This was underestimated in earlier scholarship on the political history of Tokugawa Japan. See Ravina, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan, 27; Roberts, Performing the Great Peace, 9–14. Fukaya Katsumi, “18 seiki ko¯han no Nihon” [Japan in the second half of the eighteenth century], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon tsu¯shi, vol. 14, Kinsei (4), ed. Asao Naohiro, Amino Yoshihiko, Ishii Susumu et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 47–51; Fujita Satoru, Kinsei seijishi to Tenno¯ [Early modern political history and the emperor] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1999), ch. 3. Ronald P. Toby, “Rescuing the Nation from History: The State of the State in Early Modern Japan,” Monumenta Nipponica 56, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 230; Mitani Hiroshi, Ishinshi saiko¯: Ko¯gi o¯sei kara shu¯ken datsu mibunka e [Rethinking the history of the Restoration: From public authority and imperial rule to centralization and the removal of status] (Tokyo: NKH shuppan, 2017), 69.

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Introduction

to refer to the emperor himself or the emperor’s household.88 By the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), it alluded to the governing institution as an impersonal entity that separated the emperorship as a public figure from the emperor as a private person.89 The institutionalization and centralization of the state formed one important political outcome of the process known as the ‘Tang–Song transition’ (eighth through tenth centuries).90 As the historian Miyazaki Ichisada has emphasized, the absolute authority of the emperor did not imply a personal autocracy. Rather, it signified the highest political authority of the central government in the use of political power in localities and civilian control of the armed forces, which depended upon fiscal resources allocated by the central government.91 Scholar-officials in the Northern Song thus could publicly proclaim that they and the emperor “jointly governed the realm” (gongzhi tianxia) as officials with a public duty rather than as personal servants of the emperor.92 88

89

90

91

92

Xing Yitian, Tianxia yijia: Huangdi, guanliao yu shehui [One family under Heaven: Emperor, bureaucracy and society] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2011), 15; Ogata Isamu, Chu¯goku kodai no “ie” to kokka: Ko¯tei shihaika no chitsujo ko¯zo¯ [Family and state in ancient China: A historical study of the structure of imperial rule] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1979), 265–66. Gan Huaizhen, Huangquan, liyi yu jingdian quanshi: Zhongguo gudai zhengzhishi yanjiu [Imperial power, rituals and classical interpretation: A political history of ancient China] (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2008), ch. 6. Peter Bol also points out the impersonal nature of the Song government as being in nature different from the personal rule of the emperor. See Peter Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), 120–21. For the rise of an early modern economy after the Tang–Song transition, see Paul J. Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003); William Guanglin Liu, The Chinese Market Economy, 1000–1500 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015). Miyazaki Ichisada, To¯yo¯teki kinsei [East Asian early modernity] (Tokyo: Kyuiku Taimususha, 1950). See the development of the thesis of institutionalized emperorship in the Song dynasty in Hirata Shigeki, So¯dai seiji ko¯zo¯ kenkyu¯ [A study of Song-dynasty political structure] (Tokyo: Kyu¯ko Shoin, 2012). On the development of civilian control of the military, see Teraji Jun, Nanso¯ shoki seijishi kenkyu¯ [A study of the political history of the early Southern Song dynasty] (Hiroshima: Keisuisha, 1988), ch. 1. For a synthesis of the literature on emperorship as distinct from the emperor as a private individual, see Peter K. Bol, “Emperors Can Claim Antiquity Too: Emperorship and Autocracy under the New Policies,” in Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics, ed. Patricia B. Ebrey and Maggie Bickford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 175–79. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 126; Deng Xiaonan, Zuzong zhi fa: Bei Song qianqi zhengzhi shulüe [Methods of the ancestors: A political overview of the early Northern Song] (Beijing: Shenghuo, dushu, xinzhi sanlian shudian, 2006).

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In particular, policy-making was based upon huge amounts of information in the form of written memorials submitted from regional governments and of official archives held by the central government. The sheer size of this documentation constituted a formidable information constraint on the arbitrary use of personal power by the emperor, no matter how intelligent and hard-working he was.93 The emergence of the early modern state after the Tang–Song transition thence marked a watershed in state formation in China. The degree of institutionalization in governance and the importance of domestic welfare to state legitimacy made the state thereafter qualitatively different from that found in previous dynasties.94 However, these normative and institutional constraints on the personal power of the emperor are neglected by many social scientists who view the emperor as having a high degree of despotic power: He “owned the whole of China and could do as he wished with any individual or group within his domain.”95 Such an early modern state as an impersonal governing apparatus that justified its power by protecting domestic welfare was in general sustained into the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).96 In Qing China, large-scale military campaigns came to an end after the suppression of the Three Feudatories Rebellion and the conquest of Taiwan in the early 1680s. Between 1684 and 1840, the period considered here, there were no major civil wars within China proper.97 The Qing government did launch military campaigns on its frontiers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but these wars did not present 93

94

95 96

97

For the institutionalization of government archives and its implications for policy-making, see Hilde De Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015). Philip Kuhn vividly described the deep frustration the Qing-dynasty Qianlong emperor experienced in dealing with the ministers and provincial governors who had a great advantage in controlling the information available to him. Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Social scientists who underestimate the significance of the rise of an early modern state in China often treat the state as unchanging across the imperial period (i.e., from the Qin dynasty founded in 221 BCE to the Qing dynasty that fell in 1911): “two thousand years of autocracy.” See such examples in Bendix, Kings or People, 49–60; Dingxin Zhao, The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State,” 185. Why was the institutionalized early modern state so resilient in China despite the invasions of the Mongols (Yuan dynasty, 1271–1368) and the Manchus (Qing dynasty), and the highly personal and sometimes arbitrary use of imperial power by the first emperor of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644)? This question deserves further investigation. See Chapter 1 for a definition of China proper.

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Introduction

significant fiscal difficulty.98 Likewise, it had adequate fiscal capacity and military power to suppress domestic rebellions, including the White Lotus Rebellion between 1795 and 1805.99 Its performance in providing public goods for domestic governance was thence the key to the legitimacy of the Qing state. To safeguard public interest in domestic welfare was by no means a simple task for these states, as all experienced significant socioeconomic changes during the respective periods examined here: integration of the domestic market, commercialization of agriculture, urban expansion, and population mobility, not to mention an increasing literacy rate that fostered a rising political consciousness among the populace. Although the degree of development of the market economy varied, each state had to face serious social problems caused by fluctuations in the markets and the growth of interregional trade, such as the vulnerability of urban populations to high food prices. Increasing interregional and intergroup conflicts of interest threatened social order. R. Bin Wong contends that the state’s commitments to domestic governance and social welfare were unique to state formation in China, whereas European states were committed to extracting resources for fighting wars and left the maintenance of social order and welfare provision to social elites and the church.100 But the imperative to maintain “good governance” in a commercially dynamic society was common to all three states. Each earlier episode ends with events that heralded a period of great challenge that threatened the state’s ability to meet its basic obligations to the public interest and thus its legitimacy. The terminal year for England (1640) is set prior to the outbreak of the English Civil War (1642–1651), which marked the beginning of great changes both in public finance and in the political system. The terminal years for Japan (1853) and China (1840) are set at the times of their respective forced “openings” by Western powers. This framing thus highlights the indigenous sources of the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation in the two non-Western cases. 98

On the contribution of the commercialized economy to the frontier wars launched by the Qing government, see Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). 99 Wensheng Wang, White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 100 R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), chs. 4 and 5; R. Bin Wong, “Taxation and Good Governance in China, 1500–1914,” in The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History, 1500–1914, ed. Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla and Patrick K. O’Brien with Franciso Comín Comín (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 353–77.

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Following these challenges, each state undertook reform of its institutions so as to enhance its fiscal capacity under new socioeconomic conditions; we see this to different degrees in England between 1640 and 1780, Japan between 1853 and 1895, and China between 1840 and 1911. Despite great historical events, such as the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the Meiji Restoration, and the Taiping Rebellion, the state’s proclaimed duty to safeguard the public interest continued to serve as a common normative platform across these three cases. State– society interactions centered on provision of public goods in the earlier episodes therefore provide crucial background to identify both continuity and discontinuity in such interactions in the later episodes under the new circumstances of enhancing state capacity, industrialization, and urban development. The terminal years for the later episodes are set by a juncture of “great divergence” in state development. In England and Japan, large-scale collective petitions that appealed to the state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest began to demand fundamental political reforms; in so doing, they ushered in the transition to a modern state. In China, such petitions of public grievance did not appear until 1907, and were quickly followed by the final collapse of the imperial state in 1911. The comparative methodology used here is to explain divergent outcomes in state–society interactions in the new circumstances that emerged from a common basis: the public interestbased discourse of state legitimation. In these later episodes, despite important changes, the continuity in the pattern of state–society interaction around domestic welfare was remarkable, and occurred regardless of whether there were changes to sovereignty. The challenge for the state to safeguard domestic welfare was particularly serious in England due to rapid economic integration and industrial development after 1640, and especially after 1700. In Meiji Japan, the traditional ideology of benevolent rule remained influential in spite of great efforts to learn from the West and the implementation of programs of modernization. The Qing state also met new challenges in providing public goods for domestic governance under changed socioeconomic circumstances with its decentralized fiscal operation. In all these three cases, the degree of organization of social actors and the resources deployed by them to participate in public goods provision increased dramatically; moreover, both were permitted and even encouraged by the state. State–society interactions over public goods provision related to domestic welfare continued as before, even though the capacity of social actors in public goods provision increased significantly.

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Where discontinuity in such participation occurred, it was mainly caused by tension among different dimensions of the public interest; that is, when dimensions other than domestic welfare became prominent. A passive conception of rights derived from the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation could greatly expand political participation when state–society interactions were compounded by diverse dimensions of the public interest. In England and Japan, new types of claims and demands emerged in the form of collective petitions of public grievances that were not about specific material concerns; they were made, however, upon the same basis of state responsibility for the public interest. In England between 1640 and 1642 and again in 1679–1680, the issue of “true Christianity” was held by many – including both elites and common people  – as a “public good” that the sovereign had the duty to protect. In Japan, the unequal treaties with Western powers signed by the shogunate and inherited by the Meiji government were widely considered by contemporary Japanese as a “national dishonor” or “national shame” that was contrary to the public interest of Japan. More importantly, issues of nonmaterial public good in both England and Japan generated great conflict between two dimensions of the public interest: general domestic welfare and international power struggles. Should the state use its greatly enhanced fiscal capacity more for improving domestic welfare or for military spending for imperial wars? This conflict constitutes a vital backdrop if we are to understand how the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation instigated massive but lawful cross-regional and cross-sectoral petitions of public grievances that demanded fundamental political reforms: the parliamentary reform in England between the 1760s and 1780s, and the demand to establish the Diet as the institution of representation in Japan between the 1870s and 1880s. In both cases, the cross-regional and crosssectoral collective petitions of public grievances greatly stimulated the development of associational activities and the public deliberation of general issues of public interest in mass media such as newspapers and printed pamphlets. People involved in these heated debates over general political issues, however, agreed on the state’s duty to protect that public interest. The development of a public sphere is therefore intimately connected to severe conflicts among different dimensions of the public interest. Great expansion of the public sphere took place within the framework of state legitimacy, and did not necessarily reject state authority. The terminal years for England and Japan are thus set at 1780 and 1895, respectively.

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Qing China presents a sharp contrast. The Qing state after suppressing the Taiping, Nian, and Muslim rebellions also enhanced its fiscal capacity. This allowed it to resume its role in collaborating with social actors to deliver public goods to maintain domestic governance in the new circumstances of the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, state legitimacy, unlike that in England or Japan, continued to be tied primarily to the public interest understood in terms of domestic welfare. Before the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), neither issues of nonmaterial public good nor a conflict between the international and domestic dimensions of the public interest emerged to generate collective petitions of public grievance. Qing China in the late nineteenth century thence demonstrates the strong resilience of an early modern state that legitimated its power by taking care of general domestic welfare; this resilience was crushed only by international pressure after 1895. The terminal year for China is the fall of the Qing state in 1911. In order to further strengthen the causal argument that tensions between the domestic and international dimensions of the public interest are the necessary condition for instigating cross-regional and crosssectoral collective petitions for fundamental political changes still justified by the terms of state legitimacy, I adopt a natural experiment approach. I take the astronomical indemnities imposed on China due to a series of events between the Qing defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Incident (1899–1900) as a proxy for the international dimension of the public interest. The conflict between domestic welfare and payment of indemnities did in fact give rise to cross-regional collective petitions of public grievance that demanded the establishment of an elected parliament between 1907 and 1910. These collective petitions of public grievance across the country were organized by reformers and gentrymerchants who remained loyal to the Qing dynasty. Needless to say, this natural experiment is only for the purpose of testing causal inferences in counterfactual situations.101 In actuality, the payment of indemnities had already made the Qing state unable to fulfill its basic functions in providing public goods for domestic governance; nor could it protect the national interest in international politics. Thus its refusal to immediately establish an elected parliament in 1910 contributed significantly to its collapse in the Republican Revolution (Xinhai geming) of 1911. 101

See the discussion of using historical events as natural experiments in social science in Jared Diamond and James Robinson, eds., Natural Experiments of History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010).

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The rest of the book is divided into two parts. Part I, which constitutes the bulk of the study, focuses on the earlier episodes. It describes the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation for each case and explores how it operated as a basis for collaboration and contention in different aspects of early modern governance. In Chapter 1, I detail the nature of the early modern state in Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China, and emphasize the discrepancy between the state’s limited fiscal capacity and its proclaimed duty to safeguard the public interest in domestic welfare. In Chapters 2 and 3, I examine the collaboration between state and society upon a shared normative platform of state legitimation to combat the subsistence crisis and finance infrastructural facilities. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate similar patterns in the state’s response to popular petitions justified by passive rights that demanded the state fulfill its duty to redress welfare grievances. Part II takes up the later episodes. I briefly outline the causes of state crises in England in the 1640s, in Japan between 1853 and 1868, and in China in the 1840s and 1850s. This provides a backdrop against which to explore the process of how each state endeavored to reestablish its legitimacy. Chapter 5 then explores both continuity and discontinuity in state–society interactions upon the shared normative platform of state legitimation in periods when each state had greatly enhanced its fiscal capacity while society confronted new socioeconomic and international circumstances. I demonstrate how the conflicts among diverse dimensions of the public interest instigated cross-regional collective petitions of public grievances that demanded fundamental political reforms, but were still justified by the state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest. Such petitions of public grievance occurred in England and Japan, but not in China. In the Conclusion, I review how the findings of this research change our view of state formation and popular contention, and elaborate upon the importance of contextualization to comparative historical analysis and social science research in general.

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Part I SOURCES OF EARLY MODERN STATE RESILIENCE

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1 Legitimacy and Resilience of the Early Modern State

Tudor and early Stuart England between 1533 and 1640, Tokugawa Japan between 1640 and 1853, and Qing China between 1684 and 1840 varied greatly in their political institutions, territorial scale, population, and international circumstances. In each case, the source of sovereign power was conceived differently. God was the divine source of the power of the English crown, and the Mandate from Heaven (tianming) served the same purpose for the Qing emperor. The shogunate in the early Tokugawa era often referred to the Way of Heaven (tendo¯); this was similar to a Heavenly Mandate. By the late eighteenth century, however, the shogunate came to emphasize that its authority was delegated from the emperor (a nominal sovereign) to safeguard the public interest of Japan. The intellectual frameworks that underscored the importance of public interest to domestic governance and state legitimacy also varied: Christian humanism in early modern England and the Confucian secular humanist concept of benevolent rule in Tokugawa Japan and Qing China. However, all were early modern states, and each legitimated its power by proclaiming its duty to protect an organically conceived public interest of the realm. The sketches in this chapter establish the comparability of their processes of state legitimation through safeguarding the public interest along the dimension of domestic welfare. This is not to say that normative ideas such as “public good,” “common good,” or “public interest” are new to the early modern period. They have a long history, as seen in the Confucian teaching of benevolent rule in the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BCE) in China and the ancient Greek political philosophy on the common good, to cite just two examples. 37

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Part I  Sources of Early Modern State Resilience

However, a fundamental transformation occurred in the early modern state when the safeguarding of the welfare of subjects became a duty and obligation that imposed a normative constraint on the ruler; it was no longer simply a virtue or good deed on the part of an individual monarch.1 This state duty to protect the public interest of a society conceived as an organic “body politic” in which unequal social sectors were tied together by a common interest was found in Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. Furthermore, each public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was outcome based, as it was embodied in specific social policies related to various welfare issues in domestic governance, ranging from local to general. The interactions between state and society upon the public interestbased discourse of state legitimation were crucial to domestic governance in these three early modern states; each had a very limited fiscal capacity, and none could directly provide the public goods necessary for domestic governance. The discrepancy between the state’s capacity and its proclaimed duty became more apparent and more serious as commercialization, growth of interregional trade, and demographic and social changes generated new welfare problems that threatened the social order. Moreover, the development of popular education and the rise of literacy rates increasingly enabled subordinates to turn the state’s discourse on legitimacy to making claims to the state over diverse welfare issues. Under such circumstances, the resilience of each early modern state was thus grounded in an equilibrium of state–society collaboration that enabled the provision of the public goods vital to domestic welfare; and this equilibrium could accommodate a significant degree of contention and conflict. In sketching the nature of each state and its discourse of legitimation during the earlier episodes examined, this chapter presents a picture of the early modern English, Japanese, and Chinese states that differs in important ways from the received understanding in social science. To do so, it draws heavily on the historical research of recent decades, particularly Japanese and Chinese scholarship. To comprehend how these states actually functioned and to compare them meaningfully, such a deeper engagement is necessary (even if it occasionally makes for somewhat 1

Quentin Skinner, “Republican Virtues in an Age of Princes,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 118–59; Whitney R. D. Jones, The Tree of Commonwealth, 1450–1793 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), 20–25.

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dense reading). Furthermore, the background laid out here provides important context for the case studies of state–society collaborations in famine relief, infrastructure financing, and popular petitioning that make up the rest of Part I; and as a baseline from which to evaluate both the continuities and the transformations that are the subject of Part II.

1.1  Tudor and Early Stuart England, 1533–1640 The English crown in late medieval times proclaimed its duty to protect the “public good” or “common good” of the realm for its subjects.2 The breach with Rome begun in 1533 made Henry VIII not only the sovereign of a secular state, but also the spiritual head of the Church of England. The forceful imposition of the Reformation in the 1530s in England where the majority of the population was still Catholic produced much turmoil, confusion, resentment, and resistance.3 By plundering the wealth of the Catholic monasteries, which owned some 20–25 percent of the land in England, the Tudor state broadened its fiscal basis, but dismantled the ecclesiastical institutions that had played important roles in charity provision and maintenance of social order in local communities. At the same time, the Tudor state had to face severe governance problems caused by the population growth, inflation, and social dislocation that resulted from a commercializing economy. The population almost doubled in the period from the 1520s to the 1680s, growing from an estimated 2.5 million to some 5 million.4 The enclosure of common land and the emergence of capitalistic farming led to rural polarization; many landless peasants became vagabonds.5 Rising poverty was exacerbated by inflation. Between the 1490s and the 1570s, the average prices of wheat and rye rose 3.7-fold and 4.6-fold, respectively.6 The real wages of

2

3 4 5 6

Buchanan Sharp, Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England: The Regulation of Grain Marketing, 1256–1631 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 3; Geoff Baldwin, “The ‘Public’ as a Rhetorical Community in Early Modern England,” in Communities in Early Modern England, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 201. Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 122. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985). Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 116.

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labor fell dramatically: 50 percent for urban building craftsmen in southern England between the 1500s and the 1550s, for instance.7 In this situation, the justification of state power to society was intimately connected to the protection of society, particularly while the state was establishing its ultimate authority in religion after splitting from Rome. From the 1530s onward, concepts such as “common weal” or “public weal” frequently appeared in policy debates among royal officials, members of Parliament, and scholars who were influenced by civic humanism.8 Royal officials used terms such as “commonwealth” and “common good” to emphasize the state’s duty to protect the general welfare of the realm, while rejecting the egalitarian and republican implications of the term “commonwealth” found in Italian civic humanism.9 The early modern state in England between 1533 and 1640 had unitary administrative and legal systems, but the royal government did not have centralized fiscal institutions. The early modern English state as a demesne state did not tax the whole realm on a yearly basis. Local rates were collected mainly for local expenditures independent of the royal government. The fiscal constitution of the English state in this period was characterized by a separation between the crown’s ordinary revenue and the extraordinary revenue granted by Parliament. The ordinary revenue came mainly from the royal estates, the customs duties, the fees derived from legal adjudications, and some feudal privileges of the crown such as purveyance and wardships. It funded not only the royal household but also the normal operation of the royal government. The extraordinary revenues were granted by Parliament to help cover costs caused by foreign wars and defense against invasions. Both the assessment and collection of the granted supplies were in the hands of local elites who were unsalaried officials. Nonetheless, the granting of parliamentary supplies not only indicated the loyalty of the subjects to the crown, but also embodied recognition of the special duty of the crown as the sovereign to safeguard the commonwealth in times of war.10

7 8 9

10

Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 146. Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 1. Monarchical advisors in the 1530s, such as Sir Thomas Elyot, preferred to use “public weal” rather than “commonweal,” as the latter term was considered to carry republican implications. See Early Modern Research Group, “Commonwealth: The Social, Cultural, and Conceptual Contexts of an Early Modern Keyword,” Historical Journal 54, no. 3 (September 2011): 659–87. Roger Schofield, Taxation under the Early Tudors, 1485–1547 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); David Harris Sacks, “The Paradox of Taxation: Fiscal Crises, Parliament,

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Between 1530 and 1640, the crown’s ordinary revenues shrank significantly due to both the massive sale of royal estates and rapidly rising prices. Although the royal government sometimes used the extraordinary revenues granted by Parliament to cover the deficits incurred in domestic administration, the collection of parliamentary revenues in principle was not an annual tax upon the whole nation in peaceful years.11 The royal government’s proclaimed duty to safeguard the commonwealth in normal times was therefore not accompanied by the necessary financial resources. The transition of England to a tax state only occurred after the English Civil War.12 In this decentralized fiscal system, spending on local public infrastructure and poor relief came from rates assessed and collected by unsalaried officeholders in rural and urban areas. Yet this financing method could hardly meet the demand for public goods across larger regions. The fiscal structure of a demesne state greatly restricted the capacity of the royal government to directly provide public goods. Nonetheless, the importance of social order and general welfare was recognized by both the royal government and property owners, which allowed the Tudor state to collaborate over local governance with the propertied elites in both urban and rural areas. With the dissolution of church properties, a town that had received a royal charter of incorporation could preserve some of the endowed lands and properties of these churches for educational and charitable purposes, a benefit not available to unincorporated towns. The royal government was thence able to use its power and patronage to consolidate urban management into the hands of a few oligarchs whom the center considered politically reliable.13 Moreover, the crown could rely upon incorporated towns to implement its social, economic, and religious regulations in urban areas.

11

12

13

and Liberty in England, 1450–1640,” in Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government, 1450–1789, ed. Philip T. Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 23; G. L. Harriss, “Medieval Doctrines in the Debates on Supply, 1610–1629,” in Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 76–79; G. L. Harriss, “Theory and Practice in Royal Taxation: Some Observations,” English Historical Review 97, no. 385 (October 1982): 813. J. D. Alsop, “The Theory and Practice of Tudor Taxation,” English Historical Review 97, no. 382 (January 1982): 1–30; J. D. Alsop, “Innovation in Tudor Taxation,” English Historical Review 99, no. 390 (January 1984): 83–93; R. W. Hoyle, “Crown, Parliament and Taxation in Sixteenth-Century England,” English Historical Review 109, no. 434 (November 1994): 1174–96. Patrick K. O’Brien and Philip A. Hunt, “England, 1485–1815,” in The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, 1200–1815, ed. Richard Bonney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 53–100. Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 179–80.

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By the early seventeenth century, participation in the autonomous self-governance of the incorporated towns and boroughs by the urban middling sort such as crafts- and tradespeople caused tension with these oligarchs over how to better serve the common good of the “little commonwealth” of the incorporated towns and boroughs.14 Although the royal government did not appoint the officeholders, self-governance in localities did not constitute an autonomous political basis from which to challenge the royal power or resist its penetration. Instead, urban selfgovernance existed within the network of state power in which the royal government was the ultimate political authority. The privileges and rights of each incorporated town and borough were granted by royal charter and they were subject to the higher political authority of the royal government. The magistrates of incorporated towns and boroughs also tried hard to cultivate networks of nobles and courtiers so as to secure favorable treatment from the royal government.15 The existing common law tradition was inadequate to handle new problems generated by social and economic development over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the royal government as the ultimate authority in the realm intervened to adjudicate in the name of safeguarding the “public good” or “public interest” over the narrow concerns of local communities. The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation thence allowed the common law to go beyond norms or habits common to local communities in addressing the general welfare of the realm.16 By the late seventeenth century, the royal government, in the name of safeguarding the public interest of the realm as one “big commonwealth,” often intervened to arbitrate clashes of interests between these “little commonwealths” and surrounding counties or other urban centers.17 Citizens’ rights in early modern England 14 15

16

17

Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 5. Catherine F. Patterson, Urban Patronage in Early Modern England: Corporate Boroughs, the Landed Elite, and the Crown, 1580–1640 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Daniel Lee, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 278; Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 99–112. One such example is the dispute over fishing rights between Great Yarmouth in Norfolk and Lowestoft in Suffolk. See David M. Dean, “Parliament, Privy Council, and Local Politics in Elizabethan England: The Yarmouth-Lowestoft Fishing Dispute,” Albion 22, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 39–64.

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were thus passive rights granted by royal charter to individual incorporated towns and boroughs and their residents; and were not general but exclusive of any outsiders or “strangers.” They had not yet evolved into the general citizens’ rights that Margaret Somers has highlighted in accounting for the rise of liberal democracy.18 The royal government’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest was specifically embodied in government statutes and parliamentary acts, covering a wide range of social issues: famine and poor relief, prevention of plague, wage regulation, and public works to provide employment opportunities for the jobless. These Tudor statutes to regulate society and the economy were not derived simply from traditional customs in the common law system, but were created to show the royal government’s paternalistic care of a social order threatened by inflation and social polarization. For instance, in 1561 a number of statues were enforced in all counties; among these was an act regarding the minimum property qualifications of apprentices’ parents that dated from the first decade of the fifteenth century. It was used now to control the mobility of the population (both social and geographical), even though city authorities preferred to evade it so as to have cheaper apprentices.19 Likewise, in preventing the spread of plague and other contagion, the royal government appealed to the protection of the general welfare to impose strict quarantine measures upon reluctant and even resisting communities.20 For example, the royal government issued Books of Orders in 1578 to order local magistrates to forcibly quarantine affected neighborhoods, or even the entire village, for at least six weeks. Justices of the Peace (JPs) were authorized to collect special rates so as to cover the necessary expenses of the community being isolated. Although these preventive measures went against popular morality and local customs of the time, the royal government justified them by the crown’s emergency powers in protecting general welfare.21 18 19

20 21

Somers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere,” 589. Donald Woodward, “The Background of the Statute of Artificers: The Genesis of Labour Policy, 1558–1563,” Economic History Review, new series 33, no. 1 (February 1980): 40. Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 200. Paul Slack, “The Response to Plague in Early Modern England: Public Policies and Their Consequences,” in Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, ed. John Walter and Roger Schofield (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 169–71; Paul Slack, “Books of Orders: The Making of English Social Policy, 1577–1631,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 30 (February 1979): 8.

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The concern for social order and public welfare also prompted the Tudor state to implement anti-enclosure acts to mitigate social dislocation and the decay of the countryside. It justified the regulation of the economy by attaining “the good of the commonwealth,” and royal statutes often emphasized that “local acts or ordinances should not be against the ‘common profit of the people.’”22 The agenda to legitimate state power through taking care of public welfare was shared by the crown and members of the Privy Council and Parliament, even though they debated the content of specific social policies. This allowed the royal government to use the protection of general welfare to justify the enforcement of emergency measures when the convening of Parliament was irregular rather than annual; these included banning grain exports and regulating domestic grain markets in times of dearth.23 The governance in counties mainly fell upon the shoulder of JPs, who were appointed by the crown but did not receive a salary from the center. By the early seventeenth century, both inflation and economic development allowed more people of the “middling sort” to meet the property criterion of £20 a year to serve as JPs. The middling sort also dominated the administration at the parish level.24 In the hierarchical political order of early modern England, the safeguarding of public interest was cast in a highly paternalist manner: The ideal magistrate was held to be the “father” to the county under his jurisdiction.25 As Wrightson and Levine have pointed out, “Justices of the Peace did not simply implement royal directives. They sought also to influence the policies they were called on to enforce. In their increasingly frequent meetings they formulated the opinion of the county and expressed it in letters to the Council.”26 A similar pattern of interactions between central government and local unsalaried officeholders existed in the implementation of poor laws. These laws were issued by the royal government, but the assessment of relief rates and their allocation were at the discretion of local officials.27 22 23 24

25 26 27

Christopher W. Brooks, Law, Politics, and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 387. Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, 56. Steve Hindle, “The Political Culture of the Middling Sort in English Rural Communities, c. 1550–1700,” in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 125–52. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 72. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 9. Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531–1782 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 2.

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Nonetheless, as Michael Braddick has emphasized, these unsalaried local officeholders were also agents of the state: Their use of coercive power was authorized by the center, their prestige and reputation in local society were closely tied to their officeholding, and their performance came under increasing pressure, supervision, and discipline from the center.28 The performance of JPs in local governance was regularly supervised by the assize judges sent out by the royal government.29 The concern for public interest thus provided a space for interactions between the center and local unsalaried officeholders: The royal government proclaimed its duty to protect the general interest of the realm, while local officeholders were in charge of managing specific aspects of public welfare in particular communities. Self-governance in localities thence served to protect the welfare of an organ of the larger “body politic,” the general care of which was entrusted to the royal government.30 The concept of public interest provided opportunities for people located at different rungs of the political and social ladders to negotiate with their superiors. The royal government could neither monopolize the interpretation of public interest, nor simply reject contestation embodied in an alternative interpretation from society. For example, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the economic projects presented to the court to raise revenue for the crown were often justified by their contribution to “the interest of the publick” or “the welfare of the kingdom.” Critics of such projects, however, dismissed them as serving the private interests of project promoters or the king’s need for money rather than advancing the general welfare of the country.31 In the early seventeenth century, the fiscally exhausted Stuart government tried to increase income by draining more crown estates; in its urgency for revenue, it did not even address criticism of such drainage made upon the basis of

28 29 30

31

Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 18. J. S. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes, 1558–1714 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 158–74. On this commonwealth approach to understanding the relationship between local governance and national politics in early modern England, see David Harris Sacks, “The Corporate Town and the English State: Bristol’s ‘Little Businesses’ 1625–1641,” in The Tudor and Stuart Town: A Reader in English Urban History, 1530–1688, ed. Jonathan Barry (London: Longman, 1990), 313–14. See the discussion of public concerns in Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). For public welfare–based critiques, see Koji Yamamoto, Taming Capitalism before Its Triumph: Public Service, Distrust, and “Projecting” in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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the public interest. These actions in the context of a crisis of the fiscal constitution of the demesne state seriously compromised the legitimacy of the state.32 Negotiations over the content and implementation of social policies occurred also between subordinates and governing elites in localities. The duty of obedience on the part of subordinates was linked to the duty of the authorities to take care of the basic welfare of their inferiors.33 In petitioning for redress of grievances, subordinates could turn to the state’s duty to uphold social welfare. In Tudor and early Stuart England, religious preaching and teaching in schools stressed the “godly duty” of obedience to authority, as well as proper behavior in accordance with one’s social status.34 The royal government distributed printed laws and statutes widely for the purpose of securing the obedience of subordinates. As John Walter has stressed, in the hierarchical society of Tudor and early Stuart England, with its strong culture of obedience, the political consciousness of early modern protestors was reflected in their use of the government’s publicly proclaimed responsibility for its subjects as a way to justify their demands for redress of grievances.35 Such political consciousness was further enhanced when more people became literate due to the expansion of educational opportunities such as endowed schools in urban areas and parish schools in the countryside. From the 1550s to the 1710s, the percentage of people who could sign their name rose from 20 percent among men and 5 percent among women to 45 percent among men and 25 percent among women.36 Commoners could either read state-distributed copies of laws and statutes themselves or learn their contents from hearing other people read them aloud or discuss them; their availability enabled more people to employ the language of political duty to demand the state redress their grievances, particularly when their basic livelihoods were threatened. Popular literacy thus carried important 32

33

34 35 36

Richard W. Hoyle, “Disafforestation and Drainage: The Crown as Entrepreneur?” in The Estates of the English Crown, 1558–1640, ed. Richard W. Hoyle (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 353–88. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, eds., Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 5th ed. (London: Pearson, 2004), 8–10. John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 9–10. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 176.

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political significance, as subjects could increasingly turn to the discourse of state legitimacy to make claims on the state. The means for subordinates to engage in dialogue with the authorities to demand redress of grievances included riots, protests, and popular petitioning. The central government was often called in to arbitrate conflicts of interests with neighboring communities or even with local officials. Christopher Brooks has pointed out that the major causes of the rapidly increasing volume of lawsuits that went to the courts of the crown for settlement from the 1550s on were dissatisfaction with the inefficient manorial courts and with corruption in the town courts, as well as cross-regional disputes that could not be handled by local courts.37 The increasing number of legal suits concerning domestic affairs that went to the royal courts reflected the widespread recognition of the central government as the highest authority that had a duty to protect the public interest of the realm. Although early modern England between 1533 and 1640 had neither a centralized bureaucracy nor a standing army, and relied upon unsalaried officeholders in local government, its domestic governance was reasonably successful. Overall, social order was maintained, poor relief provided, and other welfare measures taken. This significant achievement contrasts sharply with the English state’s weakness in fighting international wars in this period.38 However, the exhaustion of the royal government’s regular income from the crown estates and the increasing expenditures necessary after the 1620s put great strain on the relationship between the crown and Parliament, as well as between the royal government and local elites, even though both sides agreed on the state’s duty to protect the public interest.

1.2  Tokugawa Japan, 1640 –1853 The early Tokugawa regime (1603–1640) was like a giant military mobilization system. The shogun acted as the supreme military commander over hereditary lords known as daimyo, who ruled territorially defined domains and were obliged to provide military services (gun’yaku) to the 37

38

Christopher W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The “Lower Branch” of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 97–100. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England; Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England.

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shogun. The people were divided into hereditary statuses of samurai, peasant, craftsman, and merchant according to their respective roles in this system. The Tokugawa shogun effectively monopolized large-scale coercive force by rescinding the right of daimyo or local communities to use violence to resolve their disputes.39 In 1634, the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu demonstrated his authority by mobilizing some 300,000 samurai warriors drawn from daimyo to visit Kyoto, where the emperor resided; this appeared like a large-scale military exercise.40 The “Laws Governing the Military Households” issued in 1635 institutionalized the system of alternate attendance (sankin ko¯tai) that required daimyo to spend every other year in Edo (today’s Tokyo). The Tokugawa military machine was formidable, and it ruthlessly suppressed the Shimabara Rebellion of Japanese Catholics in 1638. After the suppression, the shogunate ordered daimyo to eradicate Christians within their territories, which represented an important penetration of the shogunate’s political authority into the internal affairs of domains.41 The shogunate also intervened in the relationship between the daimyo and his retainers. In 1663, it promulgated laws to prohibit retainers from committing suicide following the death of their lord (junshi). Instead of taking this action as an expression of loyalty to the masterlord, the shogunate rejected it as “meaningless and useless.”42 However, in the “Great Domestic Peace” that began in 1640 and lasted for more than 200 years, the shogunate had little chance to exert its authority to mobilize the military forces of daimyo. Moreover, displays like that of 1634 were too expensive to execute regularly. (Indeed, the shogun’s next visit to Kyoto did not happen until 1863.) The relationship between shogun and daimyo came instead to be greatly affected by pressing issues of domestic governance. The shogun claimed that the 39

40

41 42

Fujiki Hisashi, Katanagari: Buki o fu¯inshita minshu¯ [The confiscation of swords: A populace disarmed] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2005); Mary Elizabeth Berry, “Public Peace and Private Attachment: The Goals and Conduct of Power in Early Modern Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 12, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 237–71; Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, ch. 7. Takano Toshihiko, “18 seiki zenhan no Nihon” [Japan in the first half of the eighteenth century], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon tsu¯shi, vol. 13, Kinsei (3), ed. Asao Naohiro, Amino Yoshihiko, Ishii Susumu et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), 9. Yamamoto Hirofumi, Kan’ei jidai [The Kan’ei era] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1989), 85–87. Yamamoto Hirofumi, “So¯ron: Sho¯gun keni no kyo¯ka to mibunsei chitsujo” [General remarks: The strengthening of shogunal authority and the status order], in Atarashii kin¯ raisha, seishi, vol. 1, Kokka to chitsujo, ed. Yamamoto Hirofumi (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu O 1996), 39–40.

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daimyo had the political duty to the shogunate to deliver good governance in their respective territories.43 Preserving the welfare of peasants through civil governance appeared to be particularly urgent to the shogun and daimyo in the great Kan’ei famine (1641–1642), in which more than 100,000 people are estimated to have perished.44 Military skills could do little to address this nationwide subsistence crisis. As the status system of the Tokugawa regime strictly separated warriors and peasants, the survival of the daimyo and their retainers depended upon extraction from villages. Depopulation in the countryside and collective flight from repressive daimyo threatened to undermine the material base of warrior rule.45 This was the backdrop against which the Confucian ideology of benevolent rule (jinsei in Japanese; renzheng in Chinese) became widely accepted by the shogun and daimyo by the late seventeenth century. Both daimyo and shogunal officials turned to administrative guidance books compiled by Chinese officials in the Yuan (1279–1368) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties that had been imported into Japan. These Chinese administration manuals conveyed a strong sense of political obligation to local magistrates on how to better “shepherd the people” (bokumin in Japanese; mumin in Chinese).46 One crucial element in this concept of “shepherd-like magistrate” was to protect the basic welfare of the ruled and encourage the reproduction of households. This might be expressed in different ways depending on one’s position. For fudai daimyo (those who received their land from the shogun), the provision of relief measures to peasants facing a subsistence crisis was a kind of benevolent governance (osukui or jinsei) that represented their loyalty and service to the shogunate. More autonomous “outside” (tozama) daimyo considered 43 44 45

46

Miyake Masahiro, “Bakuhan seiji chitsujo no seiritsu” [The establishment of the bakuhan political order], Nihonshi kenkyu¯, no. 582 (February 2011): 66–67. Kurachi Katsunao, Kinsei no minshu¯ to shihai shiso¯ [The people and the ideology of rule in the early modern world] (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobo¯, 1996), 60. For the great shocks wrought by the Kan’ei famine to the governance of both shogun and daimyo, see Ogawa Kazunari, Bokumin no shiso¯: Edo no chisha ishiki [The concept of “shepherding the people”: Consciousness of rule in Edo] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2008), 39–40; Miyazawa Seiichi, “Bakuhansei ideorogi no seiritsu to ko¯zo¯: Shoki hansei kaikaku to no kanren o chu¯shin ni” [The establishment and structure of the ideology of the bakuhan system: Connections with the early period of reforms to domain governance], in Tenbo¯ Nihon rekishi, vol. 16, Kinsei no shiso¯ bunka, ed. Aoki Michio and Wakao Masaki (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯do¯ Shuppan, 2002), 73; Fujita Satoru, Kinsei shiryo¯ron no sekai [The world seen from early modern historical documents] (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 2012), ch. 4. Ogawa Kazunari, Bokumin no shiso¯.

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benevolent governance to be their own heavenly obligation (tendo¯) as a “wise lord” to their subjects.47 In the ideology of benevolent rule, the ruler had the moral responsibility to protect the livelihood of his subjects. The metaphor “all under Heaven” (tenka in Japanese; tianxia in Chinese) in the ideology of benevolent rule conveyed a strong normative implication. The ruler should show compassion and paternalist love to all his subjects, like the sky covering everything below. Subjects therefore had the right to remind the ruler of his duty by petitioning to redress their grievances regarding abuses by officials who were beholden to implement benevolent rule on behalf of the ruler.48 Such benevolent rule was to be embodied in concrete social policies, such as relief provision in times of famine and calamities, encouragement of farming, improvement of infrastructural facilities such as irrigation works, and protection of the production of peasant households by avoiding too heavy extraction. The ideology of benevolent rule thus encouraged in retainer-officials a notion of public duty that was different from their personal loyalty to the daimyo. This public duty conveyed a sense of responsibility to safeguard the welfare of subordinates and to “cultivate” the welfare of the people, who were held to be the “foundation of the state.” The protection of the welfare of subjects, which was the core of the ideology of benevolent rule, also provided the shogunate a normative basis from which to exercise its authority over daimyo: not only as the military commander-in-general but also as the ultimate guardian of the domestic welfare of Japan. When facing the Kan’ei famine, for example, the shogunate ordered the daimyo to survey and report back on the 47

48

Ogawa Kazunari, Bokumin no shiso¯, ch. 1 and 2; Wakao Masaki, “Bakuhansei no seiritsu to minshu¯ no seiji ishiki” [The political consciousness of the people and the establishment of the bakuhan system], in Atarashii kinseishi, vol. 5, Minshu¯ sekai to seito¯, ¯ raisha, 1996), 63–118; Wakao Masaki, “Edo ed. Iwada Ko¯taro¯ (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu O jidai zenki no shakai to bunka” [Society and culture in the early Tokugawa period], in ¯ tsu To¯ru, Sakurai Eiji, and Fujii Iwanami ko¯za Nihon rekishi, vol. 12, Kinsei (3), ed. O Jo¯ji (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2014), 290–93. Fukaya Katsumi, “Kinsei seiji to hyakusho¯ meyasu” [Early modern politics and petition  boxes for commoners], in Shakai ishiki to sekaizo¯, ed. Iwata Ko¯taro¯, vol. 2 in Minshu¯ undo¯shi: Kinsei kara kindai e (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1999), 9–18; Yamada Tadao, “Bakuhansei kokka to ikki” [The state under the bakuhan system and peasant uprisings], in Ikki, vol. 5, Ikki to kokka, ed. Aoki Michio, Irumada Nobuo, Kurokawa Naonori et al. (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 1981), 170–71; Irwin Scheiner, “Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants: Rebellion and Peasant Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan,” in Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period, 1600–1868, ed. Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 39–62.

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extent of the disaster in their respective domains, provide relief grain to the starving, and prohibit sake brewing; these actions showed the shogunate’s authority over the entire territory of Japan.49 However, despite the political authority of the shogunate over daimyo, the shogunate did not directly intervene in the internal governance of domains, particularly those of the “outside” daimyo who enjoyed a high degree of autonomy in governing their own territories. The shogunate had the sovereign power in mintage, yet it only collected taxes from the territory under its governance, which accounted for some one-third of Japan. The rest of the territory was governed by some 260 daimyo. The political status of the shogunate as the de facto sovereign of Tokugawa Japan was not backed up by the ability to tax the whole realm. Nonetheless, the importance of public interest in the ideology of benevolent rule shared by shogun and daimyo constituted a common platform for negotiation and collaboration. While the shogunate used tenka (“all under Heaven”) to show its authority over daimyo on issues related to the general interest of Japan, daimyo often used the term kuni-tenka (“all under the lordship”) to highlight their duty to safeguard the welfare of the subjects in their own territories. The shogunate appeared as the bigger “public authority” (ko¯gi) over the domains of daimyo, each of whom was a little “public authority” (ko¯gi) in his territory.50 This was similar to early modern England, in which the royal government protected the “commonwealth” of the realm while local officeholders were responsible for the “little commonwealths” of their respective shires or towns. This led to a division of labor among daimyo and shogunate. On the one hand, the daimyo had a large degree of autonomy in deciding how to achieve “good governance” within their respective territories, and the maintenance of welfare – or failure to do so – in the individual domain affected the general welfare of Japan. Severe social disturbances caused by misgovernance thus would incur intervention and even punishment by the shogunate.51 On the other hand, clashes of interest over domain boundaries (for example, over water, the reclamation of new farmland, and interregional trade) 49 50

51

Fujita Satoru, Kinsei shiryo¯ron no sekai, 312–13. Fujii Jo¯ji, “17 seki no Nihon – Buke kokka no keisei” [Seventeenth-century Japan – the formation of a samurai state], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon tsu¯shi, vol. 12, Kinsei (2), ed. Asao Naohiro, Amino Yoshihiko, Ishii Susumu et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), 34–64. Kasaya Kazuhiko, “Sho¯gun to daimyo¯” [Shogun and daimyo], in Nihon no kinsei, vol. 3, Shihai no shikumi, ed. Fujii Jo¯ji (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ ko¯ronsha, 1991), 90–91; Tsuji Tatsuya, “Seiji no taio¯ – So¯to¯ to kaikaku” [Political response – riots and reform], in Nihon no kinsei, vol. 10, Kindai e no taido¯, ed. Tsuji Tatsuya (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ ko¯ronsha, 1993), 104.

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that could not be resolved by negotiations among the relevant daimyo were subject to the arbitration of the shogunate; such arbitration was expected to be fair, and thus it was generally acceptable to both sides. The possibility of shogunal intervention motivated daimyo to try to settle these disputes through a consensus based on joint field investigations.52 More importantly, the shogunate had the authority to mobilize resources from daimyo for the provision of public goods that crossed the boundaries of domains, such as defense, building and maintaining largescale infrastructural facilities, postdisaster reconstruction in major cities, canal construction, river dredging, and building of long dikes that protected farmland.53 The obligation of individual daimyo to provide military contributions to the shogun was thus transformed into a duty to contribute to the public welfare of Japan in the period of “Great Domestic Peace.” Meanwhile, the shogunate had a reciprocal obligation to help daimyo who suffered from harvest failures or natural calamities by providing relief loans or direct aid, while the domain ruler had the right to decide how to distribute these relief resources received from the shogunate.54 Thus in Tokugawa Japan, political decentralization did not lead to obstacles to economic development caused by high coordination costs among economic actors and difficulties in public goods provision, which were typical problems in a polity with a divided sovereignty, as Epstein observed in medieval Europe.55 Instead, Japan experienced vibrant economic development in the Tokugawa era. The population increased from about sixteen million in 1600 to more than thirty-one million by 1720. The alternate attendance system greatly expanded the size of Edo, which became the largest metropolis in the world by the end of the eighteenth century. The formation of a national market stimulated financial development and the commercialization of agriculture.56 Educational

52

53 54

55 56

Kasaya Kazuhiko, Kinsei buke shakai no seiji ko¯zo¯ [The political structure of early modern samurai society] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1993), 249–64; Roberts, Performing the Great Peace, ch. 4; Sugimoto Fumiko, Kinsei seiji ku¯kanron, ch. 1. Takano Toshihiko, “18 seiki zenhan no Nihon,” 49–50; Toby, “Rescuing the Nation from History,” 209–10. Harold Bolitho, “The Han,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 4, Early Modern Japan, ed. John Whitney Hall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 203–6. S. R. Epstein, Freedom and Growth: The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 1300– 1750 (London: Routledge, 2000), ch. 2. Akira Hayami, Osamu Saito¯, and Ronald P. Toby, eds., The Economic History of Japan: 1600–1990, vol. 1, Emergence of Economic Society in Japan, 1600–1859 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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opportunities expanded rapidly due to the establishment of popular schools such as terakoya that taught many children of commoners to read and write, as well as the academies funded by the shogunal and domain governments to educate samurai warriors. By the 1850s, Japan’s popular literacy rate was among the highest in the world.57 Along with this growing literacy, a rising political consciousness among the common people was reflected in the increasing number of lawsuits and petitions that demanded the authorities redress welfare grievances and arbitrate conflicts of interests so as to fulfill their proclaimed duty as benevolent rulers.58 Subjects of domains were permitted to lodge their petitions only to their respective ruling daimyo and were prohibited from directly petitioning the shogunate.59 However, direct appeals to the shogunate that bypassed procedural hierarchies were tolerated in practice. Similar to the rebels in early modern England, the participants in largescale protests (ikki) in Tokugawa Japan did not reject the legitimacy of the regime, but rather appealed to benevolent rule to mitigate hardships such as heavy tax burdens in years of poor harvests and calamities.60 In Tokugawa Japan, the ruling samurai class lived in cities and castle towns, and rural governance was entrusted to village headmen. Nonetheless, the penetration of the money economy into the countryside and the great development of interregional trade from the eighteenth century onward caused many new social problems that could not be resolved 57

58

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The precise literacy rate in late Tokugawa Japan remains a subject of controversy, yet it is safe to say that popular education in Tokugawa Japan was among the most developed to be found in early modern societies. See Richard Rubinger, Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); R. P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1992). For the relationship between the literacy rate and the numbers of lawsuits and petitions, see Yakuwa Tomohiro, Kinsei minshu¯ no kyo¯iku to seiji sanka [Early modern popular education and political participation] (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 2001); Masaki Wakao, “Ideological Construction and Books in Early Modern Japan: Political Sense, Cosmology, and World Views,” in Listen, Copy, Read: Popular Learning in Early Modern Japan, ed. Matthias Hayek and Annick Horiuchi (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 46–69. Roberts, Performing the Great Peace, 105, 129–31. Fukaya Katsumi, Hyakusho¯ ikki no rekishiteki ko¯zo¯ [Historical structure of peasant revolts], enl. and rev. ed. (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 1986), ch. 2; Scheiner, “Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants”; Stephen Vlastos, Peasant Protest and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Herbert P. Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590–1884 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Anne Walthall, Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 13; James W. White, Ikki: Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

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by community-based governance. The increasing urban population made the supply of affordable food crucial for maintaining social order. Polarization in the countryside caused much tension between rich farmers and poor villagers, even though the payment of land taxes remained the collective responsibility of a village. The formation of a national market also produced many cross-regional conflicts, such as those between consumers and producers or between consumers and merchants in different regions. The disputes over concrete welfare issues among different regions and the tension between regional welfare and the more general welfare of the whole country thus posed many new challenges to domestic governance. To give just one example, in the early nineteenth century, villagers in the Kinai region centered on Kyoto and Osaka organized large-scale popular petitions to demand the shogunate regulate prices of fish fertilizer to improve their economic welfare.61 From the mid-eighteenth century onward, well-to-do farmers and merchants played greater roles in public goods provision in both the countryside and the cities. The development of rural markets and commercialization encouraged well-to-do farmers to participate in public projects, including building and maintaining irrigation works and village granaries. The space of political participation in regard to local public goods provision expanded greatly in the early nineteenth century. New organizations, such as assemblies of village headmen, appeared for the purpose of coordinating public goods provision common to neighboring villages.62 In large cities such as Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, as well as in castle towns, merchants played important roles in municipal governance through management of firefighting teams, organization of municipal granaries for famine relief, and maintenance of social order.63 61

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Hirakawa Arata, Funso¯ to seron: Kinsei minshu¯ no seiji sanka [Conflict and public opinion: Modern popular political participation] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 1996); Taniyama Masamichi, Kinsei minshu¯ undo no tenkai [The expansion of early modern popular movements] (Tokyo: Takashina Shoten, 1994), chs. 3 and 5. Kurushima Hiroshi, Kinsei bakuryo¯ no gyo¯sei to kumiai mura [Administration and the associated villages in the early modern shogunal domains] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 2002). For merchant participation in urban governance and welfare provision, see Takashi Kato¯, “Governing Edo,” in Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era, ed. James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 61–66; Yoshida Nobuyuki, Kinsei kyodai toshi no shakai ko¯zo¯ [The structure of status in early modern urban society] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 1991), ch. 1. For the active role of urban merchants in famine relief in a castle town in Tokugawa Japan, see Maren A. Ehlers, Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018).

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By the early nineteenth century, the understanding of the domain g­ overnment as an impersonal governing apparatus – that is, the domainstate – had been consolidated. In the decentralized political system of Tokugawa Japan, the position of retainer-officials was tightly connected to their lords. If a daimyo was incompetent or abused his power in ways that resulted in poor governance of the domain, retainer-officials would face the prospect of reduced income, or even the danger of becoming masterless or rootless samurai if the daimyo’s title was rescinded by the shogunate. To avoid such a consequence, sometimes the council of elders would take action to deprive a daimyo of his power by putting him into custody; such actions demonstrated the loyalty of senior retainer-officials to the domain government as a common household (ie) rather than to the daimyo as a private person.64 Indeed, the daimyo and his retainerofficials often referred to their domain as a state (kokka), albeit one over which the shogunate exercised a higher authority. The institutional separation between administrative office and individual administrators also allowed competent low-ranking samurai-officials to be promoted to high administrative positions by the method of tashidaka, which awarded them a high but nonhereditary stipend. Such promotion was made upon demonstrated expertise in fiscal or legal affairs or, after 1853, competence in mastering Western military knowledge and foreign languages.65 Such institutionalized domain governments could thus run smoothly even when the daimyo resided every other year in Edo, as mandated by the alternate attendance system.

64 65

Kasaya Kazuhiko, Shukun “oshikome” no ko¯zo¯: Kinsei daimyo to kashindan [“Secluding” the lord: Early modern daimyo and their retainers] (To¯kyo¯: Heibonsha, 1988). On the nature of public administration in domain governments in the eighteenth century, see Takano Nobuharu, “Kinsei ryo¯shu zaisei e no hitoshikaku: Daimyo zaisei no ko¯teki wo megutte” [A glance at public finance of lords in the modern period: Regarding the public character of domain lord public finance], Nihonshi kenkyu¯ 664 (December 2017): 3–30; Fukuda Chizuru, Bakuhanseiteki chitsujo to oie so¯do¯ [The social order of the bakuhan and domainal house disturbances] (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 1999), chs. 3 and 4. On the separation between administrative office and individual, see Fujimoto Hitofumi, Sho¯gun kenryoku to kinsei kokka [The power of the shogun and the early modern state] (Tokyo: Hanawa Shobo¯, 2018), 321–24. On promotion and tashidaka, see Kasaya Kazuhiko, Samurai no shiso¯: Nihon-gata soshiki, tsuyosa no ko¯zo¯ [Samurai thought: Japanese-type organization and the structure of its strength] (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shinbunsha, 1993), 112–27. On the impacts of competence-based promotion on the education of samurai in domain colleges established by daimyo to train samuraiadministrators, see Maeda Tsutomu, Edo no dokushokai: kaidoku no shiso¯shi [Reading groups in Edo Japan: An intellectual history of seminar-style studying] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2012), 210–28.

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In the meantime, the interest of the domain government was closely connected with the economic welfare of the domain. The huge expenditure caused by the alternate attendance system and by shogunal orders to contribute resources for large infrastructural facilities and rebuilding of cities after major calamities such as fire led to serious debt among daimyo. These chronic financial difficulties forced the daimyo to work with retainer-officials and even merchants to increase revenue. This conception of the domain as the state (or domain-state) served as the basis for the implementation of the kokueki (literally, the “state interest”) mercantilist economic policies from the mid-eighteenth century onward. These policies aimed to improve the manufacture and trading of specialty commodities within the domain territory so as to increase exports to major markets in Osaka, Kyoto, and Edo to earn cash.66 In the first half of the nineteenth century, the meaning of kokueki went beyond the fiscal needs of domain government to include the general welfare of the domain. This extension allowed merchants and well-to-do farmers to submit proposals on how to promote manufacturing and trade to achieve prosperity. The “interest of the people” (mineki) was presented as being just as important as the fiscal needs of the domain government, because the growing economy of the domain would sustain a higher government income in the long run.67 In the commercialized economy of Tokugawa Japan, the scope of benevolent rule (jinsei) came to reach far beyond the simple reproduction of peasant households to include policies to promote economic improvement and prosperity. By the early nineteenth century, the early modern Tokugawa state was thus like a quasi-federal system. It consisted of the shogunate holding higher authority over various domain-states, all of whom proclaimed the ideology of benevolent rule to justify their power to the subjects. The shogunate coordinated daimyo in domestic governance and the defense of Japan; the public interest of Japan thus became a basis for the interactions between the shogunate and domain governments. For example, the government of Tsushima domain in the eighteenth century used its duty as a “fence” (hanpei) to protect Japan to negotiate with the shogunate for special treatment in trade policies with 66 67

Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain. Hirakawa Arata, “Chiiki keizai no tenkai” [The development of a regional economy], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon tsu¯shi, vol. 15, Kinsei (5), ed. Fujita Satoru, Asao Naohiro, Amino Yoshihiko et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 116.

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Korea and in alternate attendance, and even to demand direct financial aid from the shogunate.68 The political advisors to the shogun in the late eighteenth century elaborated a theory that attributed the authority of the shogunate to delegation from the emperor in Kyoto. By the early nineteenth century, scholars of different schools of learning, such as Neo-Confucianism, Dutch Learning (rangaku, also known as Western Learning after the 1820s), and Nativist Learning (kokugaku), all recognized Japan as an imperial state (teikoku) in which the emperor was the sovereign in principle if not in practice. Nativist scholars even proclaimed that Japan was a “peerless” divine country due to the unbroken imperial succession.69 Scholars of “Dutch Learning” used kokueki in discussing issues related to the general interest of Japan.70 With the spread of print culture, popular education, and cross-regional travel, the consciousness of belonging to the same country came to be shared not only among the political elite, but also by commoners in various domains.71 These developments laid the foundations of a protonationalism even before the coming of Western powers. In this situation, if the shogunate failed in its duty to protect the public interest of Japan either in domestic welfare or in international politics, even the common people could appeal to the emperor for rescue.72 This paved the way for the

68

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The island of Tsushima is located between Korea and Japan. Yoshimura Masami, “Ju¯hachi seiki no taigai kankei to ‘hanpei’ ninshiki: Tsuma han ni okeru ‘hanpei’ no ‘yaku’ ron wo megutte” [The understanding of “fences” in eighteenth-century foreign relations: Regarding Tsushima domain’s “duty” as a “fence”], Nippon rekishi, no. 789 (2012): 41–58. Watanabe Hiroshi, Nihon seiji shiso¯shi: Ju¯shichi-ju¯kuseiki [The history of Japanese political thought: Seventeenth to nineteenth centuries] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 2010), 301–16; Maeda Tsutomu, Edo ko¯ki no shiso¯ ku¯kan [The intellectual space of the later Edo period] (Tokyo: Perikansha, 2009), 208–32, 315–47; Arano Yasunori, “Kinsei no taigaikan” [Early modern perceptions of foreign relations], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon tsu¯shi, vol. 13, Kinsei (3), ed. Asao Naohiro, Amino Yoshihiko, Ishii Susumu et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), 240–43. Maeda Tsutomu, Heigaku to Shushigaku, Rangaku, Kokugaku: Kinsei Nihon shiso¯shi no ko¯zu [Military science and Neo-Confucianism, Dutch Learning, Nativist Learning: The composition of early modern Japanese intellectual history] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2006), ch. 3. Ikeuchi Satoshi, “Kyo¯kai no ishiki” [Consciousness of boundaries], in Nihon no kinsei, vol. 16, Minshu¯ no kokoro, ed. Hirota Masaki (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ ko¯ronsha, 1994), 276–94; Arano Yasunori, “Kinsei no taigaikan,” 243–46; Tsurumaki Takao, “Kokka no katari to jo¯ho¯” [“The narrative of the country” and “news”], in Minshu¯ undo¯shi: Kinsei kara kindai e, vol. 4, Kindai iko¯ki no minshu¯zo¯, ed. Arai Katsuhiro (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2000), 275–312. Fujita Satoru, Kinsei seijishi to Tenno¯, ch. 3.

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growing acceptance of the emperor as the symbol of the public interest of Japan, even though the court was not involved in governance. Meanwhile, daimyo in the early nineteenth century were under huge financial pressure to strengthen coastal defenses against the Western threat.73 They appealed to the urgent need to protect Japan to demand reforms in the system of alternate attendance so that they could use the money saved for strengthening coastal defense. Alternate attendance now was held to only serve the narrow interest of the shogunate; that is, to demonstrate its authority over daimyo, but detrimental to the public interest of Japan.74 Thence when in 1853 Commodore Perry demanded the opening of Japan, the shogunate decided to consult both the court and major daimyo on how to respond. This was the first time for the court and outside daimyo to participate in the making of foreign policy. How to defend Japan against foreign threats was seen as a question of the public interest of Japan; upon this basis the shogunate, major daimyo, and the court debated seriously the appropriate responses. The public interest of Japan thus constituted a common normative platform for the daimyo to question whether the shogunate was fulfilling its duty or not. The theory of delegated power entailed that the failure of the shogunate to protect the public interest of Japan would undermine its political authority over daimyo and make it difficult for the shogunate to resist calls to return sovereign power to the emperor. This happened after 1858.

1.3  Qing China, 1684–1840 Although all dynasties in China spoke of a “Heavenly Mandate” to rule, its meaning changed significantly in different historical contexts. From the Song (960–1279) onward, the Heavenly Mandate became less connected with a mysterious cosmology or the celestial virtue of the emperor and more with the protection of the general welfare of the subjects.75 By the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the Manchu emperors explicitly defined the Heavenly Mandate in terms of protecting the 73 74 75

Noell Wilson, Defensive Positions: The Politics of Maritime Security in Tokugawa Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), ch. 4. Maruyama Yasunari, Sankin ko¯tai [The alternative attendance] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2007), 247–53. Liu Pujiang, “‘Wude zhongshi’ shuo zhi zhongjie” [The end of the “Five Virtues” theory], Zhongguo shehui kexue, no. 2 (2006): 177–90; Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 119; Jaeyoon Song, Traces of Grand Peace: Classics and State Activism in Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015).

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general welfare of the subjects.76 The ideology of benevolent rule in Qing China, as in early modern England and Tokugawa Japan, was thence a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. It was not simply empty words, but was embodied in various social policies that addressed specific welfare issues of the subjects. The arbitrary power of the emperor was constrained both by the state as a set of impersonal governing institutions and by this ideology of benevolent rule. The term “Qing state” used hereafter refers to the government of “China proper”; it does not include the frontier regions, in which different administrative and legal systems were applied to ethnic populations whose written languages and cultures differed from those of the majority Han population, and where the relationship between emperor and subject might be conceived in different terms. This is similar to the situation of England as a state within the British empire, which in early modern times consisted also of Ireland and Scotland. The Qing state was characterized by judicial and administrative conformity within China proper and the center in Beijing was the highest political authority. The territory of China proper had clear boundaries and was explicitly referred to as Zhongguo (literally, central kingdom) in many Qing official documents. The term guojia was used as an impersonal subject in discussing issues such as tax collection, maintenance of social order, and so on. In other words, taxes were justified by their contribution to fulfill the public duties of the state in securing the general welfare, in upholding social order, and in defense, rather than to serve the private needs of the emperor. The public finance of the Qing state was managed by the Board of Revenue; this was institutionally separate from the management of the finance of the court by the Imperial Household Department. The protection of social welfare was especially crucial to the Manchus as alien conquerors who had to consolidate their rule over vast numbers of Han Chinese. In the domestic peace that ensued after 1684, the Mandate of Heaven was explicitly embodied in concrete policies of domestic welfare. The Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1795), for example, repeatedly reminded his ministers that the implementation of specific social and economic policies was much more important than empty words of reverence for Heaven.77 He enjoined all governors of 76 77

Liu Pujiang, “‘Wude zhongshi’ shuo zhi zhongjie,” 90. The imperial edict of the Qianlong emperor, QL59/12/3 (December 24, 1794), in Qing Shilu [The Veritable Records of the Qing; henceforth QSL] (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985–1987), vol. 27, 581.

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provinces to be ministers of the state (guojia zhi chen) and to think the same way as the emperor (yi zhen xin wei xin).78 In this context, the mind of the emperor clearly refers to the mind of the emperorship as the guardian of the public interest rather than to the private mind of the Qianlong emperor. This was similar to the 1616 speech of James I (r. 1603–1625), in which he emphasized the duty of magistrates as “the ministers of the King’s justice in service of the commonwealth” and as the “eyes and ears of the King.”79 Legitimation of state power through safeguarding the public interest in Qing China was closely tied to a concept of “public good” or gongli. Its scope ranged from village to province and to the entire realm, depending on the context. There was tension inherent in different kinds and/or scopes of “public interest.”80 For example, upstream and downstream regions along the same river often had clashing interests. Likewise, the attempt of a provincial government to retain grain within its borders to secure its food supply could be considered by its residents as serving the “public welfare” of the province. Yet neighboring provinces that depended upon its grain would accuse those officials of serving the “private interest” of one province at the cost of the “public interest” of the realm. The political duty to arbitrate such conflicts of interests thence imposed a normative constraint on the emperor and the central government. The duty of the emperor as the guardian of the realm carried an implication of equality: The imperial benevolence covered all subjects in all regions in China, just as Heaven covered everything below it. When the central government approved a policy that catered to one province, such as permission to divert part of the tribute grain headed for the capital of Beijing for famine relief in that province, other provincial governors in a similar situation would use this precedent to request the same treatment, arguing that benevolence should be applied to all provinces indiscriminately (yishi tongren). At the same time, governors could be expected to protest policies harmful to their area. As the welfare of one province 78

79 80

This imperial edict is seen in the memorial of Sanbao, the governor-general of Huguang, and Chen Huizu, the Hubei governor, QL43/7/29 (September 19, 1778). See Gongzhongdang Qianlongchao zouzhe [Palace memorials of the Qianlong reign] (Taibei: National Palace Museum, 1982–1987), vol. 44, 383–85. J. R. Tanner, Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I, 1603–1625 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 20. The literati-scholars in the Qing dynasty were aware of the tension between the public good in small communities such as villages and that in broader regions or even in the whole realm. See Philip A. Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 77–78.

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was a component of the public interest, central policies that damaged the interests of a particular region had to be justified in terms of how such sacrifice served the wider public good; this was the typical approach taken in large hydraulic projects. For example, sacrificing some farmland to maintain the navigation of the Grand Canal in order to ship the tribute grain from southern provinces to Beijing was held to be serving the public interest of the realm.81 This complex relationship between the “public interest” at different levels thus occupied a crucial position in policy debates, such as those over regulation of the grain markets, hydraulic engineering, currency supply, and so on. In contrast to early modern England and Tokugawa Japan, the Qing state possessed a highly centralized bureaucracy and fiscal system that proceeded from the lowest level of the county up through the prefecture and province to the capital of Beijing. In the eighteenth century, central coordination of political power in provinces was carried out through a highly institutionalized administrative apparatus consisting in practice mainly of the Six Boards and the Grand Council (Junjichu). The former were high-level ministries named for the functions they oversaw (Personnel, Revenue, Rites, War, Punishments, and Works); the latter was similar to the Privy Council in England, being military in origin but gradually taking on great advisory and policy-making powers over the course of the dynasty.82 Provincial governors and provincial treasurers submitted routine reports (tiben, or ordinary memorials) to the Six Boards, but also had the right to directly communicate with the emperor and the Grand Council through “palace memorials” (zouzhe). Memorials from provinces covered a wide range of state affairs including governance, law enforcement, evaluations of officials, military affairs, infrastructure, taxes, mintage of copper coins, and even monthly prices of rice and amounts of rainfall across the realm. The route for provincial governors to send a memorial to the emperor was secret; the box that contained the memorial could not be unsealed until it reached the court. However, policy debates based upon the communications within the palace m ­ emorial system were not secret. 81

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Ma Junya, Beixisheng de “jubu”: Huaibei shehui shengtai bianqian yanjiu (1680–1949) [The “part” sacrificed: Ecological change and Huaibei society] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2011), ch. 1; David A. Pietz, The Yellow River: The Problems of Water in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 49–54. Beatrice S. Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch’ing China, 1723–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

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In making important policies, it was common practice for the emperor to collect opinions from provincial governors and then ask ministers of the relevant Boards and the members of the Grand Council to deliberate collectively. When provincial governors were asked by the center to comment on policy suggestions presented in a particular memorial, they all had a chance to read it before they responded with their comments, suggestions, and critiques. When the central government wanted to enforce a nationwide social policy, a provincial governor could emphasize the special conditions of the province under his jurisdiction to demand revision or even to reject it, as the welfare of one province was integral to the public interest of the whole realm. For example, in the great debates on the ever-normal granary system funded and managed by the state in the 1740s and 1750s, many provincial governors argued that maintaining the official quota of the state granaries – a measure that originally aimed to safeguard the welfare of the subjects – was counterproductive as it led to a shortage of grain available in the market and so drove up prices. The central government responded by permitting county magistrates to store up to 70 percent rather than the full official quota.83 Similarly, in 1745 the Hubei provincial government requested the central government to allow mintage of copper coins that contained less copper than officially prescribed, so as to safeguard the welfare of people in Hubei who suffered from a severe scarcity of copper coins. This request was approved by the center.84 The memorial system was thus a channel for provincial officials to negotiate and bargain with the center, not just the means for the emperor to discipline local officials.85 Moreover, the content of these debates was even available to the public, as reports were often printed in capital gazettes, which were distributed by merchants for profit to local

83

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85

For such negotiations through the memorial system over food policy, see Helen Dunstan, Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary Study of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644–1840 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1996); Helen Dunstan, State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), ch. 5. On the negotiation between securing provincial welfare as a coherent component of the public interest of the realm over monetary policies, see Wenkai He, “Qinglong chao tongqian guanli de zhengce taolun ji shijian” [The debate and practice of the copper coin supply policy during the reign of Qianlong], Zhongguo jingjishi yanjiu, no. 1 (2016), 133–36; Wenkai He, Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State, 134–36. For the memorial system as a means to discipline local officials, see Kuhn, Soulstealers; Patricia M. Thornton, Disciplining the State: Virtue, Violence, and State-Making in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), ch. 2.

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officials and literati-scholars.86 However, such collective deliberation for major policy-making was time-consuming, especially considering the time needed to send memorials from various provinces to Beijing and to receive the central response. It served for the making of major policies, but not for handling urgent matters. Nevertheless, the centralized bureaucracy was inadequate to maintain effective governance. The Qing state had consolidated a centrally managed fiscal system by the 1720s; the Board of Revenue supervised and audited the annual accounts of both the collections and expenditures of provincial governments. In order to run this decentralized fiscal system smoothly, the Board of Revenue set fixed quotas for both tax collection and official spending in each province.87 Although the center retained a large proportion of its income in provincial or even prefectural treasuries in strategic locations, the spending of these funds was at the discretion of the center, and local officials were not permitted to disburse these funds without central sanction.88 Provincial governments did not have independent budgets. A magistrate who wanted to dispense more than 500 taels of silver,89 which was a small amount of money, for public purposes in the locality under his jurisdiction – for example, to build a bridge or undertake a hydraulic project – had to receive permission from the center; if it was granted, the spending was subject to the strict auditing of the financial officials in the Board of Revenue. This left local officials in a constant condition of underfinancing.90 The use of fixed quotas in both tax collection and government spending and the rigid central auditing

86

87 88

89

90

These are known in English as the Peking Gazette or Capital Gazette. See Yin Qing, “Shindai ni okeru teiho¯ no hakko¯ to ryu¯tsu¯: Shincho¯ chu¯o¯ jo¯ho¯ no denpa no ichi sokumen” [The publication and circulation of the Peking Gazette: The dissemination of Qing court news], Shigaku zasshi 127, no. 12 (2018): 1–38; Emily Mokros, The Peking Gazette in Late Imperial China: State News and Political Authority (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021). Chen Feng, “Qingdai qianqi zouxiao zhidu yu zhengce yanbian” [The early Qing auditing system and policy change], Lishi yanjiu, no. 2 (2000): 63–74. Peng Yuxin, “Qingdai tianfu qiyun cunliu zhidu de yanjin” [The development of the system of land tax retention and transportation in the Qing dynasty], Zhongguo jingjishi yanjiu, no. 4 (1992): 124–33; Yeh-chien Wang, Land Taxation in Imperial China, 1750–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 12–18. The tael (liang in Chinese) was a silver ingot that functioned as an official unit of account. One tael officially equaled 1,000 copper cash (qian), but exchange rates were in practice determined in the markets based on fineness and purity. Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenthcentury Ch’ing China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 76–77; Wong, “Taxation and Good Governance in China, 1500–1914,” 360.

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of local government expenditures made the Qing state unable to accommodate various demands for public goods provision across the country, especially when the domestic economy experienced significant commercialization over the eighteenth century. The participation and cooperation of social elites such as landowners and merchants in local public works were therefore essential. These social elites often held official titles, obtained either through taking the imperial civil examinations or through purchase, and they could interact with officials on a less unequal basis than could ordinary commoners. The Qing state welcomed and encouraged their participation in building bridges and roads and maintaining hydraulic infrastructure.91 Although the Qing state did not issue charters to towns or cities as the Tudor monarch did in early modern England, a large part of urban administration such as relief to the poor, firefighting, maintenance of social order, and so on was entrusted to merchants and their associations.92 The increasing penetration of the market economy into eighteenthcentury Chinese society and the growing degree of economic interdependence among different regions also produced serious social problems, including rural polarization and a large number of migrant laborers seeking nonagrarian job opportunities in urban areas, as well as in mining and transportation. Rising food prices threatened the livelihood of the urban poor. Facing these new challenges, the Qing state turned to social elites for help. The participation of local elites in public works such as water control and famine relief increased significantly from the late eighteenth century onward, both in frequency and in the scale of resources mobilized.93 In the nineteenth century the state often delegated to social elites the political power necessary for organizing large-scale charity 91 92

93

Kung-chuan Hsiao, Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), ch. 7. William T. Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796–1895 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), chs. 3 and 4. For the Qing state’s encouragement of and financial assistance to the benevolent halls and orphanages established and managed by urban merchants, see Fuma Susumu, Chu¯goku zenkai zendo¯shi kenkyu¯ [A study of benevolent societies and benevolent halls in China] (Kyoto: Do¯ho¯sha, 1997), ch. 8; Angela Ki Che Leung (Liang Qizi), Shishan yu jiaohua: Ming Qing de cishan zuzhi [Charity and moral transformation: Philanthropic organizations in the Ming and Qing] (Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye gongsi, 1997), ch. 4. Seunghyun Han, “Changing Roles of Local Elites from the 1720s to the 1830s,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 9, part two, The Ch’ing Dynasty to 1800, ed. Willard J. Peterson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 649–700; Seunghyun Han, After the Prosperous Age: State and Elites in Early Nineteenth-Century Suzhou (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016), chs. 1–3.

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initiatives, maintaining large infrastructural facilities, and establishing militias to protect social order. Such elite activism, however, did not necessarily imply a retreating state. The same basic understanding of social order and public interest shared by both the state and social elites constituted a platform on which they could interact and negotiate over the provision of public goods in localities. Such negotiations were quite important as Chinese society underwent significant socioeconomic changes. The population soared, growing from about 150 million in 1700 to over 300 million by 1800, and more than 400 million after the 1850s. Massive amounts of silver flowed into China through foreign trade after the Kangxi emperor lifted the ban on maritime trade in 1684, which greatly stimulated domestic interregional trade, commercialization of agriculture, and urban development.94 China at the end of the eighteenth century had a large urban population in big cities and market towns that depended upon the market for their food supply.95 The basic welfare of the urban population was closely tied to the interregional grain trade dominated by private merchants. Given the size and scope of these issues, the state’s role in safeguarding the public interest could not simply be replaced by local elites. Nor did gentry participation in local public affairs imply an exclusion of state power or resistance to the state.96 It is worth noting that the collection of compulsory local taxes from guilds by the gentry was authorized by the state. A political space in which urban and rural elites deliberated about how to manage specific public matters among themselves coexisted with broad acceptance of the state’s responsibility for safeguarding the general welfare. This space was different from the Habermasian public sphere, but similar to what we have described earlier for early modern England and Tokugawa Japan.97 94

Gang Zhao, The Qing Opening to the Ocean: Chinese Maritime Policies, 1684–1757 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). 95 The value of interregional grain trade in China by 1840 amounted to some 42 percent of the total interregional trade. Wu Chengming, Zhongguo zibenzhuyi yu guonei shichang [Capitalism and the domestic market in China] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1985), 163. 96 A conception of the state–society relationship as purely confrontational has led some historians to view gentry participation in local affairs as autonomous of the state. See for example the influential work of Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796–1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 97 In the early 1990s’ debates about the “public sphere” in late imperial China, both sides held the Habermasian public sphere characterized by print media as the standard by which to evaluate participation of Chinese elites in public goods provision. They thus ignored more comparable phenomena in early modern England and Tokugawa Japan. See William

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Over the eighteenth century, commercial printing flourished and opportunities for schooling expanded significantly in both urban areas and the countryside.98 According to Evelyn Rawski, some 30–45 percent of the men and 2–10 percent of the women in China by the midnineteenth century could read and write the basic characters necessary for daily life.99 Western officials working for the Maritime Customs in China in the late nineteenth century also had quite positive assessments of the popular literacy rate in China. According to the Decennial Reports of the Imperial Maritime Customs (1882–1891), “Given 100 people as found on the streets of Chungking (Chongqing), and I estimate that 40 percent of them can read and understand a proclamation, 30 percent will have a foggy idea of its meaning.” The overall assessment of the literacy rate for Hubei province was that “about 30 percent of adult males can read.” It was believed that two-thirds of the males in Anhui province could read; and that 70 percent of adult males in Zhejiang province were literate, among whom 50 percent could read and write quite well. For Fujian province, it was estimated that 30 percent of males had “sufficient education to keep mercantile books and conduct correspondence.” It was further estimated that nearly 90 percent of adult males in Guangdong province could read common characters.100 The expansion of educational opportunities also blurred the social boundaries among officials, merchants, and literati. As the number of official posts remained almost unchanged, population growth and the rising literacy rate made the imperial civil examinations through which officials were selected fiercely competitive.101 As a result, a large number of educated people went into the world of business. These merchants tried to reconcile the profit motivation in the markets with Confucian values T. Rowe, “The Public Sphere in Modern China,” Modern China 16, no. 3 (July 1990): 309–29; Frederic Wakeman, Jr., “The Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate: Western Reflections on Chinese Political Culture,” Modern China 19, no. 2 (April 1993): 108–38. 98 Kai-wing Chow, Publishing, Culture, and Power in Early Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 99 Evelyn S. Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch’ing China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 140. 100 These surveys of literacy rate were often conducted in collaboration with clerks in the local governments and missionaries. Unfortunately, we do not know the standard of literacy used in the surveys. See the Decennial Reports of the Imperial Maritime Customs (1882–1891), in Wushinian Gebu Haiguan baogao, 1882–1931 [China Imperial Maritime Customs: Decennial Reports, 1882–1931)], ed. Liu Hui (Beijing: Zhongguo haiguan chubanshe, 2009), vol. 1, 135, 222–23, 312, and 430; vol. 2, 159 and 220. 101 Benjamin A. Elman, Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

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as such honesty and frugality; in this way, they justified commerce and trade in terms of their contribution to social welfare.102 The metaphor of interregional trade as the blood of the realm is often seen in official and scholarly discussions of trade policies in Qing China.103 The official proclamation of the state’s duty to protect the welfare of the subjects allowed both elites and commoners to utilize this obligation to negotiate with the authorities over specific welfare grievances. When harassed by government officials or clerks who made purchases for the government, urban merchants often lodged collective petitions with county magistrates or provincial governors who were obligated to protect the welfare of local markets.104 When facing conflicts of interest among different social groups or among people living in different regions, the affected parties could look for adjudication to the Qing court if not satisfied by the settlement made by local governments. In appealing to the center, they relied on this proclaimed duty to request impartial arbitration. Food rioters justified their demands for relief in terms of the Qing state’s paternalistic responsibility in subsistence crises.105 Petitioners consciously utilized cultural symbols such as city gods sanctioned by the state and the state’s publicly announced laws and statutes to justify their expression of grievances and make demands on the state.106 Petitions that went directly to the capital by jumping over the appeal procedure were tolerated in practice, though illegal in principle.107 From 102

103 104 105 106

107

Ying-shih Yü, The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China, trans. Yin-tze Kwong, ed. Hoyt C. Tillman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021); Chiu Peng-sheng, “Shiba shiji diantong shichang zhong de guanshang guanxi yu liyi guannian” [Notions of profit and the relations between state and merchant in the eighteenthcentury Yunnan copper market], Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 72, no. 1 (2001): 49–119; Richard John Lufrano, Honorable Merchants: Commerce and SelfCultivation in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997). Pierre-Étienne Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China, trans. Elborg Forster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 212–13. Fan Jinmin, Ming Qing shangshi jiufen yu shangye susong [Ming-Qing business disputes and commercial lawsuits] (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 2007), 300–14. R. Bin Wong, “Food Riots in the Qing Dynasty,” Journal of Asian Studies 41, no. 4 (August 1982): 767–88. Wu Jen-shu, Jibian liangmin: Chuantong Zhongguo chengshi qunzhong jiti xingdong zhi fenxi [Jibian liangmin: An analysis of collective actions in traditional Chinese cities] (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2011), 153–65. For the historical development of this complaint system in China, see Qiang Fang, “Hot Potatoes: Chinese Complaint Systems from Early Times to the Late Qing (1898),” Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 4 (November 2009): 1105–35; Jonathan K. Ocko, “I’ll Take It All the Way to Beijing: Capital Appeals in the Qing,” Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 2 (May 1988): 291–315.

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the late eighteenth century onward, the central government became more accepting of such capital appeals and used them to discipline provincial governors. This encouraged the formation of a nonofficial profession that provided – at a cost – aid and legal consulting services to those dissatisfied with local adjudication, helping them bring their cases to Beijing. In consequence, the number of such capital appeals rose significantly during the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly from northern provinces such as Zhili, Shandong, and so on.108 The increase in this period therefore did not necessarily reflect enhanced state legitimacy among the subjects, as argued by Ho-Fung Hung.109 As in early modern England, these direct appeals to the center were backed by a longstanding popular monarchism that imagined the emperor as a loving father of his subjects who was misled by abusive officials.

1.4 Conclusion Despite obvious variation in territorial scale, population size, political institution, and culture across these three cases, a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation was common to all. Moreover, the state’s legitimacy in each case was tied to its performance in resolving specific welfare problems in domestic governance. The state’s own discourse thence entailed an important space for political participation: negotiation, collaboration, and even contestation between state and society over provision for particular public goods. In the rest of Part I, I will show similar patterns in the collaboration of each state and society to combat subsistence crisis, finance public infrastructure, and redress specific welfare grievances, and demonstrate how these collaborations accommodated changing socioeconomic circumstances and made possible ­domestic governance.

108 109

Li Dianrong, Qingchao jingkong zhidu yanjiu [A study of capital appeals in the Qing dynasty] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2011), 103–8 and ch. 4. Ho-Fung Hung, Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 157–59.

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2 State–Society Collaboration against Subsistence Crisis

To protect the livelihood of the people in times of food crisis was recognized as a basic duty in the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. In examining “the politics of provision” inherent in food riots in England between 1550 and 1850, the historian John Bohstedt notes that when food rioters demanded that the state provide relief when starvation threatened, they were appealing to a natural right of self-preservation.1 I would argue, however, that such demands in early modern England were still mainly based upon a passively conceived right derived from the state’s obligation to protect general welfare. Ordinary people in both Tokugawa Japan and Qing China also appealed to the terms of state legitimacy to justify their demands for famine relief. The great price revolution that occurred between 1450 and 1650 in England posed a serious threat to the social order. The nationwide poor relief system that arose from it resulted from a combination of central guidance and local initiatives that aimed to preserve the social order by ensuring the survival of the poorest in normal years as well as in food crises. The parish served as the basic unit; it was self-governed and selffinanced, with the propertied members of the parish paying rates to help their destitute neighbors. Neither in Tokugawa Japan nor Qing China was the social order endangered by such a dramatic rise of food prices. In Japan, the total population stagnated in the eighteenth century. In normal years, rice prices remained low compared with the rising prices of other commodities. In China, rice prices underwent a slow and steady 1

John Bohstedt, The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1550–1850 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 10.

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growth over the eighteenth century while the population greatly increased between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In these two societies, alms to the poor were mainly provided in ordinary times by charitable organizations, and in China by lineages as well. Nonetheless, large-scale food scarcity caused by bad weather or natural calamities inevitably posed a severe threat. As a large proportion of the population in urban and even rural areas in all three cases depended upon the markets to purchase food, state efforts to rescue the starving had to deal with an interregional grain trade dominated by private merchants. In early modern England, incorporated cities and towns had their own municipal granaries, and so the system of public granaries was highly decentralized, as was the operation of the poor relief system that was funded by parish rates and managed by parish officeholders. A similarly decentralized granary system existed in Tokugawa Japan. However, such decentralization meant that the poor relief system in early modern England and the granaries in Tokugawa Japan faced great strain in major food crises that impacted wider regions. Under such circumstances, local communities typically gave priority to protecting the welfare of their own members by banning the transporting of grain out of the community. Yet communities suffering from major calamities often did not have sufficient resources to meet the needs of famine relief on their own. In contrast, the Qing state in China not only had a centrally managed fiscal system but also a nationwide system of granaries funded and managed by the state. It thus had the capacity to mobilize massive resources across provinces to help regions stricken by famine. Nonetheless, the difficulty of maintaining these state granaries due to technical, financial, and administrative reasons greatly reduced the capacity of the Qing state to combat famine. The resources available for the state to provide relief directly to its subjects varied greatly across these three cases. Each developed systems of famine relief and support for the poorest that involved collaboration between state and social actors upon a common platform of public interestbased discourse of state legitimation. Such relief efforts, which arose through interactions between the central government and local officials and between state and social actors, were grounded in shared norms regarding the responsibility of the state for the public interest.

2.1  England, 1533–1640 English society from the late fifteenth century onward underwent fundamental socioeconomic transformation. Prices, particularly prices of

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agricultural products, rose steadily from the 1500s onward. As a result, the real income of wage-earners continued to drop from the level in 1500 and did not rebound until the 1650s.2 Increasing commercialization in farming and distribution of food and a rising degree of division of labor not only led to the economic interdependence of people in different regions, but also heightened their vulnerability to ups and downs in the market. A large portion of the population came to be affected by fluctuations of food prices and shrinking job opportunities in times of trade depression. The nationwide social problems of poverty and vagrancy peaked in the 1590s and severely strained the traditional, parish-based system of local relief provision to the poor.3 Poverty and vagrancy constituted serious threats to the maintenance of social order and the preservation of the livelihood of subjects, to which the legitimation of the early modern English state was closely tied. Poverty was a major concern for the central government and local elites from the 1530s onward. After the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the royal confiscation of the properties of chantries and endowed properties of the churches damaged the provision of charity to the poor.4 This was a great loss in charity. Paul Slack estimated that monasteries provided £6,500 a year in alms in 1537, a magnitude that the private charities could only reach after 1580.5 It was not easy for the Tudor state to quickly cover this gap. Under the influence of Christian charity and civic humanism, the royal government in the 1530s drafted radical plans to use public works to simultaneously take care of the poor and create employment. It proposed to establish a special commission to collect taxes on income and property so as to finance public works, such as building highways, harbors, and fortifications, in order to employ vagabonds. Such specially set-up commissions would appoint salaried officials to implement these public projects. These ambitious national plans for social welfare, however, were blocked in 1536 by Parliament, which was hostile toward a scheme

2 3

4 5

Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), 47. Beier, Masterless Men, 21–24; A. L. Beier, “Poverty and Progress in Early Modern England,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 226–36. Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Poor Relief in England, 1350–1600 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England, 13.

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of national taxation and a central institution that relied upon its own officials to enforce social policies.6 As a result, the implementation of the Tudor state’s poor relief and anti-vagrancy policies depended heavily upon the collaboration of unsalaried local officeholders in both urban and rural areas.7 Autonomous initiatives in organizing poor relief in towns and counties with different socioeconomic circumstances coexisted with central legislation and statutes. What united these efforts was a broadly accepted vision of social duties. In the hierarchical social order of early modern England, the obedience and deference of the ruled toward the ruler were supposed to be complemented by paternalist care on the part of the authorities toward subordinates so as to achieve the ideal of communal harmony. Meanwhile, both the royal government and local magistrates had a deep fear of disorder. Upon this consensus regarding the common weal or public welfare, there were constant exchanges of information, methods, and experiments between the center and local officeholders. A decentralized approach to poor relief gave magistrates and parish officials more discretion on how to preserve public order in their own communities. In urban areas, the Tudor state used incorporation charters to delegate the responsibility for maintaining social order to the incorporated towns and boroughs.8 The number of incorporated towns and boroughs increased from 38 in 1500 to 130 in 1600. The royal government allowed these newly incorporated towns to preserve some of the endowed lands and properties of the monasteries for educational and charitable purposes at the discretion of magistrates.9 In rural areas, the parish, which before the Reformation already had the organizational capacity to collect fees for purposes such as repair of church buildings and charity provision to the poor, became the basic administrative unit to manage the secular responsibility for poor relief after the 1530s.10 In a small community like a parish, the wealthier members were often willing to provide help in kind or in cash for their own 6

G. R. Elton, “An Early Tudor Poor Law,” Economic History Review, New Series, 6 no. 1 (1953): 55–67. 7 Paul A. Fideler, “Poverty, Policy and Providence: The Tudors and the Poor,” in Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth, ed. Paul A. Fideler and T. F. Mayer (London: Routledge, 1992), 203–12. 8 Slack, From Reformation to Improvement, 26. 9 Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England, 179–80. 10 McIntosh, Poor Relief in England, 97–102; Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, “Local Responses to the Poor in Late Medieval and Tudor England,” Continuity and Change 3, no. 2 (August 1988): 209–45.

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“deserving poor,” such as the old, orphans, and widows. Such charity provision raised the reputation of the rich in the community and enhanced their moral authority; they could use charity as a means to discipline behavior of which they disapproved, such as gambling, drinking, and sexual misbehavior.11 However, such locally managed poor relief that aimed to preserve the welfare of a limited community could hardly address the rising scale of poverty and vagrancy at the national level, let alone overcome famine caused by large-scale calamities. This tension was exacerbated when economic recessions caused widespread unemployment in regions that specialized in manufactures such as woolen cloth. The affluent members of these regions felt that the burden of poor relief had become too heavy due to their own falling income and the increasing number of the poor who needed help. Poor relief based upon voluntary contributions was even more difficult to maintain in populous cities or large parishes in the north. The amount of relief money received from voluntary contributions was insufficient even in normal times due to underassessment and evasion.12 In response, cities such as London, Norwich, Ipswich, and York had to adopt compulsory collection of relief rates in the 1540s and 1550s.13 Poor relief in many cities and towns was centrally managed by city councils so as to overcome the inadequacy of parochial provision.14 Such de facto local taxes for poor relief in cities emerged out of local rather than central initiatives. After decades of local experiments in helping the poor, the statute of 1552 and parliamentary Act of 1556 marked the beginning of the creation of a nationwide poor relief system that would integrate central coordination and authority with local autonomy. The royal government ordered ministers and churchwardens in each parish and officials in boroughs and towns to survey the number of needy poor, appoint collectors to collect rates for poor relief, and keep account records of both collection and distribution. Parishes created the office of collector or overseer 11

12 13 14

Steve Hindle, “A Sense of Place? Becoming and Belonging in the Rural Parish, 1550– 1650,” in Communities in Early Modern England, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 108–10; Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004). For the difficulty in collecting poor relief rates, see Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 155–59. Paul Slack, “Poverty and Social Regulation in Elizabethan England,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh (London: Macmillan, 1984), 223. Paul Slack, “Social Policy and the Constraints of Government, 1547–58,” in The MidTudor Polity, c. 1540–1560, ed. Jennifer Loach and Robert Tittler (Macmillan, 1982), 107.

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to collect compulsory rates according to assessments of wealth to replace voluntary contributions or contributions based upon persuasion.15 This gradual trend toward a national system of poor relief in which the royal government authorized the imposition of compulsory local rates reached a peak in the 1590s. The Tudor state faced an unprecedented crisis caused by consecutive harvest failures in the years between 1594 and 1598, rising prices, and the wars with Spain and Ireland.16 The Poor Laws in 1598 and 1601 combined the authority of the state in protecting the social welfare of its subjects with local autonomy in enforcing state social policies. How to assess and collect poor rates, as well as how to distribute relief to the deserving poor, was left to the discretion of self-governance. Meanwhile, the establishment of the Commissions for Charitable Uses after 1598 provided a legal forum to check possible abuses and malfunctions in parish poor relief. Record-keeping of poor relief in parishes was thus not simply for the purpose of self-management, but was also to fulfill a public responsibility subject to the supervision of higher authorities. Thence, the funds collected from the imposition of compulsory rates in parishes represented a de facto local taxation authorized by the state.17 The total amount of poor rates raised in England was estimated at £400,000 a year in the 1690s, and accounted for nearly 10 percent of the English government’s annual spending in 1692 (not including the amounts spent to service the debt).18 Nevertheless, it was difficult for locally managed poor relief funded by compulsory rates to handle cross-regional food crises created by increasing migration, both between rural areas and from rural to urban areas. Local authorities often gave priority to the “little commonwealth” of boroughs and counties under their jurisdiction. Towns that suffered from calamities such as fire or floods, or parishes that suffered from economic recessions, often were unable to collect sufficient rates among their own inhabitants to relieve the hardship of the destitute. Yet the neighboring 15

16

17 18

Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England, 124; Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 204; Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, “Poverty, Charity, and Coercion in Elizabethan England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35, no. 3 (Winter 2005): 457–79. R. B. Outhwaite, “Dearth, the English Crown and the ‘Crisis of the 1590s,’” in The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Contemporary History, ed. Peter Clark (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 23–43. McIntosh, Poor Relief in England, 166–68, 288–93. Joanna Innes, “The State and the Poor: Eighteenth-Century England in European Perspective,” in Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany, ed. John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 229.

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parishes had no obligation to help. In such situations, suffering parishes often appealed to the central government for assistance. In response, the royal government issued letters of patent under the Great Seal of England to authorize them to collect compulsory rates from neighboring communities – or even from the whole country – to fund their reconstruction and poor relief.19 For example, considering the large number of people who became impoverished in the town of Tiverton in the county of Devon after a big fire in 1598, the Privy Council issued the town a license to collect money from the whole realm for speedy relief.20 Such measures that overrode the normal limits of parish relief were justified by the state’s responsibility to protect the general welfare. Local officials who refused to obey the central license were subject to further inquiry and punitive measures from the Privy Council. Increasing number of vagrants seeking either subsistence or better economic opportunities posed a great threat to the locally organized poor relief. Parish officers and ratepayers were hostile to providing relief to strangers from out of their limited resources. By the later sixteenth century, the authorities recognized that many “vagrants” were not driven by idleness but by lack of job opportunities. As a result, the acts and statutes of 1576, 1597, and 1610 ordered the establishment of bridewells or houses of correction in counties and towns to employ ablebodied vagrants, a model that had originated in London in 1553.21 Work creation for the migrant poor and the imposition of apprenticeship on children over the age of seven represented a method to combine regulation and discipline so as to settle the rootless poor rather than send them back to their places of origin or dwelling. In addition to houses of correction built in cities, about one-fourth of counties had their own rural houses of correction by the end of the sixteenth century.22 Justices of the Peace (JPs) in counties had to face mounting pressure from the royal government to establish houses of correction in territories under their jurisdiction.23 Although some methods

19 20 21 22

23

Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 73–74. Acts of the Privy Council [hereafter APC] 1598–1599, 264–65. Beier, Masterless Men, 164; John Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1986), ch. 5. Joanna Innes, “Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells, 1555–1800,” in Labour, Law, and Crime: A Historical Perspective, ed. Francis Snyder and Douglas Hay (London: Tavistock Publications, 1987), 62. Innes, “Prisons for the Poor,” 72–74.

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initiated from local practices, such as regulating begging by licensing, were incorporated into the central legislation and statutes for the whole country, local officeholders were less enthusiastic about implementing some brutal central orders, such as the branding and enslavement of undeserving vagrants and the hanging of incorrigible beggars.24 The role of the royal government as the highest political authority in safeguarding the general welfare was particularly important in severe food crises because many necessary measures ran against the narrower interests of local communities. When failed harvests drove grain prices high, especially when coinciding with widespread unemployment in economic recessions, the royal government often intervened in the grain markets. Such intervention aimed at preserving the “common weal” when the livelihoods of subjects were threatened by famine.25 The interventions included restricting the export and encouraging the import of grain; searching for available grain for marketing and regulating the behavior of middlemen and traders so that the grain in the markets would be affordable to poor consumers; restricting malting and brewing so as to preserve more grain for food consumption; and prompting the rich to show more sympathy toward the poor by reducing unnecessary consumption and giving more donations. In addition to sending royal proclamations and copies of parliamentary legislation to direct magistrates in times of dearth, the royal government printed the Books of Orders to provide detailed guidance to JPs on how to fulfill their responsibilities in preserving the common weal as agents of the state.26 Although the Books of Orders were a form of emergent central command to protect the general welfare in emergencies, the JPs who enforced these orders could adjust the general direction according to the circumstances of their counties. Nevertheless, the royal government in 1631 strengthened its supervision over magistrates in enforcing dearth policies listed in the Books of Orders.27 In consequence, meetings of JPs with parish officials in the 1630s became more frequent. The increasing correspondence among parish officials, JPs, and the Privy Council, upon the basis of a shared consensus on the importance of maintaining social order in 24 25 26 27

Williams, The Tudor Regime, 199. For regulating grain markets for military supply in the reign of Henry VIII, see Sharp, Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, 177–86. Slack, “Books of Orders.” B. W. Quintrell, “The Making of Charles I’s Book of Orders,” English Historical Review 95, no. 376 (July 1980): 553–72.

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times of food crisis, facilitated the enforcement of central orders in localities, and a nascent nationwide administrative network began to emerge.28 The role of the state in coordinating cross-regional relief in situations of urgent food scarcity was crucial when there were obvious interregional conflicts of interests. In the early sixteenth century, several municipal governments had established their own public granaries to prepare for poor harvests. The City of London built a granary at the Bridgehouse as early as 1514. When grain prices ran high in 1520, the mayor and aldermen raised a loan of £1,000 from the guilds and companies in London to purchase grain “for the Common Weale of this Citie” and then sell it to citizens at lower prices. Similar public granaries also existed in other cities such as Bristol and Norwich.29 City councils had public funds, as well as contributions from councilors and wealthier inhabitants, to purchase corn from outside markets to sell at below-market prices to relieve their poor.30 Nonetheless, these municipal resources mainly protected their own residents. In the famine of 1596 and 1597, the city of Salisbury provided relief grain to its own paupers, but refused to let the poor from nearby villages enter the city for relief.31 However, urban residents could likewise be vulnerable to local protectionism. In times of food scarcity, JPs in counties had the power to prohibit the transportation of grain out of the county in order to secure local needs, an action that directly threatened cities and towns that depended upon grain purchases.32 In this situation, cities and towns had to appeal to the Privy Council to intervene. The Privy Council in response ordered magistrates to lift the bans and allowed merchants to ship grain to cities and towns, particularly to London, which had the largest urban population in the kingdom and occupied a central position in England’s overseas trade and defense.33 28

29 30 31 32 33

Henrik Langelüddecke, “Law and Order in Seventeenth-Century England: The Organization of Local Administration during the Personal Rule of Charles I,” Law and History Review 15, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 49–76; Henrik Langelüddecke, “‘Patchy and Spasmodic’: The Response of Justices of the Peace to Charles I’s Book of Orders,” English Historical Review 113, no. 454 (November 1998): 1231–48. Sharp, Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, 157–58. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England, 146–47. Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), 140. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England, 144. Sharp, Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, 221–26. For the royal government’s intervention to secure the food supply to London during the food crisis in the 1590s, see M. J. Power, “London and the Control of the ‘Crisis’ of the 1590s,” History 70, no. 230 (October 1985): 371–85.

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The legitimacy of the state rested upon the protection of the welfare of the entire realm that consisted of the wellbeing of various communities. The “princely care for the loving subjects” that the crown asserted through proclamations and statutes in times of food crisis provided a platform not only for the central government to pressure local authorities to ensure cross-regional movement of grain in times of dearth, but also for local magistrates to bargain with the royal government to protect the residents of their jurisdictions. In 1595 and 1596, JPs in Kent reminded the Privy Council that the shipment of grain out of Kent to meet the urgent need in London should not conflict with the local demand for food.34 This imperative was recognized by the Privy Council in its warrant to JPs in the county of Norfolk confirming that they had the right to keep a “reasonable” amount of grain for the consumption of their residents.35 When the fear of food riots in London was relieved by sufficient supply, the royal government reacted by asking London to help other regions. In March and April of 1597, the Privy Council requested the Lord Mayor of London to permit merchants to ship 50–60 quarters of rye to the town of Tenterden in Kent, and 80–100 quarters of rye to the inhabitants of Topsham in Devon, as these towns suffered from severe food scarcity and required poor relief.36 In the same year, the Privy Council asked London to transport 200 quarters of wheat to relieve the county of Somersetshire.37 Meanwhile, the grain preserved in the municipal granaries of London was available for mobilization by the central government. In January 1624, for example, the royal government needed a large quantity of food to supply its forces for the war with Spain. Anxious that a massive purchase of grain from the markets would drive prices too high, a situation that was against the “public good of the city and the Kingdom,” the royal government requested London to supply 2,000 quarters of wheat from its municipal granaries.38 The royal government as the highest authority also intervened to resolve conflicts between different places in securing their food supply in crisis years. In 1597 a ship laden with rye heading for the city of York was stopped by the mayor of Boston in Lincolnshire and forced to sell its cargo at below-market prices for local relief. After receiving complaints 34 35 36 37 38

Stephen Hipkin, “The Structure, Development, and Politics of the Kent Grain Trade, 1552–1647,” Economic History Review 61, no. S1 (August 2008): 132. APC 1596–1597, 269–70. APC 1597, 5 and 15. APC 1597, 45. APC 1623–1625, 430–31.

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from the mayor and aldermen of York, the Privy Council sent a letter to the mayor of Boston, asking him to permit the remaining 104 quarters of rye to be sent to the city of York for the relief of its poor.39 When grain being shipped toward cities in Wiltshire was stopped at the port of Southampton, the Privy Council, having been petitioned by the JPs of Wiltshire, ordered the Southampton magistrates to release all of the grain to Wiltshire. The Privy Council justified its order upon the basis that Southampton as a port city had better access to grain in the markets than poor towns in Wiltshire. The Privy Council particularly reminded officials in Southampton that for the relief of the poor “you will deal as well with others as yourselves will desire to be dealt.”40 Although the royal government possessed neither nationwide state granaries nor a centralized fiscal system to transfer official funds or grain across regions, its authority over local governments to some extent mitigated the damage to the general welfare of the realm that might have been caused by unconstrained local protectionism. The normative authority of the central government in safeguarding the public interest of the realm was accepted rather than challenged by unsalaried local officeholders. When facing conflicts of interest with other counties or cities, magistrates and merchants petitioned the center for arbitration. Even when magistrates bargained with the center over the distribution of grain, they justified their requests by emphasizing local welfare as an inherent component of the general common weal. Meanwhile, England could import large amounts of grain from overseas when there was domestic scarcity of food. For example, London imported 13,884 bushels of grain in 1597; Shrewsbury in 1596 imported 3,200 bushels of corn for relieving its poor; and Bristol merchants purchased 375 bushels of rye for the city in 1596.41 Imports of overseas grain to a large extent mitigated the conflicts of interest between urban and rural areas in England in severe food crises. Nonetheless, local officeholders had little incentive to implement the measures in the Books of Orders that were troublesome to put into practice or went against their interests as part of the propertied class. For example, magistrates in coastal cities and towns with a surplus of grain were not enthusiastic about checking the smuggling of grain to overseas markets where it could be sold for a higher profit. Likewise, the central 39 40 41

APC 1597, 3. APC 1597, 84–85. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England, 139.

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directions to regulate malting and brewing to preserve grain for the food needs of the poor in times of dearth were often ignored by local officers who had a vested interest in the brewing business.42 The JPs were particularly against the royal orders to search for corn stocks, regulate the private deals of grain merchants, and force corn owners to sell in public markets at low prices. In their view, these methods were counterproductive as they caused panic among corn merchants, disrupted the crossregional movement of grain through market transactions, and raised local prices. Local officeholders in times of scarcity were more willing to raise the poor relief rates to help the poor purchase food from the less regulated grain markets than to supervise those markets and merchants more directly.43 The objections of magistrates to the central attempt to intervene in grain markets on the one hand reflected the fact that wholesale grain merchants and middlemen had already become indispensable to transporting food from surplus regions to meet local demands. This was a new economic condition with which the government had to come to terms in its efforts to protect the welfare of the subjects. On the other hand, it also represented the sprouting of a new political economy, which emphasized that private profit incentives could contribute to the public interest. However, the royal government in the early Stuart period was not prepared to embrace a laissez-faire ideology toward the grain trade when the livelihoods of its subjects were menaced by starvation.

2.2  Japan, 1640 –1853 In Tokugawa Japan, land taxes, which were paid by peasants in rice, were crucial to both the shogun and daimyo as they needed to pay stipends in rice to their samurai-retainers. From the early seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, the shogunate and domain governments put great effort into reclaiming new lands and improving irrigation facilities so as to increase agricultural productivity in their respective territories. The total acreage in Japan rose from 2,065,000 cho¯ in 1600 to 3,032,000 cho¯ in 1800, and agricultural productivity rose from 19,731,000 koku to 42 43

Williams, The Tudor Regime, 195; Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 460. R. B. Outhwaite, “Dearth and Government Intervention in English Grain Markets, 1590–1700,” Economic History Review, New Series 34, no. 3 (August 1981), 402–5; Paul Slack, “Dearth and Social Policy in Early Modern England,” Social History of Medicine 5, no. 1 (April 1992): 9–12.

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37,650,000 koku in the same period.44 The domain governments in the To¯hoku (northeastern) area of Japan expanded paddy plantation in the seventeenth century and became major rice exporters to the three large cities of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto.45 In the decentralized political system of Tokugawa Japan, daimyo governed their respective territories as “little states.” But their fiscal capacities were strained by various duties they owed to the shogunate, including the enormous cost of alternate attendance in Edo, which often consumed half of the annual income of most daimyo. The shogunate also requested daimyo with large territories to share the burden of major infrastructural works such as large hydraulic projects, the reconstruction of Edo after big fires, and coastal defense. In order to meet these obligations, daimyo had to borrow money from big urban merchants. These loans were often secured by the domain land taxes collected in rice. The ensuing burden of debt and fiscal deficits not only forced daimyo to try every means to raise their revenues, but also constrained their ability to fulfill their own duty of benevolent rule toward their subjects in times of food crisis. Considering the importance of land taxes in rice, the ideology of benevolent rule had significant practical implications for governance. Relief in money or grain to peasants in times of calamity represented not only a protection of basic social welfare, but also an attempt to secure the reproduction of peasant households as the basis for future tax revenues. In times of food crisis, social stability was threatened by riots in castle towns and countryside, as well as by more passive forms of resistance, such as large-scale flight of peasants to other domains. Thus for the daimyo, the provision of necessary relief to peasants (osukui) in times of scarcity was crucial to the survival of the “little state” of a domain. The shogun and daimyo were motivated to pay special attention to famine relief, and information about effective policies or failures in individual domains spread quickly through regular interactions among daimyo and their representatives living in Edo, as well as through scholars and merchants from whom daimyo sought advice.46 44

45 46

Hayami Akira and Miyamoto Matao, eds., Keizai shakai no seiritsu: 17th–18th seiki [The formation of an economic society: Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries], Nihon keizaishi [The economic history of Japan], 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988), 44. The cho¯ was a traditional unit of area, approximately equivalent to 99.18 acres. The koku was a dry measure of capacity, roughly equivalent to 180 liters or 5 bushels. Kikuchi Isao, Kinsei no kikin [Famine in the early modern world] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1997), 49–51. See the information exchange among daimyo officials in Edo in Kasaya Kazuhiko, Kinsei buke shakai no seiji ko¯zo¯, ch. 12.

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When the shogunate in the Kyo¯ho¯ period (1716–1736) implemented measures to extract more land taxes from peasants, it also tried to provide relief grain to peasants who suffered from harvest failures so as to maintain the reproduction of their households. For this purpose, the shogunate in 1728 distributed a large amount of grain to be stored in rural granaries across the shogunal territory. The total amount of stored grain in 1730 reached 600,000 koku, which constituted about 30–40 percent of the annual land taxes of the shogunate.47 Daimyo also sought effective relief measures that fitted local circumstances. Meanwhile, the economy in Tokugawa Japan experienced significant commercialization and monetization. Domains were increasingly connected by a common national market of rice and other staple goods. Due to the improvement in agricultural productivity and stagnation of total population in the eighteenth century, rice prices in normal years remained low from 1718 onward. In contrast, prices of nonfood commodities kept rising. As both the shogunate and domain governments needed to sell the surplus rice collected from land taxes in the markets to meet their spending needs in cash, low rice prices reduced their cash income and increased their debt to big merchants. How to raise the prices in the Osaka-centered rice market became a major concern for the shogunate, and governments of daimyo also intervened in local rice markets.48 Yet high rice prices favorable to the fiscal needs of the shogunate and domain governments negatively affected the livelihood of those who needed to purchase food from the markets in both urban and rural areas. High rice prices often triggered social disturbances and disorder. This was a serious social problem in urban areas, as by the late eighteenth century Edo had more than one million residents and the populations of Osaka and Kyoto were each above 300,000. Due to the shogunal “seclusion policy” (sakoku), neither could grain be imported from overseas markets when domestic rice prices ran high nor surplus exported when they were low. As a result, the protection of social welfare in times of food crisis depended upon the interregional redistribution of grain in Japan. Nonetheless, individual daimyo did not have the necessary capacity to deal with large-scale, cross-regional calamities. In times of widespread 47

48

¯ tomo Kazuo, “Kyo¯ho¯ki go¯son chokoku seisaku no seiritsu katei” [The making of rural O granary policy during the Kyo¯ho¯ reign (1716–1736)] Kokushigaku, no. 118 (November 1982): 44. Honjo¯ Eijiro¯, Tokugawa bakufu no beika cho¯setsu [Regulation of rice prices by the Tokugawa shogunate] (Kyoto: Ko¯bundo¯, 1924).

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famine, in order to secure the food supply in their respective domains, domain governments often adopted similar emergency measures such as prohibiting the transportation of grain out of their domains. The shogunate only collected land taxes in its own territory, about one-third of the territory of Japan. In times of major famine, the shogunate frequently gave priority to securing the food supply in its own territory, especially to provide for the major cities of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Interregional conflicts of interest were thus a serious defect of a decentralized famine relief system. Famine relief in Tokugawa Japan was a mixture of selfprotection on the part of villagers and urban residents supported by the shogunate and domain governments in their respective territories, as well as the coordination of relief efforts that the shogunate negotiated with domain governments in times of large-scale calamity. In coordinating relief efforts in the nationwide Kan’ei famine of 1642 and 1643, for example, the shogunate ordered daimyo to report losses of harvests in their respective territories; it also sent out inspectors to examine degrees of shortage in domains and issued decrees to daimyo to restrict sake brewing.49 The implementation of shogunal relief policies in a domain, however, was at the discretion of the daimyo. For example, Aizu domain completely prohibited sake brewing even though the shogunal decree only requested reduction of sake brewing to one-half of the amount in normal years.50 Meanwhile, the shogunate and domain governments relied upon their own stocks to provide relief food to the hungry in their own territories. In addition to setting up shelters to feed the destitute, the shogunate invested in infrastructural projects to provide opportunities for the poor to earn wages. More than 355 koku of rice were distributed to some 35,000 poor laborers who dredged rivers in Osaka.51 In order to prepare for food scarcity, many daimyo tried to build public granaries in their own territories. In 1654 Hoshina Masayuki, daimyo of Aizu domain, used domain funds to set up community granaries (shaso¯). The total amount of reserved grain reached 500,000 hyo¯ in 1669.52 The domain government used the stored grain not only to lend to poor peasants in periods of scarcity, but also to cover the cost of public works of irrigation and road maintenance in normal years. The  community 49 50 51 52

Fujita Satoru, Kinsei shiryo¯ron no seikai, 282–88. Kikuchi Isao, Kinsei no kikin, 29. Kikuchi Isao, Kinsei no kikin, 45. The hyo¯ (“bale”) was a traditional measure of rice equivalent to about 72 liters or 0.4 koku.

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granary system in Aizu domain was praised by the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune in 1718.53 The Okayama domain set up similar community granaries in 1671. These community granaries were consciously based upon the model developed in Song-dynasty China, where they were administered privately by local community leaders; here, however, they were funded and managed by the domain government.54 Daimyo might also provide relief grain to their subjects independent of shogunal orders. During the poor harvest in 1695 caused by cold weather and a summer with excessive rain, the daimyo of Kaga domain originally did not reduce the land taxes and shipped 100,000 koku to Edo and Osaka to sell for revenue. But famine threatened the social order, so the domain government implemented relief measures by lending 20,000 koku to peasants and 5,000 koku to residents in the castle town, and by releasing 8,157 koku to more than 60,000 poor people.55 Nonetheless, daimyo did not conduct famine relief in complete isolation from the shogunate. After the Kan’ei famine, daimyo regularly reported to the shogunate loss of harvests caused by natural disasters. In addition to seeking relief loans or relief grain from the shogunate, they also hoped that the shogunate would consider the degree of calamity and harvest failure and reduce accordingly their duties to the shogunate in alternate attendance and infrastructural construction.56 Daimyo in strategic defensive positions along the northern border often received relief loans or grain from the shogunate when they were struck by disasters. In 1695, Hirosaki domain suffered a harvest failure in the autumn due to cold weather. As the domain government had shipped as much rice as possible out to Edo, where prices were high, it did not have enough reserves to provide relief. The shogunate lent Hirosaki domain 8,000 ryo¯,57 but the domain government was unable to purchase rice from the nearby Akita domain, which had banned exports of grain to preserve sufficient stocks for its own consumption. Coastal transportation was blocked by 53

54

55

56 57

Nakamura Akihiko, Hoshina Masayuki: Tokugawa sho¯gunke wo sasaeta Aizu hanshu [Hoshina Masayuki: The lord of Aizu domain who supported the Tokugawa House] (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ Ko¯ronsha, 1995), 114–22. Kikuchi Isao, Kinsei no kikin, 182; Mark J. Ravina, “Confucian Banking: The Community Granary (Shaso¯) in Rhetoric and Practice,” in Economic Thought in Early Modern Japan, ed. Bettina Gramlich-Oka and Gregory J. Smits (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 179–204. Hara Sho¯go, Kaga-han ni miru bakuhansei kokka seiritsu shiron [A history of the foundation of the state in the bakuhan system as seen from Kaga domain] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 1981), 278–83. Kikuchi Isao, Kikin kara yomu kinsei shakai [Early modern society as seen from famine] (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 2003), 313. The ryo¯ was a unit of gold currency.

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the winter, so Hirosaki domain could not purchase rice from regions with good harvests. Some 30,000 people in Hirosaki domain were estimated to have died of starvation in the winter of 1695 and spring of 1696.58 In contrast, the Matsumae domain, which did not produce grain and had to depend upon the Hirosaki domain for its rice supply in normal years, received emergency relief in grain from the shogunate as the domain was charged with guarding the border facing Ezo island (today’s Hokkaido).59 The contrast of Hirosaki and Matsumae demonstrates the importance of relief grain in a time of severe food crisis when grain was not available in markets. The shogunate possessed much larger resources of grain than any single daimyo. In particular, the shogunate had a special military granary system (shirozume-mai) separate from the civilian granaries in which a large amount of rice was stored in castle towns located in strategic positions across Japan. This was established in the early seventeenth century as military reserves. In 1676, a total of 240,000 koku rice were stored in fifty-nine castle towns held by fudai daimyo, who managed the stocks on behalf of the shogunate. Every summer, the stored rice was supposed to be sold and then replaced by new rice collected as taxes or purchased from the markets.60 As the country entered a time of enduring domestic peace, the shogunate used the reserved rice for domestic welfare, including famine relief, lending seed to farmers, and stabilizing rice prices in cities such as Edo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Nagasaki.61 The resources of the shogunate allowed it to play an important role to aid daimyo against the Kyo¯ho¯ famine in western Japan in 1732 and 1733. Harvest failures caused by locusts led to runaway rice prices in Osaka as 70–80 percent of rice shipped to Osaka each year came from western Japan. The shogunate implemented emergency measures such as prohibition of sake brewing and allocated 2,000 koku in rice to both Osaka and Kyoto to relieve the urban poor. It urged wealthy merchants and commoners in both urban and rural areas to contribute resources to rescue the starving, including setting up shelters for the hungry even if they came from other domains. In what was known as the “collaborative 58 59 60

61

Hasegawa Seiichi, Hirosaki han [Hirosaki domain] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2004), 117–19. Kikuchi Isao, Kikin kara yomu kinsei shakai, 250–51. Yanagiya Keiko, “Edo Bakufu shirozumemai-sei no seiritsu” [The establishment of the shogunal system of strategic provision of rice held in castles in the Edo period], Nippon rekishi, no. 444 (1985): 38–57. Yanagiya Keiko, “Edo Bakufu shirozumemai-sei no kino¯” [The function of the shogunal system of strategic provision of rice held in castles in the Edo period], Shigaku zasshi 96, no. 12 (1987): 1855–89.

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way” (go¯ryoku) of famine relief, members of social elites managed the distribution of relief food and money to the needy under the supervision of shogunal officials. The names of 37,290 contributors to famine relief in shogunal territory, most of whom were from Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, were recorded to recognize their philanthropic virtue.62 In order to provide a chance for the poor to earn wages to purchase food, the shogunate also funded dredging projects in Osaka.63 For daimyo who were unable to provide sufficient relief with their own resources, the shogunate supplied a total of 256,525 koku of rice for sale at below-market prices and 118,578 koku to allocate to the hungry in their respective domains during the Kyo¯ho¯ famine.64 The shogunate compared the yields reported by daimyo with their average yields in the previous five years. If the ratio of harvest loss reached 50 percent, then the daimyo was eligible to receive a relief loan from the shogunate, regardless of whether he was an outside or fudai daimyo. The shogunate lent a total of 33,914 ryo¯ to forty-five daimyo, twenty-four hatamoto (high-ranking samurai in direct service to the shogun), and one shrine (jinja); the loans were to be returned interest free within five years starting from 1734. The relief rice mainly came from the shogunal reserves in Osaka and stocks in castle towns, purchased from Edo, and the land taxes that the shogunate received.65 According to the reports to the shogunate from the domain governments, a total of 1,842,170 starving people were helped by the shogunal relief grain.66 The resources provided by the shogunate amounted to some 90 percent of the total relief grain sent to calamity-struck domains. The good harvest in eastern Japan, where shogunal lands were concentrated, was also helpful to these relief efforts in western Japan. However, the shogunate did not possess a capacity adequate to balance competing claims to food in different regions in a major famine. For example, when the shogunate encouraged daimyo and merchants to ship rice to Osaka during the Kyo¯ho¯ famine, rice prices immediately soared in Edo, triggering Edo’s first rice riot against the rich rice merchants in early 1733.67

62 63 64 65 66

67

Kitahara Itoko, Toshi to hinkon no shakaishi: Edo kara To¯kyo¯ e [The social history of poverty in early modern urban Japan] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1995), 15–29. Kikuchi Isao, Kinsei no kikin, 114–17. Kitahara Itoko, Toshi to hinkon no shakaishi, 12. Kikuchi Isao, Kikin kara yomu kinsei shakai, 188–89. Ikeuchi Nagayoshi, “Bakufu no Kyo¯ho¯ kikin ni okeru bakuryo¯-shiryo¯ e no kyu¯sai” [­Shogunal relief to shogunal possessions and domain lands during the Kyo¯ho¯ famine], Rekishi chirigaku, no. 145 (1989): 15. Kikuchi Isao, Kikin kara yomu kinsei shakai, 190–92.

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The vulnerability of the decentralized relief system in Tokugawa Japan to nationwide harvest failures was clearly demonstrated in the Tenmei famine between 1782 and 1789. The eruption of the Asama volcano in 1783 caused great damage to the Kanto¯ area, which included Edo, and cold weather led to extremely poor yields in the To¯hoku (northeastern) region. Bad weather continued in 1784, and the total yield across the country in 1786 only reached one-third of that in normal years. The period between 1783 and 1789 witnessed a nationwide scarcity of food, in which the years 1783 and 1784 were most severe. As the amount of rice entering Edo and Osaka from other domains declined sharply, rice prices in both cities, as well as in Kyoto, skyrocketed. High prices, however, did not attract many shipments from other domains, even though the shogunate allowed unlicensed rice merchants to ship rice to these three major cities as an emergency measure. Facing a huge food crisis, the shogunate released its reserves to rescue urban residents and banned transport of grain out of Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto. It was unable to provide any relief grain to daimyo, only a limited amount of relief loans.68 The effectiveness of famine relief measures on the part of daimyo to rescue their own people depended upon the amount of grain reserves within the domain and the availability of grain for purchase from outside. The Hirosaki domain government transported 40,000 hyo¯ of rice to Edo despite the cold weather in 1782, and it was totally unprepared for the harvest failure the following autumn. Although it received a 10,000 ryo¯ relief loan from the shogunate, it could not purchase grain from the markets.69 An estimated 130,000 people died of starvation and 20,000 fled the domain.70 In contrast, Uesugi Yo¯zan, the daimyo of Yonezawa domain, used 14,000 hyo¯ of tax rice, 10,000 hyo¯ of the domain government’s reserve grain, and 1,000 hyo¯ of grain in the charity granaries managed by merchants, as well as 9,575 hyo¯ of rice purchased from Echigo domain, for famine relief. An additional 24,000 hyo¯ of wheat harvested in 1783 was very helpful. The effective relief measures in Yonezawa domain to a large extent mitigated the damage there and were acclaimed as a model of “good governance” by contemporaries.71 68 69 70 71

Kikuchi Isao, Kikin kara yomu kinsei shakai, 203–4. Hasegawa Seiichi, Hirosaki han, 142. Kurotaki Ju¯jiro¯, Hirosaki hansei no shomondai [Various issues of domain governance in Hirosaki] (Hirosaki: Hoppo¯ Shinsha, 1997), 145. Yokoyama Akio, Uesugi Yo¯zan [Uesugi Yo¯zan] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1968), 138–43.

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A total of 1.4 million people are estimated to have perished in the Tenmei famine, 300,000 of whom were in northeastern Japan. In the postdisaster reconstruction, in addition to attempting to reduce urban populations and encourage farming, the shogunate and domain governments put great efforts into building granary systems to prepare for future food crises. In 1789, the shogunate issued a “granary edict” (kakoikoku rei) to the whole country, requesting that each domain build granaries in the period between 1790 and 1795. A domain government was to stock 0.5 percent of its recorded rice output. The domain government was to shoulder the building cost, and the reserves were prepared “for the whole of the realm” (tenka no gosonae).72 These granaries depended heavily upon the motivation of local communities to protect themselves. In the shogunal territories, ten neighboring villages often formed one unit to maintain a common granary storing millet and wheat. The stocks were mainly provided by rich farmers in the villages, although the shogunate paid for some of the c­ onstruction fees and allocated portions from its land taxes to the reserves. The ­village headmen and well-to-do farmers were responsible for managing the g­ ranaries, subject to the supervision of shogunal officials.73 In domainal territories, sources of reserves for these community granaries varied. In Kumamoto domain, the domain government collected a special tax on houseowners and imposed a duty of 5 percent on house transactions in the castle town. The money collected was entrusted to the block association (machi kaisho), which consisted of merchants and houseowners, to maintain granaries in the castle town. These granaries not only provided emergency relief in famine years, but also aided the poor in normal times.74 A few granaries were funded and managed by domain governments directly. For example, in Mito domain, the millet granaries built by the domain government rescued many poor in the Tenmei famine. The Mito domain in the early nineteenth century continued to build such millet granaries in villages. In 1831, its domain government purchased 20,000 72

73

74

Ando¯ Yu¯ichiro¯, Kansei Kaikaku no toshi seisaku: Edo no beika antei to hanmai kakuho [Urban policy in the Kansei reforms: The stabilization of rice prices and securing the food supply in Edo] (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 2000), 346. Fujita Satoru, Matsudaira Sadanobu: Seiji kaikaku ni idonda ro¯ju¯ [Matusaira Sadanobu: The member of the Council of Elders who tackled political reform] (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ Ko¯ronsha, 1993), 60–61. Matsuzaki Noriko, Kinsei jo¯kamachi no un’ei to cho¯nin [The running of early modern castle towns and townspeople] (Osaka: Seibundo, 2012), ch. 9.

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hyo¯ of millet to set up an “ever-normal granary.” These reserves in village granaries played important relief functions in Mito during the great Tempo¯ famine of 1832–1839.75 One important development in the famine relief system from the late eighteenth century onward was the increasing collaboration between urban merchants or well-to-do farmers and the political authorities. Local elites took more responsibilities for financing and managing the community granaries in rural areas; domain governments provided some initial support from their collected land taxes, dispensed part of the cost to build and maintain the village granaries, and appointed officials to check their operations.76 In Morioka domain after the Tenmei famine, the daimyo added 300 da of rice to the 196 da contributed by castle residents to build a granary in the castle town and ordered three wealthy merchants to manage the granary.77 Akita domain originally forced peasants to contribute to stocks, but this was resisted by peasants who considered it an extra tax burden. As a result, the domain government had to let village headmen manage the village granaries and asked the resourceful urban merchants to use their own money and contributions from castle residents to set up community granaries for poor relief in the castle town.78 In the provinces of Yamato, Izumi, and Harima in the Kinai area, daimyo ordered neighboring villages to jointly build common community granaries.79 The fees came mainly from local well-to-do farmers and merchants who managed these granaries, though daimyo sent officials to monitor their management.80 In the Tokujima 75 76

77 78 79

80

Nogami Taira, Mito han no¯son no kenkyu¯ [A study of villages in Mito domain] (Tokyo: Fu¯to¯sha, 1997), 159–67. ¯ tsuka Eiji, “Okura, go¯kura ni miru kinsei shakai no ko¯zo¯” [The structure of early O modern society as seen from the granaries managed by domain governments and granaries managed by villagers], in Atarashii kinseishi, vol. 4, Sonraku no henyo¯ to chiiki shakai, ed. Watanabe Hisashi (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu o¯raisha, 1996), 150–51. One da was equivalent to some 135 kilograms. Kikuchi Isao, Kinsei no kikin, 187–88. The provinces (kuni) were imperial administrative units originally established in the seventh century. By the Tokugawa period, they had ceased to have their own administrative structures but functioned primarily as territorial and cultural markers. In some cases, the boundaries of imperial provinces coincided with those of Tokugawa domains; in others, a province might contain more than one domain, or vice versa. For a brief introduction in English, see Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain, 5–6; Roberts, Performing the Great Peace, 47–48. Yamazaki Yoshihiro, Kinsei ko¯ki no ryo¯shu shihai to chiiki shakai: “Hyakusho¯ seiritsu” to chu¯kanso¯ [Lordly administration and regional society in the later early modern period: “The livelihood of farmers” and the middling sort] (Osaka: Seibundo¯ Shuppan, 2007).

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domain, the thirteen community granaries built in 1840 and 1841 were all funded by well-to-do farmers.81 The scale of collaboration between the political authorities and local elites in building and managing such community granaries was remarkable in the big cities. In Kyoto, the city magistrate in 1787 confiscated property worth 22,000 ryo¯ from a big merchant who was charged with hoarding rice for “unjust” profit in a time of food scarcity. The city magistrate used 2,000 ryo¯ to build a granary and lent the rest to help residents who suffered from a big fire in 1787. The interest returns on these loans were used to purchase grain for the city granaries. The city government entrusted the management of these granaries to representatives selected from various districts in Kyoto. These managers worked with representatives from rice wholesalers to flexibly determine the amount of unhusked rice to be stored according to rice prices in the markets.82 In Edo, the shogunate ordered that expenditures on city management be cut and used 70 percent of the 37,000 ryo¯ thus saved (shichibuzukikin), along with 10,000 ryo¯ allocated from the shogunate, to create a fund for maintaining community granaries in Edo. The management of this relief fund and its associated community granaries was entrusted to the newly established block association consisting of merchants and houseowners in Edo. However, the bookkeeping of the granaries was subject to the supervision of shogunal financial officials. The original amount of stored grain was set to be that sufficient to feed 500,000 urban poor for thirty days.83 The Edo block association managed both ordinary relief for the “deserving poor” such as the elderly, widows, the disabled, and orphans in normal circumstances and emergent relief for the hungry in times of food scarcity. In 1811, the Edo block association had cash reserves of 460,000 ryo¯, lent-out loans of 280,000 ryo¯, and 170,000 koku of unhusked rice.84 The profits earned from lending out the reserved funds were crucial for the block association to pay for the operation of its granary system. Its effective management and profitability even attracted the shogunate to

81 82

83 84

Takahashi Hajime, Kinsei hanryo¯ shakai no tenkai [The development of early modern feudal society] (Hiroshima: Keisuisha, 2000), 293. Kobayashi Takehiro, “Bakumatsu-Ishinki Kyo¯to no toshi gyo¯sei” [Urban administration in late Tokugawa and Restoration Kyoto], 5; Akimoto Seki, “Meijiki Kyo¯to no jichi to rengo¯ kukai: Kukai” [The self-governance and the alliance of ward assemblies in Meijiperiod Kyoto: The ward assembly], 196, both in Kindai Kyo¯to no kaizo¯: Toshi keiei no kigen 1850–1918-nen, ed. Ito¯ Yukio (Kyoto: Mineruva Shobo¯, 2006). Yoshida Nobuyuki, Kinsei kyodai toshi no shakai ko¯zo¯, 8. Yoshida Nobuyuki, Kinsei kyodai toshi no shakai ko¯zo¯, 18.

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invest in the association fund.85 In 1816, the shogunate took 63,000 ryo¯ from its gold reserves to put in the Edo block association fund.86 Increasing involvement by a range of social groups in building and managing community and charity granaries in both rural and urban areas from the late eighteenth century onward made protection from food scarcity no longer simply a paternalistic favor from a benevolent ruler. But this did not imply a complete retreat of the state from social welfare. Such participation complemented the political duty of the shogun and daimyo, who did not always have adequate fiscal resources to fulfill the duty of “nourishing the people.” The operation of these community granaries received financial support from shogunal and domain governments and was subject to official supervision. Collaboration between state and social actors was to a large extent based upon a shared consensus regarding the importance of social welfare and the need to avoid social disorder. Overall, the management of various granaries in a decentralized relief system was effective in mitigating small-scale food crises, as adjustments could be made according to changes in local circumstances. However, such a decentralized granary system was sensitive to changes in the national rice market. From the late eighteenth century onward, the dominance of Osaka in the national market declined due to the vibrant development of interregional trade networks that bypassed the city. Increasing regional division of labor led peasants in economically developed regions such as the Kinai area around Kyoto and Osaka to grow cash crops such as cotton and engage in manufacturing. Many domain governments adopted mercantilist economic policies to encourage the production of special commodities and manufactured goods to sell for cash revenue. Peasants in these regions likewise needed to purchase rice for consumption and for the payment of land taxes. The growing demand for rice in local markets attracted many private rice merchants and well-to-do farmers to engage in interregional rice transactions. In the meantime, the daimyo, whose revenue depended upon tax rice received from peasants, began to actively seek out more profitable direct trade with regions whose rice prices were higher than that in Osaka. Consequently, entrepots such as Sakai and Hyo¯go emerged as rivals to Osaka in the flourishing regional rice trade among domains.87 85 86 87

Yoshida Nobuyuki, Kinsei kyodai toshi no shakai ko¯zo¯, ch. 2. Takeuchi Makoto, Kansei kaikaku no kenkyu¯ [The Kansei reforms] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2009), 227. For the rise of interregional markets not going through the Osaka-based central market in the late Tokugawa era, see Matao Miyamoto, “Quantitative Aspects of Tokugawa

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These developments significantly reduced the shogunate’s ability to regulate the domestic rice market. Structural changes in rice markets also affected the management of local granaries across Japan. The maintenance of the shogunal military granary system across the country had been a huge headache for the shogunate. The domain governments who were entrusted by the shogunate to manage the stocks in their castle towns often used them for their own fiscal purposes or relief needs without receiving permission from the shogunate. When shogunal inspectors came to check the reserves, the domain governments frequently borrowed grain from merchants to temporarily fill the granaries.88 The difficulty of avoiding spoilage and the availability of grain in the markets made cash reserves more attractive than preserving stocks of grain in granaries. Yamagata Banto¯, a merchant-scholar of the Merchant Academy of Osaka (Kaitokudo¯), even argued that the efforts of the shogunate and major daimyo to regulate rice prices in the markets were counterproductive. He advocated free rice trade across regions as ultimately benefiting the entire population.89 However, the decentralized granary system with its increasing dependence upon interregional markets for food proved quite vulnerable in the Tempo¯ famine (1832–1836), when cold weather, excessive rainfall, floods, and other calamities such as earthquakes caused consecutive nationwide crop failures. The average annual yield in Japan between 1833 and 1836 only amounted to 50 percent of the normal level, and the yields in the To¯hoku (northeastern) area were even worse.90 The rice prices in Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto shot up quickly as the amount of rice shipped in from outside dropped dramatically. The interregional grain trade was severely disrupted as daimyo strictly regulated the export of grain out of their territories and the shogunate prohibited rice from shipping out of Edo and Osaka. The regions where community granaries had only reserved cash instead of real grain suffered terribly.

88

89 90

Economy,” in The Economic History of Japan: 1600–1990, vol. 1, ­Emergence  of Economic Society in Japan, 1600–1859, ed. Akira Hayami, Osamu Saito, and ­ ­Ronald P. Toby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 79–81; Saito¯ Yoshiyuki, ­Utsumibune to bakuhansei shijo¯ no kaitai [Inland water transport and the collapse of the shogunate-daimyo market system] (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo¯, 1994). Yanagiya Keiko, “Edo Bakufu shirozumemai-sei to hansei” [The shogunal system of strategic provision of rice held in castle towns in the Edo period and domain administration], Rekishi, no. 69 (September 1987): 15–37. Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudo¯ Merchant A ­ cademy of Osaka (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 266–70. Kikuchi Isao, Kinsei no kikin, 195.

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Nonetheless, no rice riots occurred in Edo in the Tempo¯ famine due to effective relief measures by both the Edo block association and the shogunate. In the four years between 1832 and 1836, the block association dispensed its reserves in grain and cash in six rounds of large-scale relief to the poor. When the association had exhausted its reserves in 1837, the shogunate released 14,000 koku of rice from its own reserves for relieving the poor.91 In addition, the Edo magistrate decided to fund the dredging of the Hamagoten trench so as to allow the poor to earn wages to buy food. In the period between the third and sixth months in 1837, the project hired a total of 37,018 poor laborers and dispensed cash amounting to 1,139 ryo¯.92 In Kyoto, relief to the urban poor was usually accomplished by donations of grain and cash from the wealthier residents. However, the famine caused an economic recession among the manufacturers and merchants in Kyoto, while the magistrate did not release reserves for relief. From 1836 to 1837, 70,000–80,000 people are estimated to have died of starvation in the city.93 Although the Osaka magistrate banned the transport of grain out of Osaka in the eleventh month of 1836, he managed to transport some 520 koku to Kyoto on a daily basis, which accounted for 80 percent of the grain shipped out of Osaka during this crisis.94 In Osaka itself, high rice prices and the widespread unemployment of wage laborers triggered the O̅ shio rebellion. The fire set by rebels burned down 18,000 houses in Osaka, and some 4,000–5,000 koku of stocked rice was consumed by the fire. After the rebellion, the Osaka intendant (jo¯dai) released 2,000 koku of rice to support a relief campaign to the poor organized by Osaka merchants. Moreover, the shogunate in 1836 also allocated funds for the dredging of the river to improve transportation between Osaka and Hyo¯go.95

91 92 93

94

95

Yoshida Nobuyuki, Kinsei kyodai toshi no shakai ko¯zo¯, 20–22. Sakamoto Tadahisa, Kinsei ko¯ki toshi seisaku no kenkyu¯ [Urban policy in the later early modern period] (Suita: O̅ saka Daigaku Shuppankai, 2003), 119. Kobayashi Takehiro, “Bakumatsu-Ishinki Kyo¯to ni okeru toshi shinko¯saku to ko¯kyo¯sei” [The public nature and measures to promote the urban economy in Kyoto during the late Tokugawa and early Meiji period], Nihonshi kenkyu¯, no. 606 (­February 2013): 98–100. Hirakawa Arata, “Bunsei-Tenpo¯ki no bakusei” [Shogunal policy during the Bunsei and Tenpo¯ periods], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon rekishi, vol. 14, Kinsei (5), ed. O̅ tsu To¯ru, Sakurai Eiji, and Fujii Jo¯ji (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2013), 10. ¯ shio no rango no O̅ saka shisei ni tsuite – Kyu¯jutsusaku wo chu¯shin to Kawai Kenji, “O shite” [On governance in Osaka after the O̅ shio uprising – relief policy], Historia, no. 94 (March 1982): 56–69.

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Both the Tenmei and Tempo¯ famines showed the vulnerability of the decentralized granary system to nationwide calamities in an increasingly integrated national market. The inadequacy of relief measures led to food riots in both urban and rural areas targeting rice merchants, as well as peasant rebellions against the collection of land taxes.96 Along with the high mortality of the famine years, these failures damaged the legitimacy of the shogunate and daimyo governments. This not only resulted in criticism from high-ranking retainers, but also led the common people to look to the emperor, who in theory held a higher authority over the shogunate, for hope of rescue. In July of 1787, for example, inadequate relief drove hundreds of thousands of people living in the Kinai area and neighboring provinces to express their grievances by repeatedly circling the imperial palace in Kyoto; this act of reverence was known as “a thousand circuits of the imperial palace” (gosho sendo mairi). At its peak, there were around 50,000 people daily engaging in such worship. In response, the emperor ordered the shogunate to release relief food to the starving, which was unprecedented in the Tokugawa period.97 Commoners in domains also vented their grievances in famine years by calling for help from the emperor.98 Well before the coming of Western powers, the popular hope that the emperor would rescue the suffering people in major famines appeared to be a strong criticism of the shogunate and daimyo’s failure to safeguard the public interest.

2.3  China, 1684–1840 Of the three cases, China had by far the largest population and geographical size, and its vast population was vulnerable to subsistence crisis. Between 1644 and 1911, the total number of major floods noted in official records ran as high as 16,384 and the number of major droughts was 9,185. Natural calamities very often turned into subsistence crises affecting millions of people, which constituted a threat to social order in both urban and rural areas. Famine relief was therefore crucial for the Qing state to legitimate its power. In the words of the Qianlong emperor, “To provide relief grain [in times of calamity] is to fulfill the duty of the state to protect the subjects as [if it were] their parents.”99 96 97 98 99

Aoki Michio, “Tenpo¯ ikki ron” [On the Tenpo¯ uprisings], in Tenpo¯ki no seiji to shakai, ed. Aoki Michio and Yamada Tadao (Tokyo: Yu¯hikaku, 1981), 135–43. Fujita Satoru, Kinsei seijishi to Tenno¯, chs. 2 and 3. Fukaya Katsumi, Kinsei no kokka shakai to Tenno¯ [The state, society, and the emperor in the early modern era] (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 1991), 153–70. Imperial edict of the Qianlong emperor, QL7/8/yisi (September 17, 1742), QSL, vol. 11, 208–9.

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In contrast to early modern England and Tokugawa Japan, the Qing state had a centrally managed tax system. Its fiscal capacity allowed the Qing state to devote enormous funds to maintaining a nationwide system of state-managed granaries, known as ever-normal granaries (changpingcang).100 The total amount of stored grain peaked in the 1740s at about 30–40 million shi.101 This was the largest state granary system in the world in the preindustrial era. Moreover, the Qing government could draw on the annual flow of 3.5 million shi of tribute grain paid as taxes from the southern provinces to Beijing, as well as some 6 to 10 million shi of husked grain stored in the tribute granaries in the suburbs of Beijing, to provide famine relief.102 In Zhili in 1743 and 1744, for example, more than half of the total grain supplied to the famine-struck areas came from tribute grain.103 The grain available to the Qing government was a vital resource for the state’s famine relief efforts. Although the Qing state built ever-normal granaries in every province, a province did not simply rely upon its own reserves when facing a major calamity. The central government could coordinate various provinces to transport the stored grain from unaffected areas to help the disaster-stricken regions.104 In the mid-eighteenth century, the scale of such interprovincial transfer of granary stock was remarkable. In 1751, the eastern part of Zhejiang province suffered from a severe drought. Of the total three million shi of grain needed for sale at below-market prices, famine relief, loans to peasants as seed, and provision for soldiers, about one-third came from granaries in other provinces.105 Between 1738 and 1748, about 1 million shi of grain were shipped out of the state granaries in Jiangxi, a major rice-producing province, for famine relief in other provinces.106 As the amount of grain shipped out was checked by the receiving provinces, provincial governors could hardly fabricate these numbers. 100

101 102 103 104 105 106

Pierre-Étienne Will and R. Bin Wong, Nourish the People: The State Civilian Granary System in China, 1650–1850 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); R. Bin Wong and Peter C. Perdue, “Famine’s Foes in Ch’ing China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 43, no. 1 (June 1983): 291–322. The shi (“picul”) was a traditional measure of weight. One shi equaled 120 jin (“catties”) or about 60 kilograms. Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China, 282–89. Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China, 171. Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China, 278–80. The memorial of the Zhejiang governor Yonggui, QL16/7/27 (September 16, 1751), in Gongzhongdang Qianlongchao zouzhe, vol. 1, 279. Lillian M. Li, “Introduction: Food, Famine, and the Chinese State,” Journal of Asian Studies 41, no. 4 (August 1982): 698.

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Likewise, the amount of silver transferred from other provinces to a disaster-stricken region could be massive. Jiangsu province in 1755 suffered from major floods, and the amount of silver stored in the provincial treasury was inadequate to sustain famine relief. Its governor petitioned the center to allocate 1.65 million taels of silver held in the salt treasuries of Lianghuai and the Domestic Customs treasuries of Huai’an and Xushu, both of which were located in the province. Since more than half of the land taxes in Jiangsu province were canceled due to this disaster, the Jiangsu governor had to further request the center to allocate to Jiangsu province 1.5 million taels of silver from the official funds stocked in other provinces such as Henan, Shandong, Jiangxi, and Hubei.107 The fiscal basis of this central coordination was that the grain in evernormal granaries and silver deposited in provincial treasuries were under the charge of the central government. Provincial governors were the agents of the central government in managing these resources, and they could report the cost of transporting granary stocks to other provinces as an expense of the central government, which greatly facilitated the distribution of transportation costs across provinces among provincial governors. For example, Sichuan province in 1751 transported 200,000 shi of husked rice to Hunan province for sale at below-market prices to mitigate food scarcity. The transportation cost up to Chongqing was shouldered by Sichuan province, while that from Chongqing to destinations in Hunan province was the responsibility of the Hunan provincial government; each province then reported its respective costs to the central government as central spending.108 When Henan province transported 200,000 shi of grain to Shanxi and Shaanxi, two provinces stricken by a severe drought in 1752, the transportation costs within Henan province were disbursed from its provincial treasury and reported for reimbursement from the central government.109 Without such central coordination, such enormous transfers of grain and money across provinces would not have gone smoothly. The normative basis of such central coordination was that the central government took care of the public interest of the whole realm, while a provincial governor could bargain with the central government by 107 108 109

The memorial of the Jiangsu governor Zhuang Yougong, QL21/3/28 (April 27, 1756), in Gongzhongdang Qianlongchao zouzhe, vol. 14, 93. The memorial of the Sichuan governor-general Celeng, QL16/9/20 (November 7, 1751), in Gongzhongdang Qianlongchao zouzhe, vol. 1, 728–30. The memorial of the Henan governor Jiang Bing, QL17/8/5 (September 12, 1752), in Gongzhongdang Qianlongchao zouzhe, vol. 3, 537.

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framing the specific welfare needs in the province as an inherent component of the general welfare. The concern for the public interest of the realm was also shared by provincial governors, who could initiate proposals to the center regarding the interest of other provinces as a component of the general welfare. For example, Hubei is a major rice-growing province and was located at a key transportation node of the Yangzi River; the official ever-normal granary quota that the central government assigned to Hubei province was 550,000 shi. In 1753, however, the governor-general of Huguang Hengwen and the Hubei governor Kaitai suggested to the central government that Hubei should reserve an extra 400,000 shi for the purpose of helping neighboring provinces in times of scarcity.110 In 1756 when the grain prices in Zhejiang province ran high due to a bad harvest, the Hubei provincial government proposed to the center to sell 195,837 shi out of its reserved surplus grain below the current market price in Hankou to the commissioners of the Zhejiang province, which was approved.111 In the nineteenth century, due to changes in climate and environment, natural disasters occurred in China more frequently than in the previous century. Between 1644 and 1820, the number of disasters recorded in the Qing Shilu (the Veritable Records of the Qing) is on average nineteen annually, but between 1820 and 1911 it increased to thirty-two.112 Nonetheless, both the frequency and the scale of interprovincial transfer of granary stocks were much lower than in the mid-eighteenth century. This was mainly due to the difficulty of maintaining a nationwide system without modern storage technology and the increasing use of money in famine relief. Even at the peak of the ever-normal granary system in the mid-eighteenth century, there were constant debates among officials over its scale and function. In the great policy debates of the 1740s, many governors pointed out that the huge scale of state granaries might be counterproductive to the efforts to stabilize grain prices, as both the quantity of grain stored and state purchases to stock its granary system led to scarcity in the markets, and thus drove up prices even in years of good harvest.113 110 111

112

113

The memorial of the Hubei governor Zhang Ruozheng, QL19/3/27 (April 19, 1754), in Gongzhongdang Qianlongchao zouzhe, vol. 7, 838–39. The memorial of the Huguang governor-general Shuose and the Hubei governor Zhang Ruozheng, QL21/7/12 (August 7, 1756), in Gongzhongdang Qianlongchao zouzhe, vol. 14, 860–61. Guo Songyi, “Qingdai de zaihai he nongye” [Calamity and agriculture in the Qing dynasty], in Zhongguo gudai zaihaishi yanjiu, ed. Hao Zhiqing (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2007), 274. Dunstan, State or Merchant?, ch. 4.

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In order to avoid spoilage, a magistrate was required to sell 30 percent of the granary stores every spring and restock the following autumn or winter. In southern provinces with a warm and humid climate, this prescribed turnover rate was far from adequate, and in the early nineteenth century the government had to allow various turnover rates in different provinces.114 Even in this situation, magistrates still found it difficult to maintain the official targets of storage mandated by the center due to the problems that local officials encountered in buying grain from the markets. When a granary was depleted after selling out to stabilize grain prices, or lending to peasants in need, or distributing grain for famine relief, the magistrate needed to replenish reserves on time. However, this depended upon the condition of the harvest, over which officials had no control. If local markets did not have the needed volume or the prices still remained high, officials had to look to nearby markets. Nonetheless, the fixed annual budget did not give magistrates adequate money to cover the additional transportation cost from more distant markets.115 Although the Qing government encouraged the local gentry to contribute grain to fill state granaries in return for receiving official titles, this was far from enough to maintain reserves. If magistrates were pressured by their superiors to restock granaries, they would have to force merchants to sell grain at prices much lower than the market ones. However, such extortive “purchases” were ineffective due to strong resistance from grain merchants.116 As a result, local officials preferred to store silver instead of actual grain. A magistrate could use the stored granary silver (jiayin) to cover urgent deficits for other public expenditures and return the money to the account item of granary reserves at a later time. The Qing government imposed a strict “posttransfer audit” upon the magistrates who managed state granaries, and the predecessor was held accountable if his successor found deficits in storage. The central government also ordered governors to conduct special audits of granary reserves to discipline magistrates. 114

115 116

For a discussion of severe spoilage in the ever-normal granaries, see Will and Wong, Nourish the People, ch. 3; Wu Siwu, Qingdai cangchu de zhidu kunjing yu jiuzai shijian [The institutional dilemma of the granary system and its disaster relief practice in the Qing dynasty] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2018), 38–45. Wu Siwu, Qingdai cangchu de zhidu kunjing yu jiuzai shijian, 45–50. Lillian Li, Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and Environment Decline, 1690s–1990s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 175; Will and Wong, Nourish the People, 142–55.

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However, governors and magistrates had little incentive to follow the central guidelines, as they well understood the practical difficulties in maintaining the official quotas and the succeeding magistrate also preferred to store silver instead of real grain.117 Despite these difficulties in managing state granaries in counties and prefectures, provincial governors in the first half of the nineteenth century tried hard to fill the deficits in reserves when market prices were low due to good harvests. Even in Guangdong province where the wet climate was unfavorable to grain storage, the Guangdong governor in 1829 purchased 1,067,000 shi of grain to replenish a deficit of 1,300,000 shi.118 Good harvests in 1837 in Jiangnan, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi drove market prices of unhusked rice down to five to six qian per shi, the lowest in ten years, so Jiangxi province refilled up to 70–80 percent of the deficits in its ever-normal granaries.119 However, local officials rather than the central government had full discretion to decide the timing and quantity of grain purchases to refill state granaries according to local circumstances. The quantity of grain reserves in ever-normal granaries declined steadily in the first half of the nineteenth century. A central audit of the stocks of the ever-normal granary in 1837 showed that the total amount of grain was 24 million shi, only half of the official quota; and the amount of silver deposited in lieu of grain was more than 1.1 million taels.120 The storage of silver rather than grain in the state granary system indicated that the Qing state could appeal to the grain markets in its efforts at famine relief. The development of interregional grain markets was particularly remarkable in eighteenth-century China. Major grainexporting provinces included Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan, Sichuan, Guangxi, Shaanxi, and Henan, as well as Fengtian prefecture in Manchuria. The economically developed cores, such as the Lower Yangzi delta and the Pearl River delta, heavily depended upon grain imported from other provinces. The cross-regional grain trade was mainly carried out along the Yangzi River, the Grand Canal, and the coast; for the latter, seaborne transportation connected Fengtian with Tianjin and the southeastern provinces such as Guangdong and Fujian. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the annual quantity of grain shipped by merchants from the upper and middle Yangzi River regions to the Lower Yangzi 117 118 119 120

Will and Wong, Nourish the People, 160. The memorial of Li Hongbing, DG9/12/jiaxu (January 8, 1830), QSL, vol. 35, 525. The memorial of Jiangxi governor Yutai, DG18/1/yiwei (February 16, 1838), QSL, vol. 37, 764. Imperial edict, DG15/11/jichou (December 23, 1835), QSL, vol. 37, 220.

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delta is estimated to have been between 15 and 20 million shi.121 When the quantities involved in the intraregional grain trade are included, the total amount of grain in market transactions is estimated to have been between 200 and 300 ­million shi.122 The development of both the interregional and intraregional grain trade provided Qing officials with important alternative relief measures other than the direct distribution of grain. One approach was to send relief funds rather than grain to disaster-stricken areas; another was to build or repair public works in these areas so that the hungry could earn wages to buy food. Moreover, the state often exempted transit duties on grain shipped to disaster areas by merchants. In some cases, instead of sending commissioners to directly purchase grain from major grain-exporting provinces, government officials handed official funds to private merchants, who could use their commercial and transportation networks to purchase and ship the grain to the government-designated disaster areas.123 In the policy debates over the state granary system in the 1740s, many provincial governors appreciated the contribution of the private interregional grain trade to protecting the welfare of the people. In the words of Guangdong governor Celeng, “Those things which impede the grain trade should all be done away with. … Commercial transactions may flow freely and among the populace grain will become daily more plentiful [and prices will go down gradually].”124 The Jiangsu governor Chen Dashou in 1745 also pointed out in a memorial to the center that it was unnecessary to ban grain hoarding when market prices ran high. He contended that as long as high prices attracted grain merchants from other regions, the market prices would fall, which would force hoarding merchants to release their stocks to the markets.125 Even the Qianlong emperor himself emphasized the importance of ensuring the cross-regional “natural circulation” of grain unimpeded by administrative regulations. An imperial edict in 1742 particularly prohibited the embargos on exports to other provinces attempted by provincial 121

122 123 124 125

Yeh-chien Wang, “Secular Trends of Rice Prices in the Yangzi Delta, 1638–1935,” in Chinese History in Economic Perspective, ed. Thomas G. Rawski and Lillian M. Li (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 38. Dunstan, State or Merchant?, 163. For the trend toward state institutions collaborating with merchants and markets in famine relief, see Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China, 295–97. Robert Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 246. See Chen Dashou’s memorial in Dunstan, Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age, 276–78.

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governors. The Qianlong emperor pointed out that the profit incentive would attract private merchants to ship grain to regions with high prices, which would ultimately lower the market prices and even poor people would be able to afford to purchase food from the markets.126 The Qing state’s protection of cross-regional grain merchants aimed to ensure that grain would freely flow through market transactions so as to safeguard the public welfare of the realm rather than simply secure local supplies of food. In times of bad harvests or natural calamities, there were competing claims over food among different provinces. In the fifth and sixth months of 1778, several prefectures in Hubei province were stricken by drought. The Huguang governor-general Sanbao and Hubei provincial governor Chen Huizhu originally planned to compel merchants who shipped grain from Sichuan province along the Yangzi River to sell in Hubei as they passed through the province. However, this proposal was severely criticized by the Qianlong emperor. Qianlong commented that provincial governors should not merely consider the welfare of the province under their jurisdiction and ignore the needs of people further downstream who depended upon the imports of grain from Sichuan and Hubei. If private merchants transporting grain from Sichuan were forced to sell it in Hubei, Qianlong concluded that the rice prices in the Lower Yangzi delta would rise. As the sovereign, he had to treat all provinces equally in regard to food supply, and he ordered that Hubei province not impede the transport of grain down the Yangzi River.127 Even when Anning, the provincial treasurer of Jiangxi, complained in 1746 that traveling merchants who benefited from tax remission still did not sell grain at low prices, the Qianlong emperor continued the policy of encouraging merchants to ship grain to disaster-stricken areas and called upon officials to morally urge these “ignorant and foolish” merchants to show their charity to the starving poor and arouse their moral conscience (jifa tianliang).128 The Qing government also tried to protect the interests of private merchants who shipped grain from southern to northern China. For example, in 1824 the Fujian governor Sun Erzhun memorialized the court that when merchants shipped grain purchased in Taiwan to Tianjin, they found that local grain prices were low due 126 127

128

See this edict in Dunstan, Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age, 272. The memorial of the Huguang governor-general Sanbao and the Hubei governor Chen Huizu, with the emperor’s comments, QL43/7/29 (September 19, 1778), in Gongzhongdang Qianlongchao zouzhe, vol. 44, 383–85. Imperial edict, QL11/6/xinmao (August 13, 1746), QSL, vol. 269, 502–3.

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to a good harvest in Zhili, which made it unprofitable. Moreover, Sun pointed out that merchants incurred additional costs by waiting for the autumn monsoon in order to return south. In response, the Qing government used official funds to purchase this amount of grain at abovemarket prices and to exempt from tax the commodities that the grain merchants carried back south.129 In contrast to its liberal attitude toward the domestic grain markets, the Qing government strictly prohibited food exports. Qing officials were concerned that grain outflows would drive up domestic food prices. The Qing government also wanted to cut off the food supply to pirates, who could be politically dangerous as a well as a threat to coastal security. Nonetheless, the Qing government encouraged merchants to import grain from overseas. For example, in the ninth month of 1742, the Qianlong emperor exempted the Thai merchants who shipped rice to Fujian from all taxes. In order to encourage foreign merchants to continue this business, he further announced in an imperial edict in 1743 that thereafter any foreigner who came to trade in Guangdong and Fujian would only have to pay half the taxes normally levied upon their commodities if they carried more than 10,000 shi of rice, or 30 percent if they carried between 5,000 and 10,000 shi. They could sell their rice in local markets according to the market prices. If local rice prices were low, government officials would purchase their rice as reserves for the state granaries.130 When food prices were high in Guangzhou during the drought of 1741 and 1742, the provincial governor Wang Anguo managed to import 23,000 shi of rice from Thailand with government funds.131 Nonetheless, the grain imported annually to Guangdong and Fujian from Vietnam and Thailand is estimated to have been about 400,000 shi every year, which is quite insignificant compared with the quantity involved in the domestic grain trade.132 The profit to be made from importing rice from Thailand does not seem to have been big enough to attract Chinese merchants. Moreover, the output of major rice-growing countries in Southeast Asia was in any case not large enough to allow 129 130 131 132

Imperial edict, DG4/8/jiazi (September 26, 1824), QSL, vol. 34, 148–49. Imperial edict, QL8/9/jiashen (October 21, 1743), QSL, vol. 11, 566. Cited from Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt, 255. Wang Yeh-chien and Hwang Kuo-shu, “Shiba shiji Zhongguo liangshi gongxu de kaocha” [An investigation of the supply and demand for grain in eighteenth-century China], in Jindai Zhongguo nongcun jingjishi lunwen ji, ed. Institute of Modern History, ­Academia Sinica (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 1989), 282.

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Chinese traders to import rice on a large scale.133 Imported grain thence played a much smaller role in famine relief in China when compared with early modern England. Despite the increasing use of money in famine relief from the mideighteenth century onward, this method did not work in areas without good river transportation. The ever-normal granaries and the diversion of tribute grain still remained important in famine relief in the first half of the nineteenth century. Flooding in Zhili province affected some ninety counties between the summer of 1801 and the spring of 1802. The Qing government distributed 600,000 shi of its tribute grain and allocated 1.5 million taels of silver as relief funds. Moreover, it spent more than 1 million taels of silver on repairing river banks; this allowed people affected by flood a chance to earn wages so as to purchase food from the markets.134 The contribution from ever-normal granaries in Zhili province was insignificant, which suggests there may have been a large deficit in storage. Government spending of relief funds and remission of transit taxes also encouraged merchants to ship grain to disaster areas. Nonetheless, the government did not rely completely on the market, but ordered officials to purchase 100,000 shi of wheat from Shandong and 50,000 shi of millet from Henan where prices were low due to good harvests.135 In order to have sufficient reserves to sell at below-market prices in the spring of 1802, the Zhili provincial government further purchased 300,000 shi of rice from Shandong and Henan, and 100,000 shi of rice and 50,000 shi of sorghum from Fengtian.136 The importance of government purchase of grain to famine relief in Zhili province indicates that the market mechanism in nineteenth-century China was not developed enough for the state to only use indirect measures when major calamity struck. This was true even in Guangdong province, where an efficient grain market had developed to import rice from Guangxi and Hunan provinces to feed the large urban populations in Guangzhou and Foshan and the peasants who specialized in cash crops in the Pearl River delta. In this highly integrated grain market, merchants had dominated 133

134 135 136

For example, the proportion of exported rice in the total output in Thailand was usually at 2–3 percent, and never exceeded 5 percent before 1850. Cited from ­Jennifer W.  Cushman, Fields from the Sea: Chinese Junk Trade with Siam during the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, ­ ­Cornell University Press, 1993), 92. Li, Fighting Famine in North China, 251–55. The memorial of Huiling, JQ6/7/xinchou (September 4, 1801), QSL, vol. 29, 123–24. Imperial edict, JQ6/8/gengshen (September 23, 1801), QSL, vol. 29, 136.

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grain shipments from the second half of the eighteenth century on.137 However, when the region suffered from a major drought in the years 1786 and 1787, the provincial government dispensed official funds to purchase rice from the Lower Yangzi delta to distribute to the hungry; many still died of starvation.138 Likewise, when Guangzhou suffered from floods and rice prices soared in 1833, instead of relying upon the market mechanism, the provincial government used official funds to purchase grain from neighboring Guangxi province and even from Southeast Asia.139 As the stocks in the ever-normal granaries declined greatly in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Qing state appealed to gentry and merchants to fund and manage community or charity granaries to meet the needs of local communities when food prices ran high.140 In the view of Qing officials, local gentry had more incentive to donate money or grain to maintain and manage these granaries, which would give them a good reputation among their poorer neighbors who benefited from such measures. Nonetheless, the Qing government did not try to coordinate charity granaries in different regions for cross-regional famine relief. In contrast to the transregional movements of the grain stored in evernormal granaries under central coordination, the Qing government did not allow local officials to use reserves held in one charity granary to help starving people in other communities. In the view of the Daoguang emperor, “the stocks in community granaries came from the contributions of local residents, which is different from those in ever-normal granaries. Local officials therefore should not use them for the purpose of relieving neighboring regions which are short of grain.”141 Even though the quantity of stored grain in one community or charity granary was small, the total amount held in the widespread charity and community granaries was quite big. These locally managed, decentralized community and charity granaries to a large extent complemented 137

138 139 140

141

Chen Chunsheng, Shichang jizhi yu shehui bianqian: Shiba shiji Guangdong mijia fenxi [Market mechanism and social change: An analysis of rice prices in eighteenth-century Guangdong] (Guangzhou: Zhongshan daxue chubanshe, 1992); Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt, 258–64; Han, After the Prosperous Age, ch. 3. Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt, 215–16. Imperial edict, DG 13/10/jiachen (November 18, 1833), QSL, vol. 36, 661. For charity granaries in Zhili in 1814, see Zhang Yanli, Jia-Dao shiqi de zaihuang yu shehui [Disaster and society in the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2008), 107; for the Lower Yangzi delta, see Wu Tao, “Qingdai Jiangnan shequ zhenji yu difang shehui” [Neighborhood relief and local society in Qing Jiangnan], Zhongguo shehui kexue, no. 4 (2001): 181–91; Han, After the Prosperous Age, ch. 3. Imperial edict, DG13/3/jiashen (May 2, 1833), QSL, vol. 36, 495–96.

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the defects of the ever-normal granaries in the first half of the nineteenth century. For example, when Suzhou, Songjiang, and Taicang in Jiangsu province suffered from a big flood in 1823, the relief rice provided by merchants and gentry reached 15,400 shi, much more than the 3,360 shi supplied by the state granaries.142 The management of community and charity granaries in the first half of the nineteenth century became more independent from the state and more flexible and practical. These granaries in economically developed regions such as the Lower Yangzi delta were no longer self-financing units. Instead, a community or charity granary became an institution that had multiple sources of income, such as an annual rent income collected from a specifically assigned piece of farmland. Its storage mixed grain with cash. Urgent relief needs in food shortage were further supplemented by donations by local gentry.143 These autonomous and flexible management methods of community and charity granaries appeared not only in regions such as the Lower Yangzi delta, but also in North China and the provinces of Gansu, Sichuan, and Guizhou. They were similar to the management of municipal and community granaries in early modern England and Tokugawa Japan.

2.4 Conclusion The threat of famine caused by poor harvests was common to people living in early modern England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation in all three cases led to close interactions between state and society to jointly provide famine relief to protect the general welfare and maintain social order in times of dearth. Such interactions happened in two opposite directions across these cases. In the decentralized systems of granaries in early modern England and Tokugawa Japan, municipal governments and local communities were active in maintaining reserves for emergency needs. However, they were unable to handle large-scale cross-regional famines. When each community gave priority to protecting its own welfare and excluded outsiders, the general welfare of the realm was then at great risk. In these situations, the royal government in early modern England and the shogunate as the higher authority over daimyo in Tokugawa Japan intervened to coordinate famine relief efforts to safeguard the public interest of the realm. 142 143

Zhang Yanli, Jia-Dao shiqi de zaihuang yu shehui, 169, 173. Wu Siwu, Qingdai cangchu de zhidu kunjing yu jiuzai shijian, 117–27.

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Similar state–society collaboration in combating famine occurred in the opposite direction in Qing China. The Qing state had the officially funded and managed nationwide network of ever-normal granaries, which allowed the state to mobilize much larger resources than any nonstate actor could. Yet it did not have the necessary technical and financial capacity to maintain the huge volume of stock held in state granaries as targeted in their original design. In this situation, the Qing state encouraged the participation of local communities in funding and managing communal and charity granaries. The increasing involvement of local communities in both rural and urban regions in Qing China complemented state efforts at famine relief. Access to overseas grain supply greatly affected state–society collaboration in famine relief. Early modern England could import a large amount of grain from Baltic countries, which enhanced the capacity of the royal government to coordinate the distribution of grain across regions in times of dearth. In contrast, the shogunate and daimyo could not import food from overseas due to the “seclusion policy” and consequently found it hard to handle nationwide major famines. The amount of imported rice in Qing China remained insignificant between 1684 and 1840. Despite these differences, the foundation upon which state and society interacted in famine relief was the same in these three cases: the public interest-based discourse of state legitimacy commonly accepted by state and society. In all three cases, we observe similar discussions about the importance of an interregional grain trade and how market forces would undermine state efforts to regulate food markets. The arguments that private profit-making activities would ultimately lead to socially beneficial consequences can also be found across these three cases. Although in practice none of these three early modern states could entrust the provision of food in subsistence crises solely to the market mechanism, the state in each case would have accepted a bigger role of the market and merchants in mitigating food crises if the domestic and overseas grain markets had been sufficiently developed. Yet when the market mechanism failed to mitigate a food crisis, the state had to intervene or encourage social actors to organize charity organizations to play a larger role in famine relief. I will examine this dynamic in more detail in Part II.

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3 Financing Public Infrastructure

Public infrastructural facilities such as highways, bridges, dikes, canals, and seawalls are crucial to domestic welfare as they facilitate transportation and irrigation, as well as offer protection against flooding. Local communities were able to invest and manage small-scale projects that mainly benefited themselves. But in the case of large-scale and crossregional projects, for which local communities could not bear the financial burden nor settle ensuing conflicts of interest across diverse regions, the state needed to intervene by raising funds and settling intercommunal disputes as the impartial protector of public interest. The use of state coercive power in such intervention could be justified by the state’s duty as the highest political authority to safeguard the public interest. The intimate connection between local welfare and the wider public interest across regions allowed the state and society to negotiate upon a commonly accepted public interest-based discourse of state legitimation when dealing with infrastructural facilities. In this chapter, I examine the financing of public infrastructural facilities crucial to domestic welfare in Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. Despite differences in territorial scale and geographical conditions, these states confronted similar challenges in making provision for infrastructure in a context of socioeconomic development. On the one hand, the expenditure needed to build and maintain public works increased, which made it impossible for self-governed local communities to shoulder the costs on their own. On the other hand, the tension between the interest common to one community and the welfare of broader regions became more serious. The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation then provided a normative platform for state 107

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and social actors to interact to address these challenges across these three fiscally limited early modern states.

3.1  England, 1533–1640 The legitimacy of the state in early modern England rested upon protecting the commonwealth in times of peace and of emergency. However, its fiscal decentralization, in which local residents were responsible for public works from which they would benefit directly, had some obvious disadvantages in supporting major infrastructure. For example, the distribution of the financial burden incurred in maintaining and repairing major banks or dikes that ran through several counties or the bridges between counties often led to disputes among different communities over how to distribute the necessary cost. Financing was troubled by a free-rider problem, as local officeholders and residents gave priority to the particular interests of the region of their jurisdiction or residence, or even to their private interests, rather than to the common good of larger regions, let alone of the whole realm. The other problem was that towns or counties that suffered from major calamities simply could not raise the funds necessary for postdisaster reconstruction within their own communities, yet delay in repairs could pose even greater dangers, not only to themselves but to neighboring areas as well. Under such circumstances, intervention and coordination by the royal government were crucial to protecting the general welfare. The statute of Parliament in 1531 made the maintenance of bridges outside the corporate towns the responsibility of the county. While the statute of 1555 asked each parish to maintain the public highways in its jurisdiction, that of 1576 added a proviso that neighboring parishes should contribute to the cost of repairing highways when it was too expensive for one parish to shoulder.1 Regions that had representatives in Parliament could submit bills related to local welfare to Parliament, often referred to as “private bills.” If passed, these local authorities would have the authority to collect money from broader areas or to collect additional funds for financing local public works such as water supply and harbor repair.2 However, Parliament in this period was convened only when the crown 1 2

Sidney Webb, English Local Government: The Story of the King’s Highway (London: Longmans, 1913), 14 and 89. David Dean, Law-Making and Society in Late Elizabethan England: The Parliament of England, 1584–1601 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 237–40.

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badly needed money for fighting wars; it was therefore ill-prepared to resolve problems in peaceful years. Meanwhile, it was not unusual to see Members of Parliament protect the vested interests of their constituencies or even their own private interests by vetoing bills that aimed at a common good for a larger region.3 The role of Parliament in safeguarding the domestic welfare by financing public works thus remained limited. In contrast to the irregularly summoned Parliament, the Privy Council regularly accepted petitions for public goods provision and responded by issuing warrants and guidance under the name of protecting the public interest. For instance, the port of Scarborough in the county of York was the only place between Humber and Tynemouth where ships and vessels could seek refuge and safety in storms and tempests. In 1613, some four hundred shipowners and seamen trading for Newcastle and the northern parts of England petitioned the Privy Council to take speedy action to repair the decayed port. They agreed to pay duties upon the tonnage of every voyage, which would be earmarked for repairing the haven and piers of Scarborough. The Privy Council then sent a warrant to customs officers in London, Newcastle, and other ports between London and Newcastle to collect this duty and sent it to the bailiffs and burgesses of Scarborough for this “so necessary a work.”4 Likewise, in 1628 the masters and owners of ships traveling to Newcastle for coal and to trade with Russia, Greenland, Norway, and the Baltic region sent a petition through Trinity House to the Privy Council. They pointed out that the ordinary channel of the Thames mouth toward the north had become dangerous to ships and they petitioned to maintain a new and safer channel called Gouldimoregatte. The Privy Council considered this request to “tend to the public good and for the safety of the shipping of the realm” and consulted with mayors and magistrates of Newcastle, Hull, Yarmouth, Ipswich, Harwich, and London about the willingness of shipowners to pay such a levy. As a result, the Privy Council issued a warrant to customs officers to collect 6d (six pennies) upon every hundredth ton of shipping to finance the maintenance of the new channel.5 When receiving petitions from local inhabitants who complained about the lack of repair of decayed highways or bridges, the Privy Council responded by sending letters to pressure the Justices of the 3 4 5

Dean, Law-Making and Society in Late Elizabethan England, 159 and 244. APC 1613–1614, 416–17. APC 1628–1629, 277–78 and 421–22. There were 240 pennies to the pound. The abbreviation d. was derived from the denarius, a Roman coin, and was used for pennies until 1971.

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Peace  (JPs) or surveyors of highways to take speedy action to collect money for repairs. The Privy Council often used normative terms such as “the general benefit of the county” or “the benefit to the whole realm” to remind local officeholders of their duty to the commonwealth. In 1581 the badly decayed highway of Christmas Lane caused serious trouble to the inhabitants of the county of Suffolk who needed to transport goods to the coast. However, the efforts to seek contributions of labor and money by the commissioners who were granted the patent encountered “bitter debates” from the hundreds6 of Norfolk that were located close to the project. Moreover, inhabitants in the west of Suffolk who had alternative routes to transport goods to the coast were unwilling to contribute to this repair that would benefit more residents in the east of Suffolk. The repair was postponed as a result. In 1587, Sir Arthur Heveningham secured a new patent that covered the repair of both the Christmas Land and the decayed Norwich road north of Attleborough. Nonetheless, the project was delayed again due to disputes over the distribution of the financial burden among counties at stake.7 The Privy Council on June 27, 1591 had to send a letter to pressure the Sheriff and JPs of the counties of Suffolk and Norfolk, demanding they resolve the disputes so as to finish the repair work, which would benefit “the great number of the inhabitants” in these two counties and neighboring counties as well.8 Likewise, the inhabitants in 1594 had to petition the Privy Council because the repair of Wealy Bridge over the Goit River had been consistently ignored by local officials. The Privy Council in reaction sent a letter patent to the JPs in the counties of Derby, Chester, and Lancaster requiring them to collect rates among the inhabitants in their jurisdiction to effect the repair.9 In order to finance the building of havens in coastal towns such as Seaton and Hastings, the Privy Council issued a license under the Great Seal of England to authorize them to send commissioners to receive money collected in counties across the whole realm.10 Due to some scandals in which the money collected for postdisaster reconstruction was used for the private gain of officeholders, Parliament in 1596 passed an 6

The hundred was a unit of local government and taxation, intermediate between village and shire. 7 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County 1500–1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 260–67. 8 APC 1591, 244–45. 9 APC 1595–1596, 216–17. 10 APC 1577–1578, 122 and 419.

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Act for Relief of the Poor to restrict the use of this financing method so as to reduce the chances for abuse. Nonetheless, the royal government gave special consideration to the commiseration of Fordham in the county of Cambridge after a big fire in 1601 and granted a license to Fordham to collect money in the counties of Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Huntingdonshire, and Hertfordshire for reconstruction.11 Regions that suffered from a major sea breach often were unable to raise sufficient funds locally for timely repair. Voluntary contributions from local residents were inadequate. From the 1570s onward, repairs of piers and havens were dependent less upon voluntary donations than upon the compulsory rates collected by constables under the direction of higher authorities such as JPs and mayors.12 Such collection of special local rates for particular public works was backed by political power sanctioned by the center. For example, the county of Mershland and several adjoining towns were struck by a major storm in 1613 and a large area of farmland was submerged. The Privy Council sent letters to knights, the JPs in Norfolk, and the mayor of Lynn and authorized them to set up a Commission of Sewers to collect rates from upland areas in Norfolk to fund “so great a work.”13 Sometimes the Privy Council pressured magistrates to improve infrastructural facilities for the welfare of the poorer regions. In 1591, it sent letters to the JPs in the county of Kent, demanding they execute a project that had been the subject of an Act of Parliament as early as 1515. This project aimed to make the river from the city of Canterbury navigable to Fordwich, a town that had a navigable river to Sandwich. This project could provide many trading opportunities to improve the welfare of a great number of inhabitants of Canterbury and further benefit the rest of the county. As Canterbury was too poor to dispense the cost of this project, the Privy Council intervened to ask the JPs in Kent to collect rates to finance this project.14 In addition to sending letters to local officers, the Privy Council also relied upon the assize judges to discipline county magistrates to fulfill their responsibility in maintaining infrastructure by disciplining negligent or incompetent JPs. The assize judges had political authority over the magistrates and thence had the power to resolve disputes over the 11 12 13 14

APC 1601–1604, 16–17. McIntosh, Poor Relief in England, 170–72. APC 1613–1614, 265–67. APC 1591–1592, 535.

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financing of the repair of intercounty bridges when they traveled through the country.15 The authority of the Privy Council in public works was further embodied in the coercion that it could impose upon those who refused to pay the assessed levies. This included the power to summon them to the Board of the Privy Council in London or to send them to the Fleet prison. For example, Robert Stanmache of Aldby in the county of Norfolk refused to pay the rates levied for the purpose of repairing sea breaches in Norfolk. He was put into prison after being ordered to appear before the Privy Council; he was released only after he made a pledge to pay his dues to the commissioners.16 Despite this pressure from the center on local magistrates and officeholders regarding the maintenance of infrastructural facilities, the Privy Council did not have the capacity to directly monitor the collection of rates by local officials. Underevaluation of taxable property and even evasion were common. Moreover, the distribution of the financial burden among regions affected by the proposed projects often aroused disputes over the means of assessment and collection. The ensuing delays in repairs had negative impacts on public welfare. Procrastination in repairing the sea breaches between the towns of Great Yarmouth and Hapsborough illustrates the conflict between the public interest of a broader region and the particular interests of various communities and individuals, who took different views on the degree of danger from flooding to themselves. The sea breaches put some 20,000 acres of fertile land under water and the estimated repair cost was as high as £1,600. Parliament in 1609 passed an Act of Recovery for the local inhabitants. However, the repair work was poorly funded, as property owners in the counties of Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, and Lincolnshire opposed not only the distribution of the cost among different hundreds and towns, but also the assessments of property values made by the Commission of Sewers. The reluctance to contribute was also connected to a lack of perception of danger among some inhabitants; the Privy Council complained that some could not foresee a calamity “until they swim in the sea.”17 Another reason for the delay in repairs was the technical difficulty of the project. The measurement of the depth of inundation was beyond the ability of the commissioners, and so the Privy Council in 1626 15 16 17

Cockburn, A History of English Assizes, 174. APC 1616–1618, 215. APC 1616–1617, 230–31.

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recommended a mathematician from Oxford University to conduct the survey. The survey report stressed the urgency of the repairs, as the levels up to Beccles in Suffolk and Norwich and Burton in Norfolk were all threatened by inundation. Yet the inclusion of more communities to share the financial burden led to further conflicts among inhabitants over fairness in levying taxes.18 As the delay posed a great threat to the regions adjacent to the breaches, the Privy Council ultimately had to intervene by demanding that magistrates inform them who refused to pay.19 Despite pressure from the Privy Council, the collection of rates from areas that would benefit less from the recovery of the sea breaches did not go smoothly. As late as November 1621, the Privy Council still complained about the reluctance of landowners and farmers in adjacent regions to contribute to “so public a work” and again asked for the names of those who refused to pay rates.20 It turned out that in addition to the refusal of some property owners to pay rates, some commissioners and local officeholders themselves underassessed their own property and even evaded their obligations to this project.21 Unsettled disputes often damaged the public welfare. For example, severe floods in the 1570s made the dredging of the River Nebe urgent. The local sewer laws requested the inhabitants of Wisbech to take charge of this work as the river flowed through the town. Yet the inhabitants of Wisbech claimed they were unable to raise the necessary funds and asked five upriver counties that would also benefit from the finished project to contribute money. But no consensus was reached on how to share the financial burden, even when the Privy Council intervened. As a result, floods that submerged several thousand acres near Wisbech continued to occur into the seventeenth century.22 In cases of repairing havens in coastal towns such as Hastings and Great Yarmouth, the consequences of delays in the supply of funds caused by the detainment of the collected money in the hands of local officeholders could be disastrous, as the unfinished project ran the risk of being completely ruined by the sea.23 The haven of Great Yarmouth 18 19 20 21 22 23

APC 1625–1626, 361–63. APC 1616–1617, 84–86, 226–28, and 230–31. APC 1621–1623, 85–86. APC 1625–1626, 361–63. Eric H. Ash, The Draining of the Fens: Projects, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 55. APC 1578–1580, 308–9; APC 1619–1620, 245–46; APC 1621–1623, 136; APC 1625– 1626, 90–91.

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was important not only to its own citizens, but also to incorporated cities such as Norwich that had access to the sea through it. However, when sand and shingle deposits blocked the entrance to the haven, the inland residents were unwilling to contribute money for repairs. The inland JPs often resisted the levy of rates; and when the levies were settled, they underassessed the taxable value on purpose.24 In consequence, the town of Great Yarmouth had to petition the royal government for funds to repair the haven. The repair of Great Yarmouth depended heavily upon the royal license to export grain and beer that the royal government granted for the purpose of raising money for haven repair. The license to export grain in 1567 sold at £1,407, while the money received from the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk and from the city of Norwich accounted for only £503. The money derived from selling the same kind of license brought Great Yarmouth £1,073 in 1576, £2,720 in 1580, and £1,720 in 1584.25 In 1620, Great Yarmouth petitioned the Privy Council for financial support, as it had spent more than £30,000 in building piers to stand against the sea and found it difficult to dispense the annual maintenance fee of £1,000. Great Yarmouth contended that these piers protected the inland counties from being inundated and therefore the communities that benefited should contribute to the maintenance of these facilities. The Privy Council considered that the maintenance of the haven of Great Yarmouth benefited not only the adjacent ports but also the whole kingdom, and that the collection of taxes for this project was to serve the “public weal of the kingdom.”26 Nonetheless, landowners in Norfolk and the city of Norwich, who had thousands of acres of land protected by the piers, were reluctant to make monetary contributions. They disputed the amount they should pay, and the local officeholders who collected levies often detained the collected money without remitting it to Great Yarmouth promptly.27 The royal government had to use nontaxation methods and turn to royal prerogatives by granting Great Yarmouth further special licenses to export grain and sell herring to foreigners so as to raise funds for repairing the piers. Another example was Dover harbor. Dover was vital to the defense, navigation, and commerce of England. When the haven of Dover needed major 24 25 26 27

A. H. Smith, County and Court, 96–97. Henry Manship, The History of Great Yarmouth (London: J. R. Smith, 1854), 94. APC 1621–1623, 193–94 APC 1621–1623, 193–94; 1625–1626, 90–91.

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repairs, the Privy Council considered the assistance of the whole realm necessary. Nonetheless, a bill to levy rates for a period of ten years on householders, yeomen, and merchants in London and other incorporated towns for this purpose did not pass in Parliament. Parliament refused to grant extraordinary revenue for repairing the Dover haven in a time of peace.28 In 1577, a plan by the Privy Council to collect rates from inns, taverns, and alehouses in every shire for the same purpose was also introduced, but to no avail.29 As the royal government could not take the funds for repair from its shrinking ordinary revenues, the Secretary of State William Cecil even implemented the first national lottery scheme in England in 1567, aiming to raise £200,000 to repair harbors. But this scheme failed disastrously.30 Although no one questioned the importance of the project to the benefit of the whole realm, it was still difficult to secure financial contributions from inland inhabitants. In the end, a combination of tax revenue from a Parliamentary levy of 3d per ton on all ships of over 20 tons passing through the strait for seven years and a nontax revenue from granting royal licenses for exporting grain and beer to Dover to sell to merchants financed the repair, the biggest engineering project in sixteenth-century England.31 As seen from the cases detailed, the political authority of the royal government and the nontax financial measures to which it could appeal were crucial to financing large-scale infrastructural works and to overcoming free-rider and coordination issues. The central state thus significantly contributed to the safeguarding of the public interest in spite of fiscal decentralization. Yet the inadequacy of fiscal resources prevented the central authority from playing a bigger role in domestic infrastructure.

3.2  Japan, 1640 –1853 During the long domestic peace that prevailed in Tokugawa Japan from 1640, the shogunate converted the military service of daimyo for 28 29 30 31

G. R. Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559–1581 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge ­University Press, 1986), 258. APC 1571–1575, 386. David Dean, “Elizabeth’s Lottery: Political Culture and State Formation in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 50, no. 3 (July 2011): 587–611. Ian W. Archer, “Social Order and Disorder,” in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 389. For the interactions between the Privy Council and local magistrates and craftsmen in this big project, see Eric Ash, “‘A Perfect and Absolut Work’: Expertise, Authority, and the Rebuilding of Dover Harbor, 1579–1583,” Technology and Culture 41, no. 2 (April 2000): 239–68.

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domestic purposes. These included the construction and repair of cities such as Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, and of shogunal castle towns located in strategic positions; involvement in major river control projects; and participation in the shogunal pilgrimages to the Tokugawa Mausoleum at Nikko¯.32 Originally, daimyo contributions to such activities were based upon their acceptance of the shogun’s authority. Nonetheless, building and maintaining large-scale infrastructural facilities, postdisaster reconstruction in major cities, river dredging, and building of long dikes that protected farmland contributed to the public interest of Japan. This provided the normative basis upon which the shogunate and domain governments interacted over the financing of public infrastructure. It was not only widely shared, but could accommodate challenges to shogunal power over how to better safeguard the general welfare. In the early nineteenth century, daimyo could even rightfully question whether the shogunate used their contributions for the general welfare of Japan or just for its private needs. The importance of tax paid in rice to government income made both domain governments and the shogunate pay special attention to hydraulic projects in their respective territories. In the seventeenth century, most of these projects were small-scale irrigation ditches, low and discontinuous dikes, and pools for reserving water for the agricultural use of small rural communities. Local communities had both the financial resources and the technical know-how to build and maintain small-scale water control facilities from which they directly benefited.33 When local people encountered difficulties in funding larger hydraulic projects, the ruling authority of that territory, whether the shogunate or the daimyo, often provided financial aid under the name of benevolent rule, and such efforts also raised the amount of land tax collected in that territory. These methods included lending government money to villagers and collecting outputbased duties from villages that had a stake in specific water control projects to set up a fund to cover maintenance costs. Such collaborations in local works of water control between villagers and shogunal or domainal governments were common in Tokugawa Japan.34 They contributed 32 33

34

Takano Toshihiko, “18 seiki zenhan no Nihon,” 49–56; Bolitho, “The Han,” 203–6; Toby, “Rescuing the Nation from History,” 209–10. Tsukamoto Manabu, “Yo¯sui-fushin,” in Ko¯za Nihon gijutsu no shakaishi, vol. 6, Doboku, ed. Yamaguchi Keiji, Nagahara Keiji, Amakasu Ken et al. (Tokyo: Nihon Hyo¯ronsha, 1984), 195. Kitamura Toshio, Nihon kangai suiri kanko¯ no shiteki kenkyu¯: So¯ron hen [A historical study of customary irrigation rights in Japan: General volume] (Tokyo: Iwanami

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primarily to the welfare of relevant communities and therefore did not need coordination from a higher political authority. Nonetheless, large water control projects on major rivers that flowed through territories governed by different daimyo often had externalities onto wider regions. For example, the interests of downstream communities were frequently affected by activities in remote upstream regions. Under such circumstances, the role played by the shogunate as the higher authority over daimyo became important. The Yodo River illustrates this dynamic. The shogunate in 1666 planned to dredge and widen the entrance of the Yodo River that flowed into Osaka to reduce the danger of flooding and improve the navigation facilities to the city. Kawamura Zuiken, a wellknown expert in hydraulic engineering, had noted that the effectiveness of this big project depended heavily upon whether forests in the upstream regions could be preserved so that the widened entrance would not be blocked by deposits of sand and soil carried by the river. At his suggestion, the shogunate issued regulations for mountain and river management and assigned eleven major daimyo along the Yodo River the task of preserving forests and maintaining dikes.35 The boundaries of each daimyo’s assigned responsibility went beyond the territory under his jurisdiction. In this way, the shogunate acted as the political authority that coordinated daimyo into one coherent system in safeguarding the broader public welfare in the regions affected by the Yodo River. When upstream villagers were less motivated to sacrifice materially for the purpose of preserving trees and maintaining dikes that mainly benefited the downstream populations, the shogunate responded by arranging a transfer of money from downstream communities to compensate them.36 In the absence of coordination by a higher political authority, such cross-regional transfer of wealth would be very difficult in practice. The coordination of the shogunate in public works became ever more urgent over time. From the later seventeenth century onward, both

35 36

Shoten, 1971), 120–30; Hirano Tetsuya, “Kitakamigawa shitaryu¯iki ni okeru mura no kurashi to hyakusho¯ so¯zoku” [The village life on the lower reaches of the Kitakami River and household reproduction of farmers], in Ko¯za To¯hoku no rekishi, vol. 2, Toshi to mura, ed. Hirakawa Arata and Chiba Masaki (Osaka: Seibundo¯ Shuppan Kabushiki Kaisha, 2014), 212–13. Murata Michihito, Kinsei no Yodogawa chisui [Water control on the Yodo River in the early modern era] (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2009), 62–66. Mizumoto Kunihiko, “Doshadome yakunin to no¯min” [Officials in charge of halting siltage and farmers], Shirin 64, no. 5 (September 1981): 39–44.

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the shogunate and major daimyo made great efforts to reclaim large swathes of land for farming by building high and continuous long dikes to straighten the flow of major rivers. Such projects were much more expensive than the previous low and isolated smaller dikes. Moreover, the floods caused by breaching of dikes became much more violent, and their repair demanded not only more labor and money, but also more technical expertise.37 By the mid-eighteenth century, the large-scale hydraulic projects that helped to greatly expand agricultural land also exerted significant impacts on much wider regions. In this situation, the shogunate used two main methods to ask daimyo to share the burden of such major river works. In the method of tetsudaifushin (assistance-based public works), the shogunate assigned one or several major daimyo to contribute money and personnel to big hydraulic projects that did not benefit these “contributing” daimyo at all. In the method of kuniyaku-fushin (public works based on a province-wide levy), the shogunate ordered daimyo in all provinces along a major river to contribute money and labor according to their respective agricultural productivity, regardless of whether the river itself passed through domainal or shogunal territory.38 These two methods constituted a complex fiscal operation by which the shogunate that did not tax domainal territories could still make daimyo share the increasing burden of investment in public infrastructure throughout the country. Daimyo in tetsudai-fushin were assigned by the record-keepers (okuyu¯sama) and the senior councilor (ro¯ju) of the shogunate without prior consultation. The decision was made mainly by considering the financial capacity of a major daimyo, as reflected in their recorded agricultural output, whether their territory had suffered from natural calamities or poor harvests recently, and whether the daimyo currently had other duties for the shogunate. For example, the daimyo of Saga and Fukuoka were never asked by the shogunate to contribute to public works as they had already been charged with the defense of Nagasaki.39 Once the assignment was

37 38

39

Kasaya Kazuhiko, “Kinsei kuniyaku-fushin no seijishiteki ichi” [The place of kuniyakufushin in the political history of early modern Japan], Shirin 59, no 4 (July 1976): 544–46. Province (kuni) was an administrative division established in Japan in the seventh century. In Tokugawa Japan, the area of a province often contained territories under the jurisdiction of different authorities. See also Chapter 2, note 79. Matsuo Mieko, “Kinsei chu¯ki ni okeru daimyo fushinyaku – Fuka ho¯ho¯ ni kanren shite” [Daimyo construction duties imposed by the shogunate in the middle Tokugawa period – Regarding the methods of levy], Tokugawa rinseishi kenkyu¯ kiyo¯ 52 (March 1978): 387–90.

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announced officially, it could not be withdrawn. The duty to contribute could only be canceled if the domain of the assigned daimyo was struck by a major calamity during the period of contribution. Meanwhile, the shogunate would reduce or even cancel the duty of alternate attendance of the assigned daimyo so as to lessen their financial burden. Likewise, the shogunate limited its demands for infrastructural support at times when other support was demanded. The fiscal difficulties of the shogunate from 1722 to 1730 forced it to temporarily reduce alternate attendance in Edo from one year to half a year in return for daimyo submitting a certain amount of their land taxes in rice (agemai) to the shogunate. As the daimyo were making this special annual contribution, the shogunate in this period did not push them to support public projects such as river control and urban construction.40 In the period between 1716 and 1798, the shogunate ordered daimyo to contribute to twenty-seven projects of river control by means of tetsudaifushin. Most of these were in the Kanto¯ plain where major rivers such as the Tone and Ara ran. The total number of daimyo assigned to contribute was 106, and 92 percent of them had a recorded agricultural productivity of more than 50,000 koku annually.41 For the assigned daimyo, this was a huge financial burden. In order to fulfill this duty, they had to cut expenditures within their domains and borrow from merchants in Osaka, Edo, and Kyoto. In addition to financial contributions, the assigned daimyo also sent significant numbers of their retainers and footsoldiers to manage the project on site. For example, when the shogunate ordered daimyo to support the repair of a broken dike on the Tone River in 1742, which caused one of the worst floods in the Tokugawa era, the Hagi domain sent 1,392 and the Okayama domain 1,224 samurai retainers and foot-soldiers to the site.42 As the project budget was determined by shogunal officials, the daimyo who were asked to contribute had no idea about the actual expenditure that they would face. For example, as the convergence of the Kiso, Nagara, and Ibi rivers caused frequent floods on the No¯bi plain, the shogunate decided to separate the routes of these three rivers so as 40

41 42

Matsuo Mieko, “Otetsudai-fushin no henshitsu: ‘Okinotetsudai’ no seiritsu wo chu¯shin ni” [The transformation of otetsudai-fushin: The establishment of “monetary tetsudai”], Gakushu¯in shigaku, no. 10 (December 1973): 7. Calculated from Table 3 in Matsuo Mieko, “Kinsei chu¯ki ni okeru daimyo fushinyaku,” 381. ¯ tani Sadao, Edo bakufu chisui seisakushi no kenkyu¯ [A study of the history of the O Tokugawa shogunate’s water-control policy] (Tokyo: Yu¯zankaku Shuppan, 1996), 174.

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to reduce the pressure on the dikes. The shogunal officials estimated the budget of this project at around 150,000 ryo¯. In 1753, the shogunate ordered Satsuma, which had a recorded annual agricultural productivity of 770,000 koku, to take charge of this project. The Satsuma daimyo had to borrow money from Osaka merchants and sent 300 samurai retainers and 500 foot-soldiers to the site for the construction. When the project was finished in 1755, the actual cost ran as high as 300,000 ryo¯, of which the shogunate covered 9,892 ryo¯ and 220,298 ryo¯ was met by loans that Satsuma took out from Osaka merchants. Thirty-three Satsuma samurai retainers died of disease in the course of the project, and fifty-five committed suicide when it was finished, out of guilt for placing such a massive burden of debt onto their lord.43 In order to reduce the monies spent on personnel sent by the assigned daimyo who did not have the necessary hydraulic engineering knowledge and skills and were not familiar with local circumstances, the shogunate in 1775 decided to ask daimyo to contribute money only.44 Nonetheless, the daimyo assigned to contribute to a major hydraulic project could still choose to bring his own retainers to the worksite. The shogunate did not in fact always have enough personnel to manage major river works. In 1784, the shogunate ordered the daimyo of Kumamoto to be responsible for dredging the Agatsuma River, a branch of the Tone River that had become blocked after the eruption of the Asama volcano. The daimyo of Kumamoto sent a total of 300 personnel to the site and spent 69,283 ryo¯ for this project.45 Kuniyaku-fushin was the other method used by the shogunate to finance cross-regional hydraulic projects. In the seventeenth century, this was employed to finance big river projects on the Yodo and Yamato ­rivers. Both the shogunal and daimyo territories located in the provinces of Settsu and Kawachi through which the rivers ran contributed money and labor to repair and strengthen dikes managed by the shogunal ­officials.46 In 1720, the shogunate extended this method to river works on thirty-six 43

44 45 46

Yoshizumi Mieko, “Tetsudai-fushin ni tsuite” [On tetsudai-fushin], Gakushu¯in daigaku bungakubu kenkyu¯ nenpo¯, no. 14 (1967): 102; Patricia Sippel, “Chisui: Creating a Sacred Domain in Early Modern and Modern Japan,” in Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Wildman Nakai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), 167–72. ¯ tani Sadao, Edo bakufu chisui seisakushi no kenkyu¯, 240; Matsuo Mieko, “OtetsudaiO fushin no henshitsu,” 11. Kitahara Itoko, Nihon saigaishi [The history of disasters in Japan] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2006), 206–8. Murata Michihito, Kinsei no Yodogawa chisui, 43–52.

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major rivers spread out over the whole country, so as to help minor daimyo whose domains had an agricultural productivity below 200,000 koku and thus had difficulty financing big river works. Major daimyo whose domains had an agricultural productivity above 200,000 koku were supposed to self-finance the public works in their territories. The shogunate would shoulder 10 percent of the costs, while the rest were collected from a special tax (kuniyakukin) imposed upon villages located in the provinces adjacent to the river, regardless of whether they were in domainal or shogunal territories.47 River works funded by this method included projects to separate the current of a violent river so as to reduce its impact on river banks, to dredge rivers, and to strengthen dikes against rivers. In 1722, the financing method of kuniyaku-fushin was applied to fund hydraulic engineering on major rivers such as the Tone, the Edo, and the Kinu on the Kanto¯ plain. A total of some 16,874 ryo¯ was collected from villages in the four provinces of Musashi, Hitachi, Ko¯zuke, and Shimo¯sa, at a ratio of 10 ryo¯ for every 100 koku.48 Twenty-one hydraulic projects on the Kanto¯ plain were financed by kuniyaku-fushin between 1722 and 1743 and another twenty-two between 1801 and 1823.49 The nationwide application of the method of kuniyaku-fushin resulted mainly from the increasing scale of water control projects. In this situation, individual daimyo and villagers could not afford such projects and the inability to maintain a dike in one area or neglect could cause big floods affecting a much wider area. Likewise, local communities could not afford the huge costs of repairing dike breaches. Confronted with postcalamity reconstruction or the urgent need to strengthen an embankment, villagers and daimyo often petitioned the shogunate to implement a kuniyaku-fushin project. In this way, the shogunate could mobilize larger resources of both money and labor and conduct large-scale river works under one coherent management, which served the public welfare of a much larger region.50

47 48 49 50

Hara Sho¯go, “Bakufuho¯ ni okeru kuniyaku-fushinsei ni tsuite” [The system of kuniyakufushin in shogunal law], Gifu shigaku, no. 57 (1970): 1–13. ¯ tani Sadao, Kinsei Nihon chisuishi no kenkyu¯ [Studies on the history of water control O in early modern Japan] (Tokyo: Yu¯zankaku Shuppan, 1986), 166. ¯ tani Sadao, Kinsei Nihon chisuishi no kenkyu¯, 172 and 177. O Kasaya Kazuhiko, “Kinsei kuniyaku-fushin no seijishi teki ichi,” 533–34; Murata Michihito, “Yoshimune no seiji” [The politics of Yoshimune], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon ¯ tsu To¯ru, Sakurai Eiji, and Fujii Jo¯ji (Tokyo: Iwanami rekishi, vol. 12, Kinsei (3), ed. O Shoten, 2014), 18.

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In order to reduce the cost of river works, the shogunate in the early eighteenth century encouraged the method of competitive bidding for actual construction from contractors such as local merchants or village headmen. Nonetheless, a successful contractor who bid low often sacrificed quality so as to make a profit. A poor-quality project could pass inspection by shogunal officials who took bribes from contractors. The shogunate thence in 1713 prohibited the method of competitive bidding in hydraulic projects funded by official monies.51 However, the shogunate did not possess the administrative capacity to directly manage river works across the country. As a result, the construction work in localities continued to be managed by private contractors who had accumulated expertise in managing large river control projects. When a project was conducted during a busy part of the agricultural season, these professional contractors hired outside laborers.52 In river works that were eligible to be financed by kuniyaku-fushin, there was a division of labor between local communities and the shogunate in normal maintenance. The shogunate requested that local villagers conduct regular supervision of dikes and undertake routine maintenance that they could afford. For major repairs or reconstruction, villagers could seek aid from the shogunal officials responsible for managing river works, such as the magistrates in Osaka or Sakai. The shogunate also sent out officials who were specialized in managing hydraulic projects to inspect these river works regularly. The special taxes collected from villages in the wider area affected by the river works also reduced the financial burden on the shogunate.53 The implementation of kuniyaku-fushin encountered some unexpected problems, however. As the funds for major river works came not only from the shogunate but also from taxes collected in wider territories, both villagers and individual daimyo were motivated to appeal for financial aid. Faced with increasing number of petitions from daimyo or even from villagers, and lacking the necessary financial resources to meet these requests, the shogunate had to emphasize 51 52

53

¯ tani Sadao, Edo Bakufu chisui seisakushi no kenkyu¯, 172. O Nishida Masaki, “Kawayoke to kuniyaku-fushin” [River control and kuniyaku-fushin], in Ko¯za Nihon gijutsu no shakaishi, vol. 6 Doboku, ed. Yamaguchi Keiji, Nagahara Keiji, Amakasu Ken et al. (Tokyo: Nihon hyo¯ronsha, 1984), 251–56. Murata Michihito, Kinsei ko¯iki shihai no kenkyu¯ [A study of early modern inter-regional ¯ saka Daigaku Shuppankai, 1995), 161–62; Kawashima administration] (Suita: O Takashi, “Kinsei kuniyaku-fushin ni tsuite no hitotsu ko¯satsu” [An investigation into early modern kuniyaku-fushin], Rekishi kenkyu¯, no. 21 (December 1980): 6.

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the responsibility of villagers to take care of hydraulic facilities in their own communities.54 In order to discourage appeals to this financing method, the shogunate cut the funds allocated annually to the projects of kuniyaku-fushin from 7,000 ryo¯ in 1762 to 4,000 ryo¯ in 1771. Yet the necessity of important river works forced the shogunate in 1778 to restore the allocation to the original level of 7,000 ryo¯.55 Although 90 percent of the project budget was ultimately covered by taxes collected from villages in provinces along the river, the shogunate had to dispense the costs of major construction or repairs in advance, especially in emergencies. Moreover, returns of the advanced funds were often in arrears. By 1842, the accumulated amount of the unreturned shogunal advancement surpassed 213,600 ryo¯.56 As the shogunate did not rely upon its own officials to collect these taxes from the villages, which were scattered across both shogunal and domainal territories, it found it hard to maintain the sustainability of the kuniyaku-fushin system. The increasing scale of river works and their importance to agriculture and transportation from the late eighteenth century onward meant increased costs to maintain these facilities; this was especially the case for reconstruction fees after major calamities such as flooding or earthquake. At the same time, the fiscal situation of the shogunate worsened from the late eighteenth century onward. The cash reserves in the shogunal treasury dropped from some 3 million ryo¯ in 1770 to about 650,000 ryo¯ in 1813.57 Fiscal difficulties forced the shogunate in 1824 to stop the practice of kuniyaku-fushin for financing major river works as it was unwilling to shoulder the 10 percent of the project cost, especially given the huge arrears accumulated. The shogunate then relied on villagers to self-finance projects with contributions from daimyo.58 From the early nineteenth century, it was common for villages that had a common stake in a hydraulic project to form associations to raise money for repairs and reconstruction.59 For example, in the eighteenth

54 55 56 57

58 59

Nishida Masaki, “Kawayoke to kuniyaku-fushin,” 240. Kasaya Kazuhiko, “Kinsei kuniyaku-fushin no seijishi teki ichi,” 535–37. Kasaya Kazuhiko, “Kinsei kuniyaku-fushin no seijishi teki ichi,” 560. ¯ guchi Yu¯jiro¯, “Kansei-Bunkaki no bakufu zaisei” [The public finance of the shogunate O between 1789 and 1817], in Nihon kinseishi ronso¯, vol. 2, ed. Bito¯ Masahide Sensei Kanreki-kinenkai (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1984), 211. Nishida Masaki, “Kawayoke to kuniyaku-fushin,” 254–58. Masayuki Tanimoto, “From ‘Feudal’ Lords to Local Notables: The Role of Regional Society in Public Goods Provision from Early Modern to Modern Japan,” in Public

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century the river control projects on the Tsurumi River on the Kanto¯ plain were mainly financed by the shogunate and daimyo using tetsudaifushin and kuniyaku-fushin. Due to the shrinking fiscal capacities of the shogunate and daimyo, a new system of self-finance emerged. Rates were collected among villagers from some seventy-two villages along the river; upstream villages contributed 1.5 ryo¯ per 100 koku, while downstream villages, which faced more danger of flooding, paid 3 ryo¯ per 100 koku. A total of 10,000 ryo¯ in funds was raised and its yearly interest income was used to pay for repair and maintenance of water control works. However, in the event of major floods, villagers still had to petition the shogunate for financial aid in the form of kuniyaku-fushin. If the shogunate rejected the petition, villagers had to borrow money at interest from the shogunate for postflood reconstruction.60 When in 1830 villages by Biwa Lake could not afford to dredge the Seda River to prevent flooding, more than 300 villages united to repeatedly request that the shogunate as the benevolent ruler provide financial aid to mitigate the hardship they incurred in the dredging work. The shogunate in 1831 agreed to allocate 600 kan in silver currency and also collected special duties from Osaka and the villages in nearby Settsu and Kawachi to raise a total of 2,357 kan in silver currency for this big project.61 Despite the increasing importance of regional society in financing hydraulic projects, the fiscally depleted shogunate in the 1830s still could not completely evade its duty to protect the public interest through water control projects. The cost of major hydraulic projects also put the relationship between the shogunate and daimyo under great strain. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the shogunate had increasingly transferred its fiscal burden to daimyo by requiring they help pay for hydraulic projects, civil construction projects, and defense.62 Major daimyo contributed significantly to hydraulic projects through tetsudai-fushin. In the early nineteenth century,

60

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Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy: Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe, ed. Masayuki Tanimoto and R. Bin Wong (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 26–29. Uchida Kazuko, “Chisui ko¯ji no hiyo¯ futan ni kansuru kenkyu¯: Kinsei ni okeru Tsurumigawa ryu¯iki wo rei toshite” [A study of responsibility for construction costs for water control: The Tsurumigawa watershed in the early modern period], Chiri kagaku 43, no. 1 (1988): 1–17. Hattori Takeshi, Kindai chiho¯ seiji to suiri doboku [Early modern local politics and water control public works] (Kyo¯to: Shibunkaku, 1995), 187–88. ¯ guchi Yu¯jiro¯, “Bakufu no zaisei” [The public finance of the shogunate], in Iwanami O Nihon keizaishi, vol. 2, Kindai seicho¯ no taido¯, ed. Shinbo Hiroshi and Saito¯ Osamu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1989), 164–65.

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daimyo who were deeply in debt tried to avoid being assigned to support major public works through various strategies, including bribing shogunal officials who were in charge of selecting which daimyo should contribute.63 As the shogunate had full discretion over the spending of the funds contributed by daimyo, it did not always spend all the money received on the stated public works and often used part of the funds to cover its own fiscal deficits. For example, in 1707, big earthquakes struck the Kanto¯ and Kyu¯shu¯ areas and led to huge tsunami damage on the Izu peninsula and Kyu¯shu¯. The shogunate collected a recovery duty of 2 ryo¯ per 100 koku across the country. But it only spent 160,000 ryo¯ on postcalamity relief and reconstruction; it diverted 240,000 ryo¯ for the construction of the Kitanomaru (Northern Enceinte [citadel]), a fortified enclosure of Edo Castle, and kept the remaining 80,000 ryo¯ for its own coffers.64 Obligations to assist the shogunate in rebuilding Edo, repairing the Tokugawa Mausoleum at Nikko¯, and constructing and maintaining river works were already a huge burden on the heavily indebted daimyo. To make things worse, Western threats made defense of Japan an urgent issue. After the coming of Commodore Perry’s fleets in 1853, the shogunate not only lifted the ban on daimyo building large ships, but also encouraged them to adopt Western weapons and build strong batteries. All these meant increased spending on the part of the fiscally exhausted daimyo.65 Given these new foreign threats, daimyo reaction to shogunal requests for financial contributions changed significantly. In the past, fulfilling such requests in tetsudai-fushin projects was for daimyo a matter of honor and pride before the shogunate.66 But now they began to emphasize their duty to safeguard the welfare of their subjects and to Japan’s defense. Daimyo felt they could rightfully question whether the shogunate was using the money they contributed for the general welfare of Japan or for purposes that served its own narrow interest. 63

64 65 66

Matsuo Mieko, “Kinsei ko¯ki ni okeru daimyo jo¯no¯kin: Ko¯gi fushinyaku no henyo¯” [Daimyo monetary contributions to the shogunate in the latter part of the Tokugawa period: The transformation of construction duties imposed by the shogunate], Tokugawa rinseishi kenkyu¯ kiyo¯ 53 (March 1979): 404–35. Kurachi Katsunao, Tokugawa shakai no yuragi [The destabilization of Tokugawa society] (Tokyo: Sho¯gakkan, 2008), 42–57. Wilson, Defensive Positions, ch. 4. Takatsuki Yasuo, “Kinno¯ tetsudai-fushin ni miru bakuhan kankei” [Shogunate-domain relations as seen from the monetarization of otetsudai-fushin], in Bakuhansei kokka no seiji ko¯zo¯, ed. Fujita Satoru (Tokyo: Yoshikawa ko¯bunkan, 2016), 133.

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For example, Nishimaru (Western Enceinte), another fortified enclosure of Edo Castle, was the space used to demonstrate the political authority of the shogun over daimyo and as the sovereign power of Japan to foreign emissaries from Korea and Holland. The cost of rebuilding Nishimaru after it burned down in 1838 was covered by daimyo via the tetsudai-fushin method, as well as by contributions from rich merchants. The shogunate dispensed some 1.4 million ryo¯ out of the total 1.7 ­million ryo¯ received for reconstruction and kept 300,000 ryo¯.67 However, when it came to rebuilding Honmaru, the main fort of Edo Castle, which burned down in the fire of 1844, daimyo stressed their fiscal difficulties and the economic hardship of the people after the Tempo¯ famine to reject the amount of money imposed by the shogunate. As a result, the shogunate itself spent 970,000 ryo¯ to reconstruct the fort, which amounted to some 55 percent of the total cost and thence greatly reduced the amount imposed upon daimyo.68 In 1852, when the Nishimaru had to be rebuilt again after a major fire, resistance from daimyo forced the shogunate to shoulder 90 percent of the total 1,160,000 ryo¯ needed.69 After 1853, daimyo and their officials even asked pointedly whether the shogunate served its “private interest” at the cost of the general interest of Japan in both domestic welfare and defense. In 1853, Hirano Shigehisa, a samurai-scholar in the Sakura domain, wrote a letter to his lord, Hotta Masayoshi, in regard to Japan’s defense. In his view, contributions that the shogunate imposed upon daimyo should all be canceled and alternate attendance should be reduced so that more money could be devoted to strengthening coastal defense.70 In 1856, Nagano Shume, a well-known scholar of Nativist Learning in Hikone, wrote to Ii Naosuke, the daimyo of Hikone, about the political consequences of the massive levies upon daimyo for rebuilding the imperial palace in Kyoto, buildings in Edo, and other river works after a big earthquake and tsunami in 1855. Nagano particularly reminded his lord that to impose huge financial contributions on major “outside” daimyo (tozama) but not to include them

67

68 69 70

Matsuo Mieko, “Bakuhansei kaitaiki ni okeru ko¯gi-fushinyaku” [Construction duties imposed by the shogunate in the period of the dissolution of the bakuhan system], Tokugawa rinseishi kenkyu¯ kiyo¯ 54 (March 1980): 330. Matsuo Mieko, “Bakuhansei kaitaiki ni okeru ko¯gi-fushinyaku,” 337 Matsuo Mieko, “Bakuhansei kaitaiki ni okeru ko¯gi-fushinyaku,” 339. ¯ hira Yu¯ichi, “Kinsei no daimyo ‘ko¯mu’ to so no ho¯kai: Bakumatsu no ‘otetsudai’ O ‘jo¯no¯kin’ wo tegakari ni shite” [The “official duties” of the early modern daimyo and their dissolution: Otetsudai and monetary contributions to the shogunate in the late Tokugawa], Ho¯gaku 48, no. 6 (February 1985): 132.

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in the policy-making process would alienate them and even endanger the realm of Japan.71 These increasing critiques of the shogunate by major daimyo led to a reexamination of their political relationship upon the basis of how to best serve the public interest of Japan.

3.3  China, 1684–1840 The support of hydraulic projects necessary for farming, commercial transportation, and protection of people from flooding was an important means for the Qing state to legitimate its governance. The Qing state had a centralized bureaucracy to collect taxes from the whole country, though the funds were for the most part held at the provincial level until assigned by the Board of Revenue to specific spending destinations. These fiscal resources allowed the central government to directly finance and maintain major public works such as the Yellow River conservancy and the major dikes and dams necessary to keep the Grand Canal navigable. Proximity to the capital of Beijing meant that river works in Zhili province, such as those on the Ziya and Yongding rivers, often benefited from official funds. In the mid to late seventeenth century when society had not yet recovered from the upheavals of the Ming–Qing transition, the Qing government often funded the construction or repair of water control projects for which local communities were unable to raise the necessary money.72 In the eighteenth century, the Qing state extended the scope of its spending on some important hydraulic projects. The maintenance of the long seawall in Zhejiang province that protected a large swathe of farming land from the inundation of sea water had in the past fallen on local communities. But the money and labor that local people could contribute were inadequate in the face of large-scale tempests. For the purpose of protecting the welfare of millions of people who lived behind the seawall, the Qing government from the 1720s onward began to allocate official funds to maintain, strengthen, and repair it. During the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1736–1795), some 6 million taels of silver were allocated for this project.73 In order to reduce the financial burden on 71 72 73

¯ hira Yu¯ichi, “Kinsei no daimyo ‘ko¯mu’ to so no ho¯kai,” 136–38. O Xu Jianqing, “Qing qianqi de gonggong shiye jingfei” [Expenditure on infrastructure in the early Qing], Zhongguo jingjishi yanjiu, no. 4 (1993): 118–32. Zhang Fang, “Qianlong huangdi he haitang” [The Qianlong emperor and the seawall], Zhongguo nongshi, no. 1 (1990): 75. For a detailed study on the state financing and management of the seawall project in Zhejiang province, see He Weiguo, Zhishui

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local inhabitants, the Qing government relied upon the interest income derived from lending official funds to financiers or merchants to dispense the annual maintenance fee.74 The long river dikes in Hubei province that protected thousands of paddy fields were also financed by funds from the central government, and interest income earned form lending official funds to financers and contributions from merchants were used to cover the yearly costs of maintenance.75 However, direct state management of large-scale water control projects did not represent the state’s despotic power over society in the simple fashion found in Wittfogel’s influential description of “oriental despotism.”76 Rather, the connection between public interest and state legitimation was a crucial reason for the Qing state’s involvement in public goods provision. Peter Perdue points out that the collective action problem often prevented social actors in Qing China from effectively organizing large-scale water control projects. Coercion supported by state power was therefore vital to overcome the problem of “free riders.”77 In fact, supervising the annual maintenance and checking the quality of repairs and construction of local water control projects were major responsibilities for county-level magistrates and even higher circuit-level officials.78 When conflicts of interest over using water arose among different communities, social actors often expected the state to act as an “impartial”

74

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76 77

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zhengzhi: Qingdai guojia yu Qiantangjiang haitang gongcheng yanjiu [Water-control politics: A study on the relationship between the state and the Qiantang River seawall project in the Qing dynasty] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2015). Tao Cunhuan and Zhou Chaosheng, Ming-Qing Qiantangjiang haitang [Seawalls on the Qiantang River] (Beijing: Zhongguo shuili shuidian chubanshe, 2001), 119–21; Zheng Zhaojing, ed., Taihu shuili jishushi [A technological history of water control on Lake Tai] (Beijing: Nongye chubanshe, 1987), 203–4. Pierre-Étienne Will, “State Intervention in the Administration of a Hydraulic Infrastructure: The Example of Hubei Province in Late Imperial Times,” in The Scope of State Power in China, ed. S. R. Schram (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 316; Tao Cunhuan and Zhou Chaosheng, Ming-Qing Qiantangjiang haitang, 119–21; Zheng Zhaojing, Taihu Shuili Jishushi, 203–4. Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies of Harvard University Press, 1987), ch. 6. For the collective action problem in the provision of public goods, see Olson, The Logic of Collective Action. R. Keith Schoppa, “Dike Building and Repair in the Three-River Microregion, 1686– 1926: Patterns in Practical Governance,” in Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs: Qing Crisis Management and the Boundaries of State Power in Late Imperial China, ed. Robert J. Antony and Jane Kate Leonard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2002), 129–53.

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authority, and local officials accordingly consulted with representatives of local communities to find solutions.79 However, the centrally managed Qing fiscal system was quota based and rigidly audited. It was thus difficult for officials at the province or county level to accommodate unforeseen demands in maintaining infrastructure. As a result, the Qing state encouraged societal participation in financing and managing local projects of water control. In general, the Qing state tried to draw a clear division of labor between the state and society in financing and managing hydraulic projects. The state only directly financed major public works and encouraged local participation in local infrastructure such as building bridges and roads and maintaining hydraulic facilities to benefit local residents. Thence for numerous smaller dikes and irrigation projects scattered across the country – often called “people’s projects” (minxiu) in contrast to those for which the state was officially responsible – the Qing government required that local communities finance and manage both their routine maintenance and major repairs, on the grounds that these mainly benefited local inhabitants.80 Nonetheless, the distinction between the state-funded and local community-funded public infrastructural facilities was not absolute in practice. Ecological changes sometimes forced the state to pay for the repair of people’s dikes (minnian) that used to be funded by local residents.81 For example, there was a road-dike (ludi) thirty li long outside the Bao’an gate of Wuchang in Hubei province. It was close to the major Jiaomaiwang dike. The repair of this road-dike had long been funded and managed by residents nearby. However, as the Han River increasingly flowed east toward the Jiaomaiwang dike, the road-dike began to suffer the brunt of the strikes of the river. By 1800, the accumulated damage to the dike became so serious that local residents simply could not afford the necessary repair fees. The Hubei provincial government then dispersed 16,638 taels of silver out of the official funds designated for 79

80

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Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 117; Will, “State Intervention in the Administration of a Hydraulic Infrastructure,” 320–30. Jiayan Zhang, “Water Calamities and Dike Management in the Jianghan Plain in the Qing and the Republic,” Late Imperial China 27, no.1 (2006): 66–108. For a review of community participation in water control projects, see Mark Elvin, “On Water Control and Management during the Ming and Qing Periods: A Review Article,” Ch’ing-shih wen-ti, no. 3 (1975): 82–103. For a study of the relationship between environmental changes and variations in organization of water management in imperial China, see Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, ch. 6.

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repairing the Jiaomaiwang dike to conduct a major repair of this roaddike to help strengthen the former.82 A similar case happened in Henan province. People in Wuzhi county had constructed a longstanding “people’s dike” to protect them from the Long River. However, as the Yellow River gradually moved north, it almost converged with the Long River. The dike thus became less able to handle floods. In 1800, the Henan governor Wu Xiongguang asked to disburse official funds to strengthen this people’s dike. In 1804, the cost of repairs ran as high as 22,320 taels of silver.83 Repairs to this dike in 1807 cost a further 13,328 taels of silver.84 In 1816, the dike came under official management.85 Infrastructural repair could sometimes be accomplished as a means of disaster relief when the central government did not allocate official funds directly for repairs. For example, heavy rainfall in the autumn of 1810 caused many breaches of the Qianli dike (“thousand mile dike”) in Zhili province, leaving it in urgent need of repair. The management and maintenance of this dike were the responsibility of the people living along the dike, but they could not afford the cost of fixing it right after being stricken by floods. However, the Board of Revenue was reluctant to spend government funds on this “people’s dike.” As a result, the governorgeneral of Zhili, Wen Huicheng, decided to disburse 13,808 taels of silver from the disaster relief fund to conduct repairs.86 Several instances demonstrate how officials rationalized state support for people’s hydraulic projects as part of a larger conservancy effort. The headwaters of the Jiusheng River in Funing county were located close to the south bank of the Yellow River. This river was not only important to irrigate farmlands, but also for the outflow of excess water that threatened the south bank. Moreover, it facilitated the transportation of m ­ aterials needed by various bureaus in charge of managing the Grand  Canal. 82

83 84 85

86

The memorial of Huguang governor-general Wu Xiongguang and Hubei governor Quanbao, JQ9/2/13 (March 2, 1804), Grand Council Memorial Copies (henceforth GCMC)-Jiaqing-Water control, Box 1, No. 2048–50. The memorial of Henan governor Ma Huiyu, JQ9/4/5 (March 2, 1804), GCMC-JiaqingWater control, Box 1, No. 2139–40. The memorial of Henan governor Ma Huiyu, JQ12/6/27 (July 21, 1807), GCMCJiaqing-Water control, Box 2, No. 517–19. Wang Rongbi and Fang Lüjian, eds., Wuzhi xianzhi [Wuzhi county gazetteer], vol. 2 (Daoguang 9 [1829] edition), reprinted in Zhongguo fangzhi congshu, 481 (Taibei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1993): 624–33. The memorial of Zhili governor-general Wen Chenghui, JQ16/4/20 (June 9, 1811), GCMC-Jiaqing-Water control, Box 3, No. 442–44.

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In  1812, the cost of dredging the silted-up river ran as high as 33,915 taels of silver. Yet this area had suffered from floods continually since 1804, and local people could hardly raise this amount. The governorgeneral of Liangjiang Bailin and the Jiangsu governor Zhu Li memorialized for permission to use the funds deposited in the bureaus of the Grand Canal to undertake the desperately needed dredging work; they justified this request by emphasizing the importance of dredging this river to the navigation of the Grand Canal.87 Likewise, the 29,300 taels of silver spent on urgent repairs to the bank to protect the Dangshan county seat from heavy flooding by the Yellow River in 1811 were originally the responsibility of local people. However, the Liangjiang governor-general Bailin reported that in addition to flood damage, this county had suffered drought in 1813 and 1814, and the land taxes due in 1814 and 1815 in this area had been postponed. Given this situation, the repair costs were disbursed from the annual expenditure the Qing government assigned to the administration of the Grand Canal.88 Concern for people’s welfare – particularly a desire to reduce the tax burden on local residents – was one major reason why Qing officials actively sought reasons to use state funds to cover some of the costs of people’s projects in water control. The method of deriving interest income from lending official funds to private merchants or financiers was also extended to support people’s projects. For example, the Yu River in the counties of Huazhou and Huayin in Shaanxi province channeled water from the mountains into the Wei River. Its dike was managed by local people. However, the dike’s construction was not solid due to limited community investment, and floods often inundated the bank between summer and autumn. Provincial governors and circuit officials investigated this situation and suggested paying for the repairs and maintenance with government money so as to protect the agricultural land. Yet the two counties were quite poor. The Shaanxi governor Lu Kun and provincial treasurer Chang Wen decided to lend 120,000 taels of silver from the government funds to pawnshops and use the annual interest income of 12,000 taels to finance the maintenance of this bank.89 87 88

89

The memorial of Liangjiang governor-general Bailin and Jiangsu governor Zhu Li, JQ17/8/13 (September 4, 1812), GCMC-Jiaqing-Water control, Box 3, No. 1558–60. The memorial of Liangjiang governor-general Bailin and acting director-general of the Grand Canal Li Shixu, JQ19/10/22 (November 22, 1814), GCMC-Jiaqing-Water control, Box 4, No. 106–8. The memorial of Shaanxi governor Lu Kun, DG3/12/18 (June 20, 1823), GCMCDaoguang-Water control, Box 1, No. 229–31.

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Although Qing officials often used the protection of the public interest as the reason to dispense official funds to cover the costs of people’s projects of water control and reduce the tax burden on localities, there were limits to this financing method. For instance, only governors and governors-general had the privilege to propose covering such costs with official funds assigned for large-scale water control works. The Qing state had no intention of increasing its share in the investment in people’s projects of water control. On the one hand, the Qing government insisted on the existing quota-based fiscal conservatism, which did not encourage the state to extract increasing revenue to meet the needs of even domestic welfare projects. The Qing state did not want the people to expect it to cover all the costs of infrastructure in their communities. On the other hand, the Qing government considered that the method of self-financing and self-management of local hydraulic projects provided fewer chances of abuse to county officials and to low-level functionaries such as runners and clerks. Moreover, government officials held it as “natural” for people to invest in infrastructural projects that mainly benefited themselves. The quota-based fiscal system and its inability to finance all hydraulic projects in localities, however, put prefectural and county magistrates in a very awkward position. Magistrates were held accountable by the center for any suffering caused by the mismanagement of water control projects. Yet at the same time they were constrained by an inflexible fiscal system that did not place adequate funds at their disposal to meet the varying needs of the region under their jurisdiction. Even when they received sanction to spend official funds on local hydraulic projects, they had to face the rigid auditing of the Board of Revenue. The prices of labor and materials that the financial officials of the central government used to calculate the budget of a project often lagged behind changes in market prices in localities. Budgets made according to the prices listed in the manual of the Board of Revenue were frequently inadequate to guarantee the quality of the project, yet officials would be held accountable for quality problems with the finished projects. But if an official tried to spend more official funds than were allowed by government fiscal regulations, he risked being disciplined. For example, in Jingmen prefecture of Hubei province, there was a long dike erected against the Han River. In the ninth month of 1806, the prefectural magistrate Tao Chen reported to the provincial government the need to consolidate the part of the dike between Hejiawan and Wangjiatan. The estimated expenditure was approved by the provincial government. However, when the project was finished six months later,

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the inspectors sent from the provincial government measured the amount of earth used for the construction and found it was only half of the estimated amount. It turned out that the magistrate Tao Chen knew that the official prices for labor permitted by the Board of Revenue were only half of the current market prices. In order to avoid a deficit, he deliberately overestimated the scale of the project so as to get funds sufficient to finish the project. The prefectural official Deng Wenbing, who was responsible for supervising this work, knew the circumstances and did not report him. But the difference between the actual finished work and the reported amount was too obvious to escape the eyes of the provincial inspectors. Further investigations of the original bookkeeping and interrogations of labor heads in the project did not find any evidence of embezzlement. However, both Tao and Deng lost their posts; Tao was punished by eighty cane strokes and exile, and had to return the overreported 400 taels of silver to the government.90 The supervision of hydraulic projects financed by the state could be quite strict. The dike of the north bank of Jing River in Hubei province needed to be repaired every year after the rainy season. An official in Jingzhou prefecture who specialized in water control affairs was charged with organizing this annual project. Government officials allowed landlords whose land was located further from the dike to contribute money instead of labor. The contributed money was under the management of two bureaus set up by local gentry, yet each disbursement required receipts printed by the prefectural government, which kept the original receipt as a record. Every year, the surplus of the finished project would be retained by the bureaus managed by local gentry. In 1806, there was a surplus of 710 strings of copper coins (equivalent to 710 taels of silver) left after the annual repair. Lou Chunfang, the prefectural official who was in charge of supervising the annual repair, was reimbursed for the expenses that he had covered with his own money in advance, including the costs of traveling to the sites of repair and food for himself and his subordinates during these trips. The gentry managers considered this to be normal costs of the project. But the Hubei provincial governor in inspecting the dike noticed that the original receipt showed that this disbursement was not made upon a day-by-day basis, but as a lump sum after the project was finished. Although the gentry managers all testified that they had approved both the purpose and amount of this 90

The memorial of governor-general of Huguang Wang Zhiyi and Hubei governor Zhang Xu, JQ12/11/5 (January 14, 1808), GCMC-Jiaqing-Law, Box 3, No. 344–53.

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spending and that Lou did not pocket the funds, Lou was forced to return this amount of money to the government and sentenced to two years of hard labor.91 Given such examples, gentry managers of water control projects would have less motivation to use official funds for local water control projects. Self-financing of water control projects in local communities, however, had its own problems. First, the cost to repair a dike after a major breach or to dredge a river after years of silting up was often too large for the local community to prepare in a timely fashion. This was particularly the case when the local community had just suffered from dike failure or inundation of farmland. Ecological changes sometimes led to a sharp increase in the cost of maintaining nonofficial projects such as dikes or banks and local residents found themselves unable to bear the burden. This was often the situation in North China, where the routes of major rivers sometimes changed dramatically. Second, it was not uncommon that local residents were forced to move by a major flood. In this situation, the state recognized that it had a responsibility to disburse the project fees to repair the breached dikes so that residents would come back when the finished project had made farming possible again.92 Third, when a hydraulic project was located between counties belonging to different provinces, it was often quite difficult for local communities to coordinate maintenance and repairs. For example, Huangmei county in Hubei province frequently endured breaching of the Chugong dike because the people in Dehua county in neighboring Jiangxi province could not afford to maintain this dike properly. In response, the Hubei provincial government in 1838 petitioned the court to allow it to disburse 8,481 taels from official funds to construct a new dike to run across the three provinces of Hubei, Jiangxi, and Anhui. Only when this state-funded project was finished could officials persuade local people to take on the responsibility of maintaining the parts of the dike located in their own communities.93 Given these circumstances, a new financing method emerged in the early eighteenth century that combined state financial support with that of local communities in repairing and maintaining water control projects. 91 92 93

The memorial of Huguang governor-general Wang Zhiyi and the acting Hubei governor Dong Jiaozeng, JQ13/4/22 (June 17, 1808), GCMC-Jiaqing-Law, Box 3, No. 1061–5. The memorial of Huguang governor-general Naerjinge and Hubei governor Yin Giyuan, DG14/12/22 (February 5, 1835), GCMC-Daoguang-Water control, Box 2, No. 227–30. The memorial of Huguang governor-general Lin Zexu and Hubei governor Zhou Zhiqi, DG16/3/7 (March 17, 1838), GCMC-Daoguang-Water control, Box 2, No. 2326–29.

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Local communities first borrowed official funds at no interest for the repair and strengthening of people’s projects that had in the past been financed by local people. Then the communities that benefited from the finished project returned the money by paying extra rates in their annual land taxes. The time granted to clear this debt to the government ranged from two to twelve years. The total amount due was divided in proportion to the acreage of farmland and was collected along with the annual land taxes of each household. In this way, emergency measures to repair or rebuild people’s hydraulic projects were covered first by official funds, which reduced the financial burden on local communities.94 This method of financing local water control projects therefore seemed not to increase the state’s regular expenditure, yet allowed the Qing state to fulfill its proclaimed duty to protect domestic welfare. In essence, this financing method was equivalent to funding local infrastructural projects by collecting additional taxes, though in a reverse sequence. By the first half of the nineteenth century, the method of lending official funds for local projects of water control had become institutionalized in practice. When communities borrowed official funds, the cost was first estimated by county officials in cooperation with local gentry. The amount was then reviewed by circuit officials who visited the project location; after this, it was routinely approved by the provincial authorities. The money was directly handed over to local gentry who were to organize the work. In this way, runners and clerks in the county government would have little chance to embezzle the funds. When the Hunan provincial government in 1813 lent 9,740 taels of silver for the people in the counties of Wuling and Longyang to repair their damaged enclosure dikes, the acting governor Chen Yu emphasized that the money had to be delivered directly to the inhabitants of the area of each breached dike, without going through the hands of local government clerks.95 Similarly, the official funds that were regularly lent to support dredging of the Liu River in Jiangsu province were also handed over directly to the local gentry.96 94

95 96

Liu Wenyuan, Qingdai shuili jiexiang yanjiu [Water control and account debits in the Qing dynasty] (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 2011); Wenkai He, “Public Interest and the Financing of Local Water Control in Qing China, 1750–1850,” Social Science History, vol. 39, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 409–30. The memorial of Hunan acting governor Chen Yu, JQ18/12/4 (December 2, 1813), GCMC-Jiaqing-Water control, Box 3, No. 2490–93. The memorial of Sulinga and Fei Chun, JQ1/11/7 (November 19, 1796), GCMCJiaqing-Water control, Box 1, No. 182–84.

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The actual process of advancing official funds involved the close collaboration of state and social actors. Qing officials considered that the local gentry managers would carefully supervise spending and care about the quality of the project as they had both their own reputations and material interests at stake. As the official funds for water control projects were independently managed by local communities, the actual spending did not have to be audited and approved by the central government when the project was finished. This enabled social actors to escape the rigid fiscal management of the central government. State involvement was restricted to ensuring that there was some involvement of officials in planning, in inspection of finished projects, and in record-keeping. As the state considered the advancing of funds for local hydraulic projects by local people to serve the public interest, the community had the responsibility not only to return the money to the state, but to ensure the quality of the project. The finished project needed to be inspected by government officials who were familiar with hydraulic engineering. In order to make officials inspect the finished project conscientiously, the Qing state set a “warranty period” (baogu qixian) of three or even ten years for the finished project. If a major accident occurred within this warranty period, the relevant officials would be held accountable.97 Moreover, the Qing state had one indirect yet important method to supervise local gentry involved in organizing such projects: accusations of abuses by gentry managers. State adjudications of such accusations were made after careful examination of the evidence presented by the plaintiff and the bookkeeping records of the projects, as well as onsite inspection of construction quality and measurements of actual earth and labor used. If social actors were not satisfied by the adjudication of local officials, they could bring the case to Beijing, an act that represented a recognition of the center as the highest political authority in safeguarding the public interest.98 In the summer of 1764, the dike in Huangmei county of Hubei province was breached by flood. The magistrate at the time, Zhu Yipei, originally asked local gentry to donate money to fund the repair of this dike, which had been maintained by local communities. However, as the money obtained from voluntary contributions fell far short of the amount needed, 97 98

Liu Wenyuan, Qingdai shuili jiexiang yanjiu, 270–78. Wenkai He, “‘Public Interest’ as a Basis for Early Modern State-Society Interactions: Water Control Projects in Qing China, 1750–1850,” Environment and History, 23 (2017): 455–76.

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the succeeding magistrate He Gangzhong consulted with local gentry and decided that in addition to the 5,000 taels of silver lent by the government, a special duty was to be imposed upon local residents in proportion to the land taxes so as to raise the money for repairs. The collection was handed over to members of the local gentry: Li Mingwu (a juren degree holder), Shi Shizun (a shengyuan degree holder), and eight other people.99 When the repair was finished in the spring of 1765, Qu Xuefu, who himself was also a jiansheng degree holder, made an accusation to the provincial governor that Li Mingwu and other managers of the project not only overcollected from farmers, but also underspent on construction, pocketing the difference. Qu Xuefu’s appeal was rebutted by the prefectural and provincial governments as a false accusation, and he was punished by eighty blows of the heavy bamboo by the provincial government. Qu Xuefu and his son Qu Shigui then brought this case to Beijing, and the Board of Punishment returned it to the Hubei governor to reinvestigate. The Hubei governor sent officials to check the bookkeeping records of duty collection and reconstruction disbursement, and insisted that Qu’s accusation had no factual support. Qu then faced a heavier punishment: deprivation of his jiansheng title, 100 blows of the heavy bamboo, exile, and three years’ forced labor.100 Nonetheless, the youngest son of Qu Xuefu, Qu Boji, came to Beijing again to appeal his father’s case. As Qu Boji was only fifteen years old, this caught the attention of the center. Two central officials, Mailaxun and Dingchang, were sent to Hubei province to investigate. In addition to catching inconsistencies in bookkeeping and contradictions in the statements made by the magistrate, county clerks, and gentry members involved, inspecting officials measured the amount of earth and found it well below the reported figure. Moreover, the quality of some repairs was bad, and others were new, obviously made in preparation for the inspection by the center. It turned out that Li Mingwu and other gentry managers had let some members of their lineage off without paying, but collected money from 99

100

Holding a degree from the imperial examination system was a prestigious marker of gentry status. Those with the highest (jinshi) and next-highest (juren) degrees were likely to be appointed to official office. Holders of lower degrees, such as the shengyuan and jiansheng, might hold a low-level local administrative position; these degrees were sometimes purchased. The memorial of the Board of Punishment, QL 32/r7/1 (August 23, 1767), GCMCQianlong-Law, Box 1, No. 1488–95. Qu Xuefu’s appeal can be found in GCMCQianlong-Law, Box 1, No. 1470–86.

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poor farmers who should have been exempted. These managers also diverted a total of some 326 taels of silver into their own pockets. In order to have the badly repaired dike pass government inspection, they bribed runners and clerks and sent expensive gifts to the magistrate He Gangzhong. Moreover, they removed thirty-three taels of silver from the project expenses to help the magistrate cover a shortfall in the collection of land taxes so that he could fulfill the quota and avoid being disciplined. After the investigation, Li Mingwu received the death penalty, while ten other members of the gentry and clerks were punished to various degrees. The magistrate He Gangzhong was exiled to the frontier. Although the total amount of embezzlement officially found – 660 taels of silver – was much smaller than the 5,000 taels of silver originally charged, Qu was not punished for false accusation. Instead, he was pardoned because his appeals finally led to the exposure of this scandal.101 The original bookkeeping of gentry managers that recorded spending on both labor and the amount of earth used for projects was thus crucial evidence to prove their impartial management. When government officials investigated appeals, they often checked whether the amount of earth actually used in the project matched the amount calculated according to the original accounts. For example, the gentry of Henei county in Henan province established a “public office” (gongju) to manage the accounts of all spending on repairing and maintaining the bank against the Qin River. When an accusation was brought against them, their innocence was proved when government investigators found the materials used matched with the records kept by gentry managers.102 In 1829, Liu Ruzhen and Luo Bingnan from Jianli county of Hubei province went to Beijing to accuse the county clerk Sun Lunyuan of underspending on dike repairs to benefit himself. Government officials came to inspect the quality of the finished project and found the work had been done according to the original design. Moreover, government inspectors convened fifteen labor heads who took money from the gentry managers and distributed it to laborers under their respective supervision; they all testified that there had been no deductions in wages.103 101 102

103

The memorial of Mailaxun and Dingchang, QL32/8/30 (October 22, 1767), GCMCQianlong-Law, Box 6, No. 2046–57. The memorial of the director-general of canal transportation (Hedong hedao zongdu) Li Fenghang, JQ1/8/29 (September 29, 1796), GCMC-Jiaqing-Law, Box 14, No. 2883–93. The memorial of Hubei governor Yang Jian, DG9/10/11 (November 7, 1829), GCMCDaoguang-Law, Box 3, No. 3083–94.

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However, the capital appeal itself may suggest that social actors frequently had no effective means to hold local officials accountable for fulfilling their duty in public works. The case of Qu Xuefu shows how difficult it could be for local residents – commoners or gentry – to sue gentry managers of water control projects who were well connected with local officials. In Qu’s case, the gentry managers disbursed project money not only to bribe magistrates and clerks in the county government, but also to cover the deficits of local government in collecting land taxes or other public expenditures. Magistrates who were constrained by the state’s rigid fiscal system often did not have adequate funds for local governance, and thus they welcomed financial contributions from gentry managers of projects. Such collusion between gentry managers and fiscally constrained local officials may explain why circuit and provincial officials did not have the incentive to carefully conduct a field inspection and measure the amount of earth used in construction when they received the appeal from Qu Xuefu. The Qing government in principle did not incur any extra expense as long as the lent-out money was paid back within the designated period by extra land taxes. However, this financing method in practice was quite different from the original design. Although the communities in the wealthy Lower Yangzi Delta could afford to pay extra duties to return the official funds borrowed from provincial governments for local hydraulic projects, many could not do so punctually. In particular, the extra land taxes remained a heavy burden on residents in those regions where poor harvests persisted even after the successful completion of water control projects, or in regions vulnerable to hydraulic damage. In such cases, the funds borrowed from government accumulated over time. In poor provinces such as Yunnan and Guizhou, the government either directly invested in local projects or exempted the local communities from repayment. For example, Dian Lake (Dianchi) near Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, was important for irrigating farmland in the four counties of Kunming, Jinning, Kunyang, and Chenggong. Both the regular and extraordinary dredging of the mouth of Dian Lake to allow excess water to flow out was paid for by official funds. Costs ranged from 1,000 to 7,000 taels of silver each time. Local inhabitants did not need to pay the government back for these expenditures.104 104

The memorial of the governor-general of Yunnan and Guizhou Bolin and Yunnan governor Yongbao, JQ13/10/26 (December 15, 1808), GCMC-Jiaqing-Water control, Box 2, No. 1741–42.

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Likewise, in the spring of 1831 Tongzi county in Guizhou province suffered from a severe flood, and the existing riverbed was too narrow to divert the excess water. The Guizhou provincial government thus decided to dig a long ditch to allow the water to flow out. Of the total amount of some 22,800 taels of silver, officials in Guizhou contributed 12,700 taels while members of the local gentry contributed 1,100 taels; the remaining 9,000 taels were borrowed from the provincial treasury. Further, officials in Guizhou took over 4,000 taels of this loan as their responsibility, while the final 5,000 was expected to be paid back within ten years from extra taxes on farmers in Tongzi county. However, the Guizhou governor Yutai in 1835 memorialized to the court that the mountainous Tongzi county was quite poor and the annual quota of land taxes was only 2,000 taels of silver. The annual 500 taels of extra taxation was thus a tremendous burden on local farmers. Yutai petitioned to deduct this item of 5,000 taels of silver from the supplementary salary to magistrates (yanglianyin) held by the Guizhou government.105 Arrears in returning the official funds by the benefited communities were widespread in the first half of the nineteenth century. For example, the government in 1788 lent some 48,700 taels of silver to repair the people’s dikes and ditches in the counties of Henei and Wuzhi in Henan province. This amount needed to be returned within two years by collecting extra land taxes from the twenty-five counties that benefited from the projects. However, 19,190 taels were still outstanding six years after the deadline.106 Arrears even happened in relatively rich regions. In 1833, big floods destroyed the circling dikes (yuandiji) between Nanhai and Shunde counties in Guangdong province. The local gentry petitioned to borrow 49,000 taels of silver from official funds to repair the dikes. After applying the annual interest income derived from an amount of money that the local gentry had deposited for the yearly maintenance of the dikes against this debt to the government, 10,600 taels remained. This amount was to be repaid within five years (starting from 1834) by an extra duty added to the regular land taxes. However, as late as 1842, the Guangdong government had not received any repayment, because local households could not reach a consensus on how to distribute the extra burden among themselves.107 105 106 107

The memorial of Guizhou governor Yutai, DG15/1/25 (March 23, 1835), GCMCDaoguang-Water control, Box 2, No. 314–18. The memorial of Li Fenghan, JQ1/8/29 (September 29, 1796), GCMC-Jiaqing-Water control, Box. 1, No. 141. The memorial of Liangguang governor-general Qi Gong and Guangdong governor Liang Baochang, DG22/11/14 (December 14, 1842), Palace Memorials-Daoguang

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Such delays in returning borrowed official funds seem to have been the rule rather than the exception. In 1803, the governor-general of Huguang Wu Xiongguang and Hubei governor Quanbao pointed out to the court that the extra land taxes that should have been collected to return funds lent for local hydraulic projects were often in arrears in the provinces; arrears of more than twenty years were not unknown. The major reason, in their opinion, was that the performance of magistrates was evaluated by the collection of the formal quota of land taxes rather than the extra rates. There were either light or even no disciplinary measures against magistrates if they failed to collect the extra rates on time. They thus suggested that the court include the rates collection into the regular evaluation of the administrative performance of magistrates so that state advances for local infrastructure projects would be returned.108 This suggestion was not put into practice. As a result, the accumulation of such arrears was quite big. For instance, in 1846, the Jiangxi governor Wu Wenrong reported to the court that the total amount still owed to the government ran as high as 251,800 taels of silver and dated back to 1823. As similar arrears in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces had been exempted by the court in 1795, 1818, and 1835, Wu Wenrong asked the court to write off all the Jiangxi arrears accumulated by 1840.109 In Hubei province, a total of 327,218 taels of silver in official funds lent for local water control projects before 1830 was still outstanding and was finally exempted in 1837.110 In Anhui province, the total amount of state funds that local communities had borrowed for water control projects in 1832, 1835, 1837, and 1839 was 274,654 taels of silver. As of 1847, 191,353 taels of silver (equivalent to 70 percent of the total debt) had not been paid back yet, and the Qing state exempted these liabilities.111 In 1848, the governor-general of Minzhe Liu Yunke petitioned the court to exempt the amount of 21,196 taels of silver that the counties of Longxi and Nanjing had borrowed from the government in 1827

108 109 110 111

reign, copies preserved in the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica (henceforth PM-Daoguang). The memorial of Huguang governor-general Wu Xiongguang and Hubei governor Quanbao, JQ8/11/23 (January 5, 1804), GCMC-Jiaqing-Water control, Box 1, No. 1908–12. The memorial of Jiangxi governor Wu Wenrong, DG26/10/13 (December 1, 1846), GCMC- Daoguang-Water control, Box 3, No. 2581–82. The memorial of Huguang governor-general Lin Zexu and Hubei governor Zhou Zhiqi, DG17/5/16 (June 18, 1837), PM-Daoguang. The memorial of acting governor-general of Liangjiang Lu Jianying and Anhui governor Wang Zhi, DG 27/4/3 (May 16, 1847), PM-Daoguang.

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to repair local dikes and banks. Liu pointed out that the official land taxes had often been in arrears in these two poor counties, let alone the extra rates for repaying official advances.112 In Hubei province, the total amount of similar arrears in counties by 1846 was 601,822 taels of silver. The Hubei provincial government petitioned the court to exempt this debt as the people in Hubei simply could not afford to pay it back.113 Although the specific amounts of arrears in other provinces remains to be examined, it is not unreasonable to expect them to be on a similar scale as those observed in Hubei and Jiangxi provinces. However, the advancement of official funds to support infrastructural facilities across the country was not recorded in the bookkeeping of the Board of Revenue, as these expenditures were supposed to be returned to the state. Moreover, such financing methods were not used on an annual basis but in response to specific demands made by local communities and local governments to provincial governors, who typically approved such requests as they did not imply additional government spending. It is thus difficult to estimate such spending on a yearly basis. Based upon the available documents that mention the use of this financing method, the historian Liu Wenyuan estimates that the total amount of official advancement funds (including both those returned and those unreturned) for hydraulic projects that were not included in state budgets across the country was over 14 million taels in the period between the 1730s and the 1840s.114 This is a large amount of money. It is clear that the Qing state spent significantly on public infrastructural facilities outside its formal fiscal system, upon the basis of its responsibility to the public interest of the whole realm.

3.4 Conclusion State legitimacy in each of these early modern states was tightly tied to the specific performance of public goods provision in infrastructural facilities. All these states encouraged the participation of local communities in building and maintaining public works that mainly benefited local residents. Yet in none of these cases could local society or the central government meet the full scope of infrastructural needs alone, especially 112 113

114

The memorial of the Board of Revenue, D28/6/14 (July 14, 1848), GCMC-DaoguangWater control, Box 3, No. 2762–66. The memorial of Huguang governor-general Yutai and Hubei governor Zhao Bingyan, DG28/10/14 (November 9, 1848), GCMC-Daoguang-Water control, Box 3, No. 2862–64. Liu Wenyuan, Qingdai shuili jiexiang yanjiu, 64.

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when demands for infrastructural facilities grew significantly with the development of the economy or repeated natural disasters. In addition to the rising cost of public works, the connection between the welfare of local communities and that of broader regions became more complicated; a political authority higher than the local or regional level was increasingly necessary to coordinate these projects. Local communities or local authorities often had to justify their claims to each state by demonstrating specifically how their local welfare was connected, rather than opposed, to the public interest. At the same time, the state’s intervention was made upon a normative basis of how to better safeguard the public interest through infrastructural projects. The negotiation and contestation between state and society upon a common platform of a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation led to similar patterns in state–society interactions across these three cases over how to finance infrastructural facilities crucial to both domestic governance and general welfare. Such interactions occurred in two opposite directions. In the decentralized political and fiscal systems of Tudor and early Stuart England and Tokugawa Japan, local communities with various degrees of self-governance played active roles in building and maintaining public works that mainly benefited themselves. However, the royal government or the shogunate had to intervene when local communities could not afford the cost of larger projects. They either adopted ad hoc financial policies or implemented fiscal innovations so as to mobilize resources from a wide range of regions or even the whole realm to invest in large-scale public works projects that local communities simply could not afford, especially after major calamities. State intervention thus complemented the weakness of local society in early modern England and Tokugawa Japan. The Qing state, in contrast, had a centrally managed fiscal system, which allowed the state to have a better ability to fund large-scale hydraulic projects important to domestic welfare. In order to complement the disadvantages of the inelastic quota-based fiscal operation and the rigidity inherent in central auditing of investments in local projects, the Qing state encouraged local communities to self-finance and selfmanage numerous smaller projects of water control that benefited local residents. The collaboration between state and social actors in infrastructural facilities was further exemplified by the innovation in the financing of water control projects that were too big for local communities to handle, yet too numerous to be included in the quota-based and rigidly managed state fiscal system. The advancement of official funds for hydraulic

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projects that were to be returned by the communities that benefited from the finished projects became an important means for the Qing state to significantly expand its spending on local infrastructure without fundamentally reforming its fiscal institutions. In Qing China, local participation and state–society collaboration thus sustained state governance of a large territory despite the inflexibility of its centralized fiscal system.

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4 The Negotiation of State and Society over Redress of Grievances

In early modern England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China, the public interest of the realm was conceived organically: The various members of society were tied together in a hierarchical political system by a common interest that the state had a duty to protect. This obligation on the part of the state entailed a passive right for subordinates. They could turn the terms of state legitimacy to make claims on the state, or even to demand that the state fulfill its publicly declared obligations. The public interestbased discourse of state legitimation thence provided a common platform for subordinates to engage with state authorities. With the expansion of popular education and the rise in the literacy rate, more social actors gained an increasingly sophisticated understanding of state laws and statutes, and some became skillful at using the norms of state legitimacy to make claims. Forms of engagement with the state included both individual and collective petitioning and even popular protests and riots. Such claims and collective actions were mostly tied to specific welfare grievances, and they did not reject state authority. The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation thus opened up a limited space in the early modern state for political participation, not only to social elites but also to ordinary people. In this chapter, I examine the popular petitioning for redressing welfare grievances that was justified by the state duty to the public interest, and how the state reacted to such contentious claims in Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. In each case, there are two kinds of petitioning. The first is individual or collective petitioning that targeted greedy gentry, abusive officials, or even state policies. These petitions were treated harshly by the state as threats to 145

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the established authorities. The state showed little mercy toward organizers or ringleaders of riots and crowd petitioning, despite the state proclaiming itself as the paternalistic protector of its subjects. Indeed, such state reactions often turned initially peaceful petitions into riots and protests. The second form of engagement is the organized collective petition that asked the state to intervene as an impartial arbiter to adjudicate conflicts of interests across different regions or different social groups so as to better safeguard the organically conceived public interest. These collective petitions over “competitive claims” involved a large number of participants and were well organized. They were typically tolerated by the state across these three cases. Such collective petitioning thus constituted an important means of political participation in the early modern state. Moreover, the space for such participation had great potential to expand with socioeconomic development.

4.1  Early Modern England, 1533–1640 The concept of commonwealth was the key term in legitimating state power in early modern England. It conceived society as one organic body consisting of different social groups tied together by the public interest in a hierarchical political system. This governing ideology permitted two directions of communication between the ruler and the ruled. On the one hand, it demanded obedience of inferiors to superiors, and in particular, obedience to the crown was held to be a Christian duty. On the other hand, it emphasized the paternalist duty of superiors toward inferiors and the right (in the passive sense) of the latter to appeal to the former to fulfill their duties and obligations.1 The crown in Tudor and early Stuart England was held to bear the obligation to hear petitions from its “loving subjects” and to redress their grievances accordingly. The petitions delivered to the monarch came from ordinary people, including weavers, tenants, and miners.2 The vast number of petitions delivered to the court made necessary a division of labor: The received petitions were allocated to different government departments such as the Masters of Request, the Secretaries of State, the Star 1 2

Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 8–10; M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 61. R. W. Hoyle, “Petitioning as Popular Politics in Early Sixteenth-Century England,” Historical Research 75, no. 190 (November 2002): 365–89.

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Chamber, and so on.3 In addition to formal channels, commoners sometimes directly delivered petitions while the monarch was on the way to chapel or on royal progress in the country. Although the presenter would be punished by imprisonment and a fine, the petition itself was accepted.4 The public duty of the crown to hear grievances encouraged a “popular monarchism” in ballads and print culture, which told stories of kings in disguise who learned of abuses and punished unjust and corrupt officials.5 For example, Edward Powell, an ordinary laborer who led a protest against a drainage project in 1638, told his followers that Charles I “leaned on his shoulders and wept” when he heard their petition describing their sufferings.6 The popularity of such an imagined kingship conveyed an important message to those at the bottom of a hierarchical political society: Their livelihoods were integral parts of the commonwealth and were guaranteed the protection of the state. In the early stage of state formation in Tudor England, protestors often questioned the state authority on social and economic policies related to the commonwealth. The rebels in the Lincolnshire Uprising and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 challenged the fiscal and religious policies of the Tudor state as detrimental to the welfare of the subjects.7 With the bloody suppression of these rebellions and further consolidation of state power, protestors came to explicitly express their loyalty to the monarch by justifying their protests in terms of the royal laws and policies that had been issued to protect the welfare of the people, particularly the weak and the poor. Collective protests in this situation were thus based upon an acceptance of state authority and the principles of state legitimation.8 The collective protests of commoners in early modern England represented a special form of negotiation between the state and its subjects upon a common platform of the state’s duty to protect the public interest. 3

4 5 6 7

8

For the division of labor in addressing petitions within the center, see R. W. Hoyle, “The Masters of Requests and the Small Change of Jacobean Patronage,” English Historical Review 126, no. 520 (June 2011): 547–48. Hoyle, “The Masters of Requests and the Small Change of Jacobean Patronage,” 555. Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England, 20. Clive Holmes, “Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity,” Past and Present, no. 205 (November 2009): 175. For the contention over the means to attain the commonweal and the alternative policies proposed by the rebels in 1536, see M. L. Bush, “The Tudor Polity and the Pilgrimage of Grace,” Historical Research 80, no. 207 (February 2007): 47–72; M. L. Bush, “‘Up for the Commonweal’: The Significance of Tax Grievances in the English Rebellions of 1536,” English Historical Review 106, no. 419 (April 1991): 299–318. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunders (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4.

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In the rebellions in the spring and summer of 1549 in the western part of England and East Anglia, for example, both rebels and the central government exhibited the same concern over the serious social consequences of the enclosing of common land by nobles into pastures. Such enclosures threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of tenants and small proprietors. The royal government was worried about the decay of tillage and depopulation. It considered depopulation particularly detrimental to the needs of defense and the dearth of grain a danger to social order.9 The royal policies to curb the enclosure of arable land for grazing and encourage tillage thence allowed the victims of enclosures in 1549 to invoke the royal authority to express their grievances against greedy gentry; their protests even received sympathy from high-ranking royal officials such as the Protector Somerset.10 The protestors employed the same evangelical language that the Tudor state had used to promote the Reformation by linking religious change to the economic prosperity of the commonwealth and the welfare of the subjects.11 The rebels thus behaved as if they were enforcing the royal anti-enclosure policies on behalf of the crown so as to protect the commonwealth from destruction by avaricious lords. This political context is crucial to understand the discipline and self-control that the rebels showed in destroying fences and hedges; they rarely used violence against the gentry. However, the Tudor state did not accept demands from commoners made in the form of collective assemblies, and considered it to be improper behavior on the part of those who should be “quiet and obedient subjects.”12 The lack of a standing army and the time needed for the royal government to mobilize noblemen’s troops forced it to be more strategic in dealing with collective protestors. It first tried to disperse camps of protestors by granting pardons, but brutal suppression was applied to those who refused to go home.13 In order to demonstrate that collective protests were an unacceptable way to engage with authority, the ringleaders were

9 10

11 12 13

John E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development, rev. ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1986), 141–44. Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 151–59; Ethan H. Shagan, “Protector Somerset and the 1549 Rebellions: New Sources and New Perspectives,” English Historical Review 114, no. 455 (February 1999): 34–63. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation, 280–82. Hoyle, “Petitioning as Popular Politics in Early Sixteenth-Century England,” 384. Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Kett’s Rebellion in Context,” Past and Present, no. 84 (August 1979): 36–59.

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singled out for the death penalty even when the majority of protestors had accepted the royal pardon and dispersed.14 Public execution of leaders of protests under the charge of treason aimed to discourage future protests.15 Such draconian measures showed that the early modern English state viewed collective protests as a threat to social order and a rejection of the Christian duty of obedience; it showed little leniency, no matter how carefully the collective protestors and their leaders justified their demands in terms of commonwealth ideology and state statutes. After suppressing the rebellions in 1549, the royal government on the one hand tried to show its paternalist compassion for its subjects by enforcing anti-enclosure Acts and imposing heavy fines upon some enclosing landlords. On the other hand, Parliament issued the Act for the Punishment of Unlawful Assemblies. The Act charged any assembly of forty or more persons with treason if they targeted officials and government laws for more than one hour, as well as any group of forty or more who destroyed enclosures and properties for two hours. This charge of treason in cases of collective destruction of properties was changed to capital felony in the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, yet the group size was reduced from forty to only twelve persons and the time allowed for dispersal was reduced to one hour.16 In addition to harsh laws against collective protests, Parliament also greatly extended the scope of the treason laws to punish political gossip, comments about royal policies, or criticism of the monarch’s personality among commoners. Informers based in alehouses or even hiding under hedges by roads reported the “seditious talk” they heard to magistrates. The punishment for those so indicted ranged from pillorying to whipping and even hanging.17 In Colchester, a center of cloth manufacture in Essex, four people (three of them weavers) who had expressed an intention to organize weavers in the region for a rising were charged in 1566 with “seditious talk.” They were all hanged even though they had taken no action.18

14 15 16 17 18

MacCulloch, “Kett’s Rebellion in Context,” 44; Hoyle, “Petitioning as Popular Politics in Early Sixteenth-Century England,” 384. Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England, 71–78. Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 55–56. Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 33–37. J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750, 2nd ed. (London: Longman Press, 1999), 194.

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Compared with large-scale protests against enclosures, peaceful collective petitions of distress by victims of enclosure did not put much pressure on the government. In 1553, a petition signed by a large number of residents of Norfolk was presented to the royal government. Signatories included evicted copyholders who could not afford to pay increased rents to the landlords, as well as tenants who had lost access to the resources of the commons. As the “loving and loyal subjects” of the crown, they appealed to Queen Mary to help them maintain the livelihood of their families. Yet their collective petitions had no effect. The Parliament convened that year reacted by making it a felony for twelve or more to gather together to discuss religious issues or to destroy enclosures.19 In the second half of the sixteenth century, steadily rising grain prices and improvements in agricultural production led to economic stratification in rural communities. In the process of engrossing separate pieces of land together for higher agricultural productivity and enclosing wastes and commons for tillage, yeomen and even some tenants became economically better off. Moreover, these people of the “middling sort,” who were increasingly able to read and write, began to actively participate in parish governance and became closer to the gentry in their preference for social order. The political and economic polarization in rural communities by the late sixteenth century made it less likely for the “middling sort” such as yeomen and smallholders to join anti-enclosure riots.20 Nonetheless, enclosure for sheep and cattle grazing could trigger severe disturbances when a large number of rural residents became victims. The good harvests in the early 1590s made Parliament in 1593 repeal the tillage Acts that attempted to constrain enclosure, and the gentry in the Midlands responded by enclosing farming land into pasture for sheep and cattle. This resulted in the eviction of more than 1,500 people across eight villages and ultimately led to a large-scale insurrection in 1607. Thousands of poor people participated in this Midland Rising, destroying fences and hedges. Like the rebels in 1549, they legitimated their actions by citing the state’s anti-enclosure statutes and Acts. They attributed high grain prices to these enclosures and held that King James I would be sympathetic to his starving yet loyal subjects. The insurrection was put down as “unlawful assemblies” and the leaders were indicted with “treason and 19 20

R. W. Hoyle, “Agrarian Agitation in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Norfolk: A Petition of 1553,” Historical Journal 44, no. 1 (2001): 230. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England, 89–92; Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680, 140–41; John Walter, “A ‘Rising of the People’? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596,” Past and Present, no. 107 (May 1985): 90–143.

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launching wars against the monarch.” Afterward, however, the royal government implemented anti-enclosure measures and imposed heavy fines upon enclosing landlords to show to its subjects the state’s care for the commonwealth and the crown’s Christian compassion.21 Food riots were another means used by poor commoners to appeal to the state’s proclaimed paternalist responsibilities to justify their collective demands for relief in times of dearth. Major food riots broke out when grain prices became too high, such as those that followed harvest failures in 1586, 1595–1597, 1621–1622, and 1629–1631. In these emergencies, the state reacted with a bundle of measures to safeguard the basic welfare of the people against the threat of starvation at a time when an increasing percentage of the population depended upon the market to purchase food. In addition to building a safety net based upon both voluntary neighborhood charities and a parish-based poor relief system, the early modern English state intervened to regulate the grain markets in periods of food crisis. These provision policies culminated in the Book of Orders that was originally issued in 1587 to the Justices of the Peace (JPs) in every county. The statutes printed in the Book of Orders authorized the magistrates to prohibit unlicensed export of grain, to search for grain stocks and make them available for sale, to restrain the use of grain for brewing, and to prosecute those who engaged in hoarding and forestalling that aimed to sell the stored grain for higher prices in future.22 Although the Privy Council exerted great pressure on magistrates to enforce these provision policies in times of food scarcity, local officeholders had autonomy in implementing central guidelines. As local officeholders often had vested interests in the grain trade and some of them were brewers or grain dealers, the collusion between local officials and grain merchants could undermine the food policies set by the central authorities. In this situation, those whose livelihood was threatened by high food prices shared with the royal government the same concern regarding social welfare, and both demonstrated a common anger against middlemen and merchants who aimed to make a higher profit by sacrificing the poor. That subjects should not starve to death was a very basic moral obligation of the early modern English state. 21

22

Steve Hindle, “Imaging Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England: Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607,” History Workshop Journal, no. 66 (Autumn 2008): 21–61; Manning, Village Revolts, 229–50. Slack, “Books of Orders”; Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England, 96–98.

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Therefore, when the magistrates did not enforce the provision policies of the royal government, the poor took action as if they had been entrusted to implement royal policies on behalf of the crown. Crowds stopped shipments of grain that they suspected were intended for export. When seizing the grain from merchants believed to be hoarders, the crowd often brought the food to the magistrates or forced the traders to sell it in the markets at prices determined according to state statutes rather than the market.23 The familiarity with state laws shown by food rioters and their conscious use of royal statutes to justify their collective actions against middlemen or grain merchants suggested that the moral economy of food rioters was intimately tied to state legitimation in early modern England.24 Facing such food rioters, the Tudor and early Stuart state exhibited two faces. On the one hand, it showed paternalist care by a willingness to listen to the distress of poor subjects and by being merciful to the majority of food rioters. The typical punishments meted out to ringleaders of food riots included military service overseas, flogging, pillorying, fines, and imprisonment, rather than capital punishment.25 The lack of a standing army, and the reluctance of militia to use force against their hungry neighbors, to a large extent accounted for the leniency shown to food rioters by local magistrates. For example, after a food riot in early 1596 in Kent, which stopped the shipment of grain out of the community, the magistrate only punished rioters with light fines.26 In order to ensure the food supply to major metropolitan areas, local magistrates used force to disperse the crowds that tried to stop shipments of grain going out, and 23

24

25 26

John Walter and Keith Wrightson, “Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, no. 71 (May 1976): 32–33; John Walter, “Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629,” in An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. John Brewer and John Styles (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 51–53; Peter Clark, “Popular Protest and Disturbance in Kent, 1558–1640,” Economic History Review, new series, 29, no. 3 (August 1976): 373–75. For the importance of the political consciousness of commoners in eighteenth-century England in their invocation of the Books of Orders to remind the state of its responsibility to rescue the starving, see E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (February 1971): 108. See also Thompson’s reemphasis on commoners’ use of the norms of the state to legitimate their demands in times of food crisis in “The Moral Economy Reviewed,” in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991), 269. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 45–47. Clark, “Popular Protest and Disturbance in Kent,” 375.

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they justified such actions as taking care of the broader public welfare by supplying food to urban areas, particularly London.27 Nonetheless, the early modern English state was ready to mete out the death penalty when it felt threatened by food rioters. In 1596, the royal government and local magistrates became very concerned about possible disorder when consecutive harvest failures and depression of cloth exports to the continent coincided. In this year, some poor people in Oxfordshire planned an uprising after peaceful petitions to the local authorities for relief failed to produce any effect. The uprising was abortive as very few people actually showed up. But the organizers were executed because they had uttered a general hatred of the gentry and had planned to join the apprentices’ riots in London.28 In 1629 the central government became highly concerned about possible large-scale social disorder among unemployed clothmakers, as the state had been unable either to mitigate the economic depression of the cloth industry or to supply enough food at prices affordable to the poor. In a food riot in Maldon, Essex, that May, a crowd of two to three hundred people tried to stop grain from being shipped out; a few rioters took some seized grain home and some broke into houses to take grain. The state reacted by setting up a special court to try rioters and hanged four who were charged as ringleaders, though the ones who were found guilty of taking grain home were treated more leniently. This was the only case in Tudor and early Stuart England in which the state applied the death penalty as exemplary punishment for food rioters. The historian John Walter pointed out that the harsh measure seemed to be determined less by the behavior of the rioters and more by the insecurity of the royal government in the special economic difficulties in 1629.29 The legality or legitimation of collective petitions was determined by the state authority, regardless of how carefully the commoners had utilized the state laws or governing ideology to justify their demands. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English economy and society were undergoing significant transformations, such as the ascendance of capitalistic farming, the expansion of rural industrial development, and the increasing volume of cross-regional trade in staples. Under these economic circumstances, new clashes of interests popped 27 28 29

Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England, 144; Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 57. Manning, Village Revolts, 221–29. Walter, “Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law,” 75–77 and 82.

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up. These included disputes over enclosures and fenland drainage; over wages between weavers and clothiers in times of economic recession; and so on. Many new kinds of conflicts could not be easily settled by existing laws or communal customs. As the early modern English state proclaimed itself an impartial arbitrator above various social groups in safeguarding the public interest, both parties to disputes appealed to the state for fair adjudication. While embracing the state’s authority, social actors whose interests were at stake could still challenge the fairness and impartiality of the state’s arbitration. From the late sixteenth century onward, large tracts of arable land were enclosed for capitalistic farming. Local residents erected fences and hedges to prevent cottagers and artisans who had migrated from elsewhere from using the resources of the commons. The early Stuart state, though still hostile to enclosures for pasture, looked favorably upon enclosures of wastes and woods for agricultural improvement and considered the “improving enclosure” a service to the “public good.”30 Litigation over such enclosures was focused primarily on the terms of compensation that the encloser should provide to those who would lose customary rights to use the commons. Parish officeholders, some of whom were yeomen and well-to-do copyholders, were concerned that refusal of common resources to newly arrived cottagers would raise the burden of poor relief, which was funded by the wealthier members of the parish. In negotiating enclosure agreements, they were thus willing to incorporate the interests of the newly arrived cottagers and artisans who had neither legal nor communal rights to the commons.31 The state laws that defined the legality of collective actions by commoners against another social group such as enclosing gentry thus made anti-enclosure petitions a lawful expression of local grievances. Collective petitions became a means of political participation for smallholders and tenants who had the same stake in enclosure disputes. They showed a high degree of political consciousness by raising a common purse to dispense the cost of litigation at Star Chamber and achieving solidarity among protestors. Collective actions also accompanied the litigation. To avoid the laws that held destruction of enclosures by three or more to be a form of riot, protestors often divided into pairs when destroying fencing and 30 31

David Brown and Frank Sharman, “Enclosure: Agreements and Acts,” Journal of Legal History 15, no. 3 (1994): 274. Steve Hindle, “Persuasion and Protest in the Caddington Common Enclosure Dispute, 1635–1639,” Past and Present, no. 158 (February 1998): 37–78.

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hedges.32 However, the condition set by the government of having interests at stake in lawful enclosure disputes also restricted the scale of such political participation; cross-village alliances in anti-enclosure collective actions would be considered by the state as treason if these villagers did not have a shared interest in the same commons.33 The government reaction to large-scale enclosure riots and food disturbances indicated the political limits for commoners using the terms of state legitimation to negotiate with the state. Nonetheless, the number of commoners who shared the same interest, which was held by law as the precondition to organize a lawful collective petition, could be quite large in industry-related clashes of interest. For example, some ten thousand lead miners in the High Peak area of Derbyshire raised a common purse to dispense the costs of collective litigation in the central courts against the tithe on lead ore newly imposed by parish ministers. Their petition consciously emphasized both the fiscal needs of the crown and the crown’s compassion for the economic hardship of the families of miners. Representatives of lead miners claimed that the newly imposed tithe would force them to “leave the mine, to the prejudice of his Majesty in his revenue, and the utter overthrow of themselves, their wives, and children.”34 The Privy Council considered this legal suit not simply a matter of private interest, but related to “the public and to the matter of State.”35 Although the petition was accepted, the royal government did not grant a decision favorable to the miners, nor did Parliament pass a bill to repeal the tithe, and leaders of the collective litigation were jailed and fined. Yet the large-scale collective petitions organized by lead miners were not handled under the savage treason laws.36 The role of the state to safeguard the public interest was important in settling industrial disputes in regions that specialized in cloth manufacturing. Woolen cloth was the major manufactured export in late Tudor and early Stuart England. In times of export slump such as the late 1590s, 1620–1624, and 1629–1631, clothiers who could not sell cloth 32

33

34 35 36

Manning, Village Revolts, 79–80; Andy Wood, “Subordination, Solidarity and the Limits of Popular Agency in a Yorkshire Valley, c.1596–1615,” Past and Present 193, no. 1 (November 2006): 63. Manning, Village Revolts, 228; Heather Falvey, “Crown Policy and Local Economic Context in the Berkhamsted Common Enclosure Dispute, 1618–42,” Rural History 12, no. 2 (2001): 123–58. APC, 1615–1616, 224. APC 1616–1617, 361–62. Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 231–37.

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to exporting merchants due to recession in the continental markets often responded by cutting the wages of weavers or ceasing to hire. Weavers, whose livelihoods were further threatened by high food prices caused by harvest failures, lodged petitions not only with local magistrates but also with the Privy Council for protecting their livelihoods. The Privy Council was concerned about the social consequences of chronic mass unemployment of weavers in regions that specialized in clothmaking. Although the law prohibited tumultuous assemblies, the Privy Council responded to the collective petitions made by hundreds of weavers by pressuring the clothiers to reemploy them, by urging merchants to buy finished cloth from clothiers, and by ordering the JPs to redress their grievances by setting reasonable wages.37 The JPs were to report the names of the clothiers who did not cooperate to the Privy Council. The Privy Council justified these measures on the ground of protecting “the good of the public.”38 The positive response of the Privy Council encouraged the weavers. The success of a collective petition by weavers in Sudbury on February 16, 1631 encouraged some three hundred weavers in Colchester to present similar petitions to the Privy Council to demand similar wage regulation to mitigate their hardship.39 As chronic recession in continental markets made it difficult for the state to force clothiers and merchants to buy cloth, the Privy Council ordered neighboring parishes to be rated for the poor relief of those parishes that suffered from massive unemployment.40 The government’s handling of such collective petitions showed both a fear of social disorder and a paternalist compassion for the welfare of the unemployed. Disputers over the draining of the fens, the major civil engineering project between the 1580s and 1640s, also appealed to the role of the state in protecting the public interest. For example, drainage of the Hatfield Level involved some 70,000 acres. Drainage of fens demanded massive capital and labor inputs and was rife with clashing interests. Advocates of drainage claimed it served the “good of commonwealth” by converting a large area of marshes into arable lands and pasture and preventing floods. They justified their proposals by pointing to the Dutch successes in drainage.41 37 38 39 40 41

Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 71–79. APC, 1621–1623, 133. APC, 1630–1631, 358–59. Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, 73–74. Ash, The Draining of the Fens, 60.

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Nonetheless, large-scale drainage had significant impacts on local people who depended on the common fens for pasturage. A large drainage project frequently inundated land, raised the danger of flooding for some towns and villages, and even affected riverine transportation. The parties being adversely affected included not only cottagers and tenants but also yeomen and gentry.42 Residents of local communities that came out against draining schemes applied the same notion of commonwealth to defend their interests and used the term “public good” to criticize the drainers as seeking to profit themselves only.43 Both sides in drainage disputes petitioned the royal government, which was held to have the political duty to safeguard the public interest. Opponents of drainage organized neighboring towns and villages that had a common stake to lodge collective petitions with the center. Existing religious and social networks were mobilized to raise a common purse to dispense the legal costs; the organizers were skillful at using state laws and policies to bolster their demands for redress of grievances.44 Proper economic compensation was crucial to settle litigation and secure the consent of local communities to a proposed drainage project. The petitions of textile workers to regulate wages and apprenticeship in early modern England that Margaret Somers has highlighted in fact had a similar political nature to those of farmers or tenants over enclosure and drainage.45 All were based upon passive rights derived from the state’s duty to protect the public interest and appealed to the state as the impartial arbiter of intersectoral conflicts of interest. They varied mainly in the particular type of welfare grievance and in the kinds of social networks they used to organize the petitions. The nature of participation in the form of contested claim-making, however, remained the same. None of these petitions demanded fundamental political reforms, just action by the state to redress specific welfare grievances. Nevertheless, disputes over drainage were complicated when the king himself was a major player in draining fens on the royal estates. 42

43 44

45

Mark E. Kennedy, “Fen Drainage, the Central Government, and Local Interest: Carleton and the Gentlemen of South Holland,” Historical Journal 26, no. 1 (March 1983): 15–37. Ash, The Draining of the Fens, 61. Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982), 60–64; C. Holmes, “Drainers and Fenmen: The Problem of Popular Political Consciousness in the Seventeenth Century,” in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge, UK: ­Cambridge University Press, 1985), 168–70. Somers, “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere.”

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In  the  fiscal  constitution of the demesne state, royal estates were an important source of income for the crown. Fiscal difficulties forced James I and Charles I to improve the management of royal estates for more revenue.46 Instead of being an impartial arbiter in disputes over enclosing the royal forests and draining fens where a large number of poor migrants had settled, the crown itself was in fact a party to the conflict. Fiscal need made the royal government suppress anti-drainage rioters; it used both administrative intervention and manipulation of legal procedure to discourage local gentry from initiating lawsuits against drainage projects that affected the local economies.47 While the royal government supported courtiers and drainers under the name of “greater benefit to the country,” critics of these projects argued that these rent-seeking business schemes were detrimental to the “public interest” or “public benefit.”48 The fiscal institution of the domain state in early modern England thence was harmful to state legitimacy, as the fiscal needs of the crown could go directly against its proclaimed duty to protect the public ­interest in arbitrating drainage-related disputes. The direct conflicts between the fiscal needs of the crown and the state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest would disappear after England transformed into a tax state after 1640, and Parliament in 1698 assigned a very generous amount of tax revenue in the form of the “civil list” to fund both civil government and the royal household.49

4.2  Tokugawa Japan, 1640 –1853 The political space of the ruled to rightfully engage with the ruling authorities was more complicated in Tokugawa Japan. In its decentralized political system, the autonomy of major daimyo in governing their own territories was reflected in a division of labor in handling petitions from the people. Shogunal officials would receive petitions from subjects in the shogunal territories. People living in domain territories governed by daimyo lodged petitions with their respective ruling lords and were not allowed to appeal to the shogunate.50 The official stance of the shogunate 46 47 48 49 50

Hoyle, “Disafforestation and Drainage,” 353–88. Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution, 55–56; Clive Holmes, SeventeenthCentury Lincolnshire (Lincoln: History of Lincolnshire Committee, 1980), 123–29. Koji Yamamoto, Taming Capitalism before Its Triumph, ch. 2. E. A. Reitan, “The Civil List in Eighteenth-Century British Politics: Parliamentary Supremacy versus the Independence of the Crown,” Historical Journal, 9, No. 3 (1966): 318–37. Roberts, Performing the Great Peace, 105.

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and daimyo – that they demonstrated their paternalist love by hearing the grievances of their subjects – encouraged subordinates to lodge petitions against heavy taxes and insufficient relief in times of calamity. The spread of reading and writing skills among the populace in the Tokugawa era enabled village headmen and townsmen to learn the special terms and formats involved in writing such appeals. The contents of petitions from peasants ranged from disputes over using water or setting boundaries with neighboring communities to grievances against abusive officials or village headmen.51 Increasing standardization of terms used to describe particular grievances appeared in petitions lodged in different domains.52 In the eighteenth century, there were “legal inns” (called kuji yado in Edo and go¯yado in Osaka) in major cities and in castle towns in domains. These “legal inns” mainly accommodated people who came to lodge petitions with the authorities. Petitioners staying there could purchase unofficial copies of shogunal laws such as the One Hundred Articles (hyakkajo¯), the shogunal legal guidance on how to mete out punishments to various crimes, and even pay fees for private legal consultations with those who had specialized knowledge of government laws and legal procedures. In collective petitions in which villagers had common interests, the costs incurred by representatives in lodging petitions were often covered by funds raised among villagers.53 The number of petitions lodged with the shogunate and domain governments was quite high. For example, there were 47,773 petitions and lawsuits presented to the Edo city magistracy in 1718.54 The difficulties of dealing with such a vast number of petitions made the shogunate and daimyo insist on the establishment of a standard legal procedure for expressing grievances that proceeded from the lowest level of village headmen via intendants in localities. Any petition that jumped the legal procedure to directly reach the shogun or senior shogunal officials (osso) was a crime to be punished severely. However, this effort to discourage 51

52 53

54

On the expansion of popular education and the lodging of petitions as a means of political participation in Tokugawa Japan, see Yakuwa Tomohiro, Kinsei minshu¯ no kyo¯iku to seiji sanka. Yakuwa Tomohiro, Kinsei minshu¯ no kyo¯iku to seiji sanka, 267. Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan, 34; Iwaki Takuji, “Kinsei chu¯go¯ki no murashakai to go¯yado, yo¯tashi, shitayado” [Village society and the lodging of petitions with shogunal officials through various legal inns in the mid and late Tokugawa era], in Minshu¯ undo¯shi kinsei kara kindai e, vol. 3, Shakai to chitsujo, ed. Yabuta Yutaka (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2000), 77–78. ¯ hira Yu¯ichi, Kinsei no higo¯ho¯teki sosho¯ [Early modern illegal lawsuits] (Tokyo: O So¯bunsha, 2011), 3.

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commoners’ direct appeals to the shogunate and daimyo was not strictly enforced in practice. To demonstrate that the ruler’s compassion reached every corner, direct petitions against the misgovernance and abuse of village headmen and intendants remained unlawful on paper, but in practice were tolerated and the petitioner was punished only lightly.55 The basic responsibility of a benevolent ruler was to protect the livelihood of his subjects and the reproduction of their households. In major cities under shogunal administration such as Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto, food crises were caused mainly by sharply reduced rice imports from major rice-growing regions struck by harvest failures. In this situation, the shogunate usually released official reserves of rice, strictly regulated the use of rice in sake brewing, prohibited merchants from hoarding rice, and forced merchants to sell at prices affordable to the urban poor. Wage laborers and the urban poor used these official policies to justify collective actions against rice merchants who were considered to be violating them. The first recorded rice riots in major cities occurred in Nagasaki in 1703 when rice merchants hoarded rice for higher profits at a time when the poor already could not afford the price.56 When the food rioters forced rice merchants to sell their hoarded rice at below-market prices, they behaved as if they were implementing official policies to safeguard the welfare of residents in times of food scarcity. They justified their collective actions by the norms of state legitimacy; and rice rioters tried hard to avoid stealing, looting, and arson. Violence was not targeted at persons, only at property belonging to those merchants who showed no compassion for the starving.57 The urban poor and the shogunate not only shared the same ideology of benevolent governance, but also a hostility against profiteering rice merchants. For example, the shogunal intendants in Kyoto imposed heavy fines on the rice merchants who hoarded large amounts of rice in the famine of 1788.58 Although the shogunal officials attempted to 55

56 57

58

Hosaka Satoru, “Hyakusho¯ ikki e – Sono kyozo¯ to jitsuzo¯” [Toward peasant uprisings – image and reality], in Nihon no kinsei, vol. 10, Kindai e no taido, ed. Tsuji Tatsuya (Tokyo: Chu¯o¯ Ko¯ronsha, 1993), 186–92; Roberts, Performing the Great Peace, 129–31. Matsumoto Shiro¯, Nihon kinsei toshiron [Cities in early modern Japan] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 1983), 26. Iwata Ko¯taro¯, Kinsei toshi so¯jo¯ no kenkyu¯: Minshu¯ undo¯shi ni okeru ko¯zo¯ to shutai [A study of early modern urban riots: Structure and subjectivity in popular movements] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2004), 84–95. For examples of similar behavior on the part of food rioters in castle towns, see Kikuchi Isao, Kinsei no kikin, 169; Iwata Ko¯taro¯, Kinsei toshi so¯jo¯ no kenkyu¯, 421. Kikuchi Isao, Kinsei no kikin, 185.

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restore social order by arresting ringleaders of rice riots, the punishment meted out was usually banishment, not death.59 Urban rice riots thence represented a special means of communication between the ruler and subordinates based upon the shared norms of benevolent governance. Nonetheless, the daimyo who depended upon selling rice outside their domains for cash revenue, particularly those in To¯hoku (northeastern Japan), often colluded with rice merchants to ship out rice even when people in the domains were under threat of starvation.60 This conflict illustrated that negotiations between the ruler and subordinates within the same framework of benevolent governance were severely constrained in practice by the fiscal needs of domain governments. The shogunate could derive revenue from debasing the gold and silver currencies and transferring expenditures on defense and domestic infrastructure building to daimyo. The daimyo were pressured by the huge cost of the alternate attendance system and the contributions to infrastructure that the shogunate imposed. Between the 1660s and 1720s, both shogunate and daimyo encouraged farming and reclamation of new fields to increase their income in rice extracted from peasants. In the meantime, they also tried hard to extract further agricultural output from the peasants by methods such as rigorous surveys of farming acreage and productivity, or by setting fixed ratios of land taxes regardless of harvest situations. In times of bad weather or natural disasters, the ruling class often ignored petitions by peasants to reduce extraction and to provide relief. In this situation, peasants had to use collective action to pressure the ruler to fulfill his paternalist duty. They made appeals in large crowds (go¯so) to shogunal intendants, at the castle towns in domain territories, or at the resident compounds of their respective daimyo in Edo. Prior to the late eighteenth century, the peasants endeavored to justify their crowd petitions by the ideology of benevolent rule and avoided violence. The last resort of frustrated peasants was large-scale rioting. But even riots did not necessarily imply a rejection of state authority. The tools that rioting peasants carried with them, such as reaping hooks and hoes, were not used as weapons but as symbols to highlight their status as 59 60

Yamada Tadao, Ikki uchikowashi no undo¯ ko¯zo¯ [The structure of peasant uprisings and urban movements of property destruction] (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 1984), 222. For an example of collective action to stop the shipment of rice by privileged merchants in Tsugaru domain when the northeast suffered from harvest failures in 1783, see Iwata Ko¯taro¯, “Toshi so¯jo¯ to shokuryo¯ kakuho” [Urban riots and securing the food supply], in Minshu¯ undo¯shi kinsei kara kindai e, vol. 3, Shakai to chitsujo, ed. Yabuta Yutaka (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2000), 231–35.

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honorable peasants who deserved to be protected by the ruler; the straw raincoats that they wore on purpose in riots were used as symbols of their hardships, which aimed to arouse compassion.61 With the development of the market economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the meaning of benevolence in the ideology of benevolent rule expanded from safeguarding livelihood and mitigating hardships to improvement of economic welfare and redressing economic grievances. After the 1720s, except during nationwide harvest failures, the price of rice remained relatively low in comparison with prices of other commodities. This reduced the cash revenue of both shogunate and daimyo when they sold land taxes collected in rice in the markets. By the mid-eighteenth century, most daimyo were heavily indebted to big urban merchants. Both the shogunate and daimyo had to seek alternative methods to increase their cash income. In this situation, daimyo extended the meaning of benevolent rule to justify mercantilist economic policies to encourage the production of specialty commodities in the domain and to organize their sale in the primary market centered on Edo–Osaka–Kyoto as a way to raise cash revenue. Daimyo often emphasized that these mercantilist policies contributed to the economic prosperity of the subjects.62 However, peasants and rural merchants argued that these mercantilist policies mainly aimed to raise revenue for domain governments at the cost of the welfare of the people. In major rice-growing domains such as Sendai, the domain government prohibited peasants from selling their surplus rice in the markets and forced them to sell to the domain government at low prices.63 Many domain governments collaborated with big merchants, granting them monopolies to process, manufacture, and sell major commodities such as paper, raw silk, dyes, and wax. The peasants and rural merchants considered these restrictive policies to be 61

62

63

Hosaka Satoru, Hyakusho¯ ikki to gimin no kenkyu¯ [Studies on peasant uprisings and martyrs for justice] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2006), 64–66; Yabuta Yutaka, Kokuso to hyakusho¯ ikki no kenkyu¯ [Studies of province-based collective petitions and peasant uprising] (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 1992), 199–200. Hirakawa Arata, “Chiiki keizai no tenkai,” 116; Koseki Yu¯ichiro¯, “Meikun” no kinsei: Gakumon, chishiki to hansei kaikaku [“Benevolent lords” in early modern Japan: Learning, knowledge and reform of domain government] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2012). Nanba Nobuo, “Kansei no kaikaku: Sendai han wo sozai toshite” [The Kansei reforms: A case study of Sendai domain], in Ko¯za Nihon kinseishi, vol. 5, Ho¯reki Tenmeiki no seiji to shakai, ed. Yamada Tadao and Matsumoto Shiro¯ (Tokyo: Yu¯hikaku, 1988), 250–70.

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damaging to their economic welfare.64 The peasants’ protests against forced purchase and restrictive trade regulations, and townspeople’s protests against imposition of duties on commercial transactions and forced loans, were accordingly justified by the terms of benevolent rule; that is, as safeguarding the welfare of the people in the new circumstances of a commercializing economy. However, the shogunate and daimyo found the collective petitions of peasants and urban commoners in the form of assemblies (go¯so) intolerable, no matter how carefully the petitioners justified their activities by appealing to the paternalist compassion of the ruler. Large-scale crowd petitions were suppressed by warrior-troops mobilized from neighboring daimyo. Even in the case of small-scale and peaceful crowd petitions, ringleaders or organizers faced the death penalty. After the suppression, but only then, the shogunate or daimyo might make some concessions to peasants by reducing taxes, abolishing unpopular trade regulations, and punishing some officials or village headmen whose abuses of power were particularly odious.65 Neither the shogunate nor the daimyo were willing to yield to crowd protests, even if they did not challenge the ideology of state legitimation. In response to the increasing scale and frequency of group protests, the shogunate in 1750 issued orders in both shogunal and domainal territories to severely suppress such protests and execute the leaders and organizers. The shogunate even permitted daimyo to use more destructive firearms against crowd protestors, which had been strictly prohibited previously. In 1770, the shogunate ordered tall signs (ko¯satsu) to be set up in villages across the country to encourage informants to provide information about any attempts by villagers to organize protests of five or more people. In 1771, the shogunate forbade domain residents from gathering in front of their daimyo’s compound of residence in Edo to petition collectively.66 The escalation of violence against peaceful collective petitions led to the gradual erosion of the legitimacy of the political authorities among the populace. In the nineteenth century, the increasing 64 65

66

Walthall, Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan, 27–33. Vlastos, Peasant Protest and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan, 18; Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan, xxxiii–xxxv; Walthall, Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan, 13. Yamada Tadao, Ikki uchikowashi no undo¯ ko¯zo¯, 65–84; Kurushima Hiroshi, “Hyakusho¯ ikki to toshi so¯jo¯” [Peasant uprisings and urban riots], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon rekishi, ¯ tsu To¯ru, Sakurai Eiji, and Fujii Jo¯ji (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, vol. 13, Kinsei (4), ed. O 2015), 231–32.

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use of violence and weapons such as bamboo spears and hunting firearms by protestors made petitions appear more like rebellions.67 Nevertheless, peasant resistance and protests forced some daimyo to search for economic policies to produce a “rich state and sufficient people” (fukoku sokumin); these were intended to better align the fiscal needs of domain governments with the improvement of the economic welfare of their subjects. Input from merchants about market transactions and the recognition of the importance of economic incentives for peasants were preconditions for a successful mercantilist policy. Such policies solved problems that individual peasant households found difficult to handle by themselves, such as taking low-interest loans prior to engaging in processing or farming cash crops; learning useful knowledge and skills; and organizing sales to markets outside domain territories.68 This reformed mercantilism did not aim only at increasing the revenue of domain governments; it also represented the efforts of rulers to creatively implement benevolent rule by incorporating the voices of merchants, craftsmen, and well-to-do farmers into the process of making and implementing economic policies in an increasingly commercialized economy. The development of a market economy not only promoted interregional trade, but also generated disputes among merchants and peasants in different regions. The ideology of benevolent rule enabled subordinates to appeal to political authorities to settle their disputes impartially in the greatly changed economic circumstances. Collective petitions regarding such competitive claims among social actors thus represented a channel for subjects to engage with rulers over how to safeguard the public interest by settling conflicts of interest between people living in places subject to different authorities, such as the shogunate, daimyo, bannermen (hatamoto), and temples; they appealed to the shogunal magistrates and ultimately the shogunate in Edo for impartial arbitration. These crossregional organized collective petitions that demanded the shogunate provide fair arbitration as the highest political authority constituted a new and expanded space of political participation. By the mid-eighteenth century, the peasants in the Kinai region already depended upon purchasing from the market fertilizers such as 67

68

Hosaka Satoru, “Hyakusho¯ ikki” [Peasant uprisings], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon tsu¯shi, vol. 13, Kinsei (3), ed. Asao Naohiro, Amino Yoshihiko, Ishii Susumu et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), 105–6. For examples of such success, see Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain, ch. 8; Ravina, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan, chs. 3 and 5.

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dried sardines, fish meal, and oil cakes for growing cash crops like cotton and tobacco, as well as rapeseed for oil pressing. They were sensitive to changes in the market prices of these fertilizers, particularly when their profit margins began to be eroded by competition from peasants in other regions. There were also serious conflicts of interest between peasants and politically connected urban merchants. For example, cotton growers were unhappy with the low prices offered by the licensed Osaka merchants to buy their raw and ginned cotton, but the shogunate prohibited them from selling to merchants in other regions. Similar demands for free trade were also made by rapeseed growers and small oil pressers who wanted to break the monopoly of licensed Osaka oil-pressing merchants. The economic stakes were common to villagers under different jurisdictions of various daimyo, and these villagers then organized to submit collective petitions to the shogunal magistrates in Osaka and Kyoto, and ultimately to the shogunate itself if they were not satisfied with the replies they received.69 These collective petitions by peasants living in the same province were called kokuso (province-wide petitions).70 While the daimyo used the term kokueki (the state interest) to justify their mercantilist policies to raise government income, these petitioning peasants emphasized that their economic welfare was an integral part of the “state i­nterest.”71 The peasant petitioners explicitly used the same term, kokueki, to refer to the interests of people living in the same province, and emphasized that the  removal of restrictive regulations could promote the economic prosperity of the province and enhance their ability to pay taxes.72 The total number of such province-wide petitions from the 1740s to the 1860s was smaller than that of other forms of protests, such as 69

70

71 72

Province-wide petitions from Settsu, Kawachi, Izumi, and Harima were lodged with the ¯ mi, and Tanba were lodged Osaka city magistrate, while those from Yamato, Yamashiro, O with the Kyoto city magistrate. Taniyama Masamichi, “Kinsei ko¯ki no minshu¯ undo” [Popular movements in the latter part of the early modern period], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon ¯ tsu To¯ru, Sakurai Eiji, and Fujii Jo¯ji (Tokyo: Iwanami rekishi, vol. 14, Kinsei (5), ed. O Shoten, 2015), 255–56; Taniyama Masamichi, “Popular Movements in the Edo Period: Peasants, Peasant Uprisings, and the Development of Lawful Petitions,” in The Tokugawa World, ed. Gary P. Leupp and De-Min Tao (London: Routledge, 2021), 175–99. The province (kuni) was an administrative division in medieval Japan, and one province in Tokugawa Japan often contained territories under the jurisdiction of different domainal and shogunal authorities. For some examples of such reasoning, see Walthall, Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan, 84–94. Taniyama Masamichi, “Kinsei kindai iko¯ki no kokueki to minshu¯ undo” [Kokueki and popular movements in the transition from the early modern to the modern period], Hisutoria, no. 158 (1997): 55–60.

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attacks on the property of the rich (uchikowashi) and riots and peasant uprising (ikki). But the number of petitioners involved and the organizational skills they exhibited were impressive. For example, between 1740 and 1865, there were fifty-one organized province-based collective petitions demanding that the Osaka city magistrate intervene in the market to ensure the supply of cheap fertilizer in the Kinai region.73 Targeted not directly at the government but rather at suppliers of fish fertilizer, these petitions were lawful and the representatives had no fear of being punished by the authorities. The number of villages involved was also quite big. In 1777, villagers in the three provinces of Settsu, Kawachi, and Izumi started to lodge petitions with the Osaka city magistrate to break the monopoly of licensed Osaka cotton merchants in purchasing raw and ginned cotton. In 1823, some 1,007 villages in Settsu and Kawachi joined collective petitions. In order to increase the pressure on the authorities, cotton growers invited rapeseed growers to form an alliance against restrictive market regulations, as the latter were also unhappy at the low purchasing prices offered by the oil-pressing merchants licensed by the shogunate. The number of villages involved in collective petitions reached 1,307 in 1824.74 The organization of such large-scale collective petitions was made possible by important changes to rural governance in the shogunal lands in both the Kanto¯ and Kinai regions over the course of the eighteenth century. As individual villages became unable to handle cross-regional social and economic problems, neighboring villages organized themselves into a league, and the league of villages in one district formed a unit of selfgovernance (gun). Village headmen in the same district gathered regularly to deliberate issues of common interest, such as maintenance of irrigation infrastructure, protection of villagers from rootless samurai, disciplining villager consumption and moral behavior, regulation of sake brewing, organization of famine relief, and so on. The shogunate recognized the important functions in local governance performed by these representatives selected from among the village headmen (gunchu¯ so¯dai).75 Although the regulations made by these assemblies (gunchu¯ gijo¯) were within the boundaries set by the shogunal laws, the collective deliberation over local 73 74 75

Hirakawa Arata, Funso¯ to seron, 50–51. Tsuda Hideo, Kinsei minshu¯ undo¯ no kenkyu¯ [Studies in early modern popular movements] (Tokyo: Sanseido¯, 1979), 142. Anne Walthall, “Village Networks: So¯dai and the Sale of Edo Nightsoil,” Monumenta Nipponica 43, no. 3 (Autumn 1988), 281–88; Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, and Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 239–30.

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governance among village headmen in regular intervillage assemblies represented an important form of political participation by well-to-do farmers. Ordinary villagers in the Kinai area also participated by electing their village headmen and by supervising the expenditure of funds raised for local public affairs.76 The regular meetings of village headmen in one district served as an important venue to express the common interests of various villages in drafting petitions to the authorities. The elected representatives who were to lodge petitions with the government usually signed a formal covenant with the villagers, who contributed money toward expenses according to the number of villages and the agricultural productivity of each village.77 The organizers of province-wide petitions were skillful in utilizing the ideology of benevolent rule to demand redress for particular kinds of grievances caused by politically connected merchants or unfair trade regulations. When they learned that shogunal officials were planning to make changes to regulations, organizers of province-wide petitions were quick to seize the opportunity to submit petitions. For example, when the shogunate dismantled licensed merchant monopolies of consumer goods in 1841 with the aim to push down prices, the representatives of villagers in the province of Harima immediately presented a petition against the monopoly in cattle-trading by licensed merchants, an attempt that they had tried several times before but to no avail.78 Although representatives of province-wide petitions appealed to benevolent rule to justify their demands on behalf of villagers, they mainly represented the welfare common to their own communities. Upon receiving such petitions, the shogunal officials often evaluated the particular welfare of petitioning communities against the wider welfare of society.79 When receiving complaints about the high price of fertilizer from peasant representatives, for example, the Osaka city magistrates conducted their own surveys to figure out whether this was caused by drops in fishing output that led to declines in the amount shipped to Osaka, or by 76

77 78

79

Kurushima Hiroshi, “Hyakusho¯ to mura no henshitsu” [A transformation of the commoners and the village], in Iwanami ko¯za Nihon tsu¯shi, vol. 15, Kinsei (5), ed. Fujita Satoru, Asao Naohiro, Amino Yoshihiko et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 72–96; Hirakawa Arata, “‘Gunchu¯’ ko¯kyo¯ken no keisei” [The creation of a “district-based” public sphere], Nihonshi kenkyu¯, no. 511 (2005): 41–60. Yabuta Yutaka, Kokuso to hyakusho¯ ikki no kenkyu¯, ch. 3. ¯ saka machi bugyo-shihakoku: Harimakuni no Yamazaki Yoshihiro, “Kokuso to O kokuso wo megutte” [Province-wide petitions and the Osaka shogunal officials: The Harima province petition], Nihonshi kenkyu¯, no. 564 (August 2009): 28–30. ¯ saka machi bugyo-shihakoku,” 40–44. Yamasaki Yoshihiro, “Kokuso to O

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hoarding on the part of fertilizer merchants.80 As the Kinai region was not the only place to use fish meal as fertilizer in agriculture, the shogunal officials rejected the petitions that demanded merchants only sell fish meal in the Kinai region.81 Similar popular petitions against another social groups also happened in Edo. From 1789 to 1792, representatives of villages in the suburbs of Edo lodged petitions with the Edo city magistrate and the financial intendants of the shogunate to protest the rising price of nightsoil, a fertilizer important to growing vegetables to sell to urban residents. The petitions represented the shared interests of vegetable growers, and the number of villages involved rose from an original 541 to 1,016 in 1792. In response, the shogunal officials tried to secure the interests of peasants by finding a way for them to purchase nightsoil at a lower price without sacrificing the benefits to urban houseowners. The shogunal officials encouraged the representatives of peasants to deliberate with urban landlords to reach a compromise.82 A similar concern on the part of the shogunate for the wider social welfare when settling competitive claims among social groups was shown in the issue of oil pressing. The shogunate in the late eighteenth century granted the monopoly for pressing oil in western Japan to the licensed merchants in Osaka, with the intention that they would ensure the supply of cheap lighting oil, one of the most important daily necessities for some 1.5 million consumers living in Edo. To secure the profits of these licensed merchants, the shogunate strictly prohibited oil pressing by nonlicensed merchants. Peasants and small producers in the Kinai region organized collective petitions to the shogunate for more economic freedom so that they could profit from selling rapeseed and pressing oil for retailing. In response, the shogunal officials conducted careful investigations of the oil-pressing market in western Japan and consulted with local officials in Osaka. The official investigation concluded that increasing the number 80 81 82

Hirakawa Arata, Funso¯ to seron, 54. Hirakawa Arata, Funso¯ to seron, 129–32. For the importance of Edo nightsoil to vegetable-growing peasants in the greater Edo area, see David L. Howell, “Fecal Matters: Prolegomenon to a History of Shit in Japan,” in Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power, ed. Ian J. Miller, Julia Adney Thomas, and Brett L. Walker (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), 137–51. For the organization of collective petitions by intervillage representatives, see Walthall, “Village Networks,” 297–302. For the protection of the interests of urban households, see Kumazawa Toru, “Edo no shimogoe nesage undo¯ to ryo¯ryo¯ so¯dai” [The movement to cut nightsoil prices in Edo and the representatives of an assembly of villages], Shigaku zasshi 94, no. 4 (1985): 66–70.

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of oil-pressing merchants and the transportation facilities linking western Japan and Edo would secure the supply of cheap lighting oil even without a monopoly by licensed merchants.83 When the shogunate in 1832 granted the petitioners’ request, this decision was made upon the conviction that the interests of consumers in Edo would not be sacrificed.84 These negotiations between the shogunate and the representatives of province-based collective petitions sought appropriate ways to settle interregional or cross-segmental conflicts of interests. To do this, they built upon a consensus regarding the importance of a wider public interest over the narrower interests of local communities. The reactions of the shogunate to these well-organized large-scale collective petitions that appealed to the central authority to be the impartial arbitrator of interregional and intersectoral conflicts of interest contrasted sharply with the shogunate’s brutal suppression of crowds of protestors against abusive officials or government statutes.

4.3  Qing China, 1684–1840 According to the ideology of benevolent rule, the Qing state in principle granted the right of subordinates who were wronged by abusive officials to express grievances through an appeal process that worked gradually up the bureaucracy through prefecture to province and ultimately to the capital. Although the Qing regulations insisted that people present their petitions properly through the bureaucracy, direct petitions to the central government were accepted in practice, though the petitioner would be punished. Unsurprisingly, complaints brought by individual petitioners against abusive officials were often ineffective, as the accused officials were protected by other officials who reviewed these cases, and petitioners were more likely to be charged with “false accusation without factual basis.”85 Crowd petitions represented another means for subordinates to remind the Qing state of its duty to protect the general welfare. In times of famine or when grain prices ran high in urban areas, crowds frequently presented petitions for relief. When county magistrates did not have the necessary financial or material resources to meet such demands, or when they simply ignored them, peaceful petitions could quickly turn into 83 84 85

Hirakawa Arata, “Bakufu kanryo¯ to rieki shu¯dan” [Shogunal bureaucracy and interest groups], Rekishi kenkyu¯ 698 (June 1997): 34–52. Hirakawa Arata, Funso¯ to seron, 140–45. Almost all individual petitions against abusive officials that I have examined in archives were rejected as “false accusation.”

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violent riots: throwing stones at the offices or officials, smashing objects in the offices, stripping the magistrate of his hat or uniform, or even assaulting officials.86 These collective actions, however, still accepted state legitimacy, and were therefore different in nature from rebellions that defied the state authority. Although the Qing state allowed subjects to petition for redress, it emphasized the virtue of obedience and the duty of the subject to respect the authorities. In the words of the Qianlong emperor, “To provide relief grain [in times of calamities] is to fulfill the duty of the state to protect the subjects as their parents; the gentry and commoners should behave properly according to their social statuses so as to receive the benevolence of the state.”87 In this view, subjects should show gratitude to the benevolent state and quietly wait for relief delivered by government officials. The Qing state thence rejected crowd petitions as politically unacceptable. In 1725 the Qing state issued the “statute against rogues” (guanggun li) to handle public gatherings of forty to fifty (or more) people that targeted the government for reasons such as tax resistance, litigation, petitions, or entering into government offices. The initiators or organizers of such gatherings were to be punished by death, regardless of whether the content of the petition was justified or not. This regulation provided legal guidance for local officials to handle petitions by the crowd. In 1748, the Qianlong emperor further extended the death penalty to those who were not initiators but were major accomplices in beating officials or who distributed leaflets.88 These regulations were not just on paper, but were implemented in cases of crowd petitions and food riots until the end of the Qing dynasty.89 The Qing state was not prepared to yield to the demands of crowd petitioners, as it considered concessions would further encourage disrespect of authorities on the part of “wicked” people.90 When such crowd petitions were triggered by abuses or incompetence on the part of magistrates engaged in relief work, the Qing state put the priority on repressing the crowd and punishing the ringleaders before disciplining its officials. In 1747, a crowd in Yanshi county of Henan province, which had been stricken by poor harvests, petitioned the magistrate’s office for government provision of relief grain. Both provincial officials and the Qianlong 86 87 88 89 90

Wu Jen-shu, Jibian liangmin, 121–24. Imperial edict, QL7/8/yisi (September 17, 1742), QSL, vol. 11, 208–9. Wu Jen-shu, Jibian liangmin, 120. Examples from the last decades of the Qing dynasty will be discussed in Chapter 5. Wu Jen-shu, Jibian liangmin, 120–22.

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emperor held that the incompetent magistrate who instigated this incident should be impeached only after the rioters had been punished.91 In 1779, the court emphasized again to governors that the punishment of magistrates guilty of abuse or mismanagement who were responsible for causing riots should be conducted after the ringleaders of the protests had been punished.92 The Qing state did not want to give its subjects any illusion that they had the collective power to pressure the government to dismiss officials, even those who did not fulfill the publicly proclaimed duty of nourishing the people. In times of food scarcity, the Qing government urged wealthy households to donate food to the poor or to sell their stored grain at belowmarket prices. Nonetheless, it did not allow collective actions targeting grain merchants or rich households. The court even told local officials not to use public proclamations to persuade the rich to show compassion to the poor, lest commoners took this as an excuse to force merchants to sell at low prices. Instead, the center ordered local officials to persuade wealthy people in private so that they would “voluntarily” behave in a “morally virtuous” way. The government would publicly praise such charitable actions afterward. The Qing government expected the rich and the grain merchants to supplement state-organized famine relief. Qing officials were also concerned that the rich would lose motivation to provide charity if they did not receive adequate protection and reward from the state.93 In contrast, initiators or organizers of collective actions to seize grain from the rich or force grain merchants to sell at belowmarket prices were subject to the death penalty. Even though the Qing state claimed that the rich and the poor were both “innocent subjects” of the emperor, the maintenance of social order trumped the claims of the poor on the rich in the hierarchical political system. The Qing state attempted to protect cross-regional grain merchants to ensure that grain would freely flow through market transactions across the country, because it considered the free commercial circulation of grain more important in protecting the public interest of the realm than the narrow concern for securing local supplies of food in one county or one province. The Qing government often intervened to ensure the cross-regional circulation of grain by suppressing collective actions that aimed to prevent grain from being shipped out. In the spring of 1748, for 91 92 93

Imperial edict, QL12/6/xinsi (July 29, 1747), QSL, vol. 12, 839–40. Imperial edict, QL44/3/guisi (April 24, 1779), QSL, vol. 22, 484. Imperial edict, QL16/7/bingyin (August 22, 1751), QSL, vol. 14, 169.

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example, grain prices ran high in the rice-producing counties of Suzhou and Songjiang. Crowds in Qingpu county started to block the movement of grain; they sank one boat and destroyed the property of traveling merchants.94 On July 3, 1801, a crowd gathered in front of the magistrate’s office in Hengyang county of Hunan province. Four entered the office, demanding to stop the shipment of grain by wealthy households out of the county. Then the crowd moved into the county seat and ransacked two households. In consequence, the four leaders were executed.95 Although the Qing government did not tolerate crowd petitions that targeted government policies or officials, it treated collective petitions brought by one social group against another in a more lenient manner. Each side in such clashes of interest took the state’s responsibility for the welfare of its subjects as the basis for demanding fair and impartial adjudication. In eighteenth-century Suzhou, one of the most prosperous commercial cities in Qing China, there were many cases of wage disputes between laborers and their employers. Although the Qing state prohibited laborers from forming associations, it tried to protect their interests when they called for wage increases in times of high food prices. Processors of cotton cloth who launched strikes could petition the government to intervene to protect them.96 Despite the fact that organizers of such collective petitions on behalf of laborers in wage disputes were often referred to derogatively as “evil elements,” the Qing government did not apply the brutal “rogue laws” to punish them, but tried to show paternalist compassion for wage laborers.97 Rapid population growth in the eighteenth century led millions of people to move into sparsely inhabited mountainous regions. Largescale movements of population led to conflicts with existing residents. Migrants often cut down trees for timber that could be sold at a profit; apart from resentment over what locals saw as poaching of resources, the resulting deforestation caused erosion and affected downhill communities. Likewise, the planting of corn and other crops on such marginal land eroded the slopes and caused a variety of problems. Local residents sometimes appealed to the government to intervene. 94 95

96

97

The memorial of Jiangsu governor Anning, QL13/5/jichou (June 1, 1748), QSL, vol. 13, 152. The memorial of Hunan governor Ma Huiyu, JQ6/7/26 (September 3, 1801), Palace Memorials of Jiaqing, copies preserved in the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica (henceforth PM-Jiaqing). Chiu Peng-sheng, Dang jingji yushang falü: Ming-Qing Zhongguo de shichang yanhua [When economy meets law: Market evolution in Ming-Qing China] (Xinbei: Liangjing chuban shiye gongsi, 2018), 144–50. Wu Jen-shu, Jibian liangmin, 229–31.

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Qing officials were well aware of the environmental degradation caused by the overplanting and deforestation of mountainous regions. However, the state had to weigh competing claims to the wellbeing of the unemployed. For example, in his comment on a memorial in 1815 discussing the serious deforestation problem in Anhui, Jiangxi, and Fujian provinces, the Jiaqing emperor emphasized the importance of protecting the livelihoods of migrants who were loyal subjects of the emperor just as were the local residents (pengmin yi jie chizi).98 In response to the clash of interests between local residents and outside immigrants, Qing officials did not force all immigrants to return to their original places. They allowed those who had settled in the area for many years to stay.99 Cross-regional disputes over water were common in China. For example, people living upstream preferred to discharge excess water to avoid being inundated. This action, however, meant an increasing danger of flooding to downstream people. Those living downstream preferred to build strong dikes against high water levels that occurred in rainy seasons, but this meant a risk of inundation for those living upstream. Likewise, when people on one side of a major river tried to strengthen the bank, the danger of breaching increased on the opposite side. In these situations, both sides would appeal to the state for fair arbitration.100 Without effective intervention from the Qing state, the parties to such disputes over water often had to resolve their conflicts by violence.101 To protect the welfare of a wider region when water resources became scarce, the Qing government also used its coercive power to force those who had invested in constructing ditches or canals for irrigation not to monopolize the use of water, but to sell the water-use rights to communities or households that had not participated in the projects.102 The responsibility of the state to protect the public interest related to hydraulic projects served as a shared platform for local gentry and commoners to plead with or make demands on the Qing state. The central officials’ attitudes toward collective petitions related to hydraulic projects often appeared derogatory. They typically described petitioners as 98 99 100 101 102

The memorial of Zhejiang governor Yan Jian, JQ20/3/23 (May 2, 1815), PM-Jiaqing. Imperial edict, JQ12/5/guimao (June 7, 1807), QSL, vol. 30, 346. Will, “State Intervention in the Administration of a Hydraulic Infrastructure,” 320–30. William T. Rowe, “Water Control and the Qing Political Process: The Fankou Dam Controversy,” Modern China 14, no. 4 (October 1988): 353–87. Zhang Jianmin, Ming-Qing Changjiang zhongyou nongcun shehui jingji yanjiu [­Agricultural society and economy along the middle reaches of the Yangzi during the Ming and Qing] (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2010), 96–97 and 102–7.

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“foolish” or “ignorant.” Nonetheless, as these appeals had a significant bearing on the livelihood of local residents and their ability to pay land taxes, the Qing government tried to use official surveys or investigations to settle disputes in a fair and reasonable manner. In the second lunar month of 1795, Yan Shihong (a shengyuan degree holder) and several others from Anyang county in Henan province went to the Censorate in Beijing to lodge a capital appeal. They petitioned to construct a dike along the Zhang River after a major flood that had occurred the previous year. They especially complained that people living on the opposite bank of the river refused to cooperate in this proposed project. In response, the court sent officials to conduct an on-site survey. The officials found that while people on the south side of the river suffered from inundation, people living on the north side actually benefited from the silting as it increased the fertility of the soil, which made them less willing to cooperate with people on the south side of the river.103 After these field surveys, government officials realized that this situation was due to the fact that the previous year’s high water level had led to an unexpected change of route of the Zhang River as it flowed into the Wei River. As a result, the old river route became silted up, which benefited the people on the north side while the lands of the south side were covered by water. The solution recommended by the investigating officials was to dredge and widen the old river route so as to enable the water of the Zhang River to enter the Wei River as before, and the inundation on the south side would thereby be resolved without the need to construct a dike.104 Another example was in the second month of 1807 when Pang Chun and Yu Zhiqi, two residents living in the east of Cangzhou city in Tianjian prefecture, acted as representatives of a collective petition to the Censorate in Beijing. According to their petition, a sluice had been built on the Jian River on the site of Jiedizhuang in 1726. In 1771, this sluice was replaced by a dike. As the height of this dike was low, some sixty villages downstream of the Jian River began to suffer from frequent inundation. They requested to restore the original sluice so as to prevent excess water from flowing downstream. The censors held that these “foolish” villagers did not understand the details of this hydraulic project, which was crucial not only to irrigation but also to the navigation of the Grand Canal. Moreover, officials were 103 104

Imperial edict, QL60/2/jiwei (February 25, 1795), QSL, vol. 27, 636. The memorial of Director-General of the Grand Canal Li Fenghan and Henan provincial governor Ajinga, QL60/r 2/gengxin (April 17, 1795), QSL, vol. 27, 687.

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suspicious that the petitioners had private interests involved. When the censors checked the records of disasters, however, they did notice that no flooding had occurred when the sluice controlled the flow of water; yet the farming lands of that area were now covered by deep water. They then memorialized the emperor to order the governor-general of Zhili to send officials to conduct a field investigation. The two petitioners returned to their villages.105 After the investigation by the governor-general of Zhili, Wen Chenghui, and the director-general of the Grand Canal, Li Rumei, the provincial government of Zhili decided to increase the height of the dike as a temporary solution. This measure was, however, not effective in preventing flooding. In consequence, Pang Chun and other residents continued to petition provincial officials for a better solution. In 1819, they brought this case to the Censorate in Beijing again on behalf of sixty villages that were affected.106 The censors realized that if the height of the dike was as high as demanded by the petitioners, the navigation of the Grand Canal would be affected adversely; yet at the current height, these villages would be flooded almost every year. The censors then suggested further surveys be conducted so as to find a better method to secure the navigation of the canal and to take care of the farming needs of villagers simultaneously.107 The commoner Pang Chun was the leading figure in the series of petitions from 1807 to 1819 and he was not punished by the government. When people petitioned the Qing state to intervene in local hydraulic projects, they skillfully utilized copies of previous government documents or memorials to the emperor to make their cases. The Mengdu River in Wujing county of Changzhou prefecture was important both to the navigation of the Grand Canal and to the irrigation of farmland. This river had not been dredged from 1766 onward, which led to flooding in the rainy season and scarcity of irrigation water in winter. Several petitions by local people to the director-general of the Grand Canal led to surveys but no real action. In 1804, Yin Rongshu, a commoner in Wujing county, went to the Censorate in Beijing on behalf of the affected villagers to petition the government to spend official funds to dredge the river; local 105 106 107

The memorial of censor Geng Yin, Zhou Tingdong, Run Xiang et al., JQ12/2/9 (March 17, 1807). GCMC-Jiaqing-Water Control, Box 2, No. 248–52. The petition letter of Pang Chun, Run Tingfang, Xing Daoxing et al., JQ24/5/20 (July 11, 1819). GCMC-Jiaqing-Water Control, Box 4, No. 957–60. The memorial of censor Pu Gong, Liu Huanzhi, and He Gui, JQ24/5/20 (July 11, 1819). GCMC-Jiaqing-Water Control, Box 4, No. 974–76.

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people would return the money advanced by the government by paying extra duties. In order to justify this request, he also attached copies of the memorial to dredge the river in 1765, as well as the positive comments of governors on previous petitions. Although the censors considered it inappropriate for a “foolish commoner” to estimate the cost of the proposed project on his own, they did urge the court to order the governor-general of Liangjiang to further investigate the case.108 The dredging work finally started in 1812.109 When receiving petitions from people with conflicting demands, Qing officials often attempted to persuade both sides to accept a reasonable solution, rather than simply relying on coercion. For example, the Niutou River in Shandong province had not been dredged for a long time and the residents of Yutai county in the downstream area took advantage of the situation to farm on the silted soil. They were therefore against any attempt to dredge the river. In contrast, farmland in upstream counties such as Jining, Jiaxiang, Juye, Jinxiang, and Wenshan was often severely inundated when excess water could not be discharged through the Niutou River. When Grand Canal officials found in 1806 that the water in Weishan Lake was inadequate to carry the canal transportation, they planned to dredge the Niutou River so that more water would be channeled into the lake to aid the navigation of the Grand Canal. Nonetheless, Liu Yunzhong (shengyuan degree), Ma Zenghua (juren degree), and several other elders from Yutai county petitioned against such a plan. In settling this dispute, Qing officials gave priority to securing the transportation along the Grand Canal, which was crucial to carry tribute grain to Beijing, over the protection of local agricultural interests. They reminded the Yutai gentry of the importance of maintaining the transportation along the Grand Canal. Moreover, they conducted several field investigations and argued that Weishan Lake was big enough to contain the water flow from the Niutou River in normal years. Even in the season of high water, the land that was likely to be inundated was the newly silted area, which Yutai residents had no established rights to farm. The officials argued that the combined benefits to Grand Canal transportation and to the five upstream counties outweighed the narrow interest gained from cultivating the newly silted downstream soil by the inhabitants of Yutai county. 108 109

The memorial of censors Ying Shan et al. JQ9/11/27 (December 28, 1804). GCMCJiaqing-Water Control, Box 1, No. 2476–80. The memorial of the governor-general of Liangjiang Bailing, JQ17/3/xinsi (April 19, 1812, QSL, vol. 31, 442.

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The Yutai gentry did not come up with a better counterargument and thus had to accept the official plan to dredge the river.110 These collective petitions all attempted to use the state’s obligation to protect the public interest to invite the government to adjudicate competing claims among different communities. Meanwhile, representatives of such collective petitions, who were often members of the gentry who held low-level degrees, or even commoners, could derive moral authority and prestige in their communities from negotiating with the Qing state on behalf of the affected villagers. Petitions were signed by villagers and the traveling expenses of petitioners to Beijing were covered by the residents in the affected area. In response to such disputes presented by representatives of collective petitioners, the Qing state favored those appeals that presented evidence to show that they were representing the common interest of the affected communities rather than those of the individual petitioner. An individual petitioner was often at a disadvantage when competing with a communitybased rival, as government officials held that an individual petitioner did not represent the common interest of a community. For example, in May of 1812, Wu Lianfeng, a commoner from Wuqing county in Zhili province, went to appeal to the Capital Gendarmerie in Beijing. He claimed that in 1808 some people in his village illegally blocked an officially built sluice. This led to a dike breach that inundated the lands of the three counties of Wuqing, Dongan, and Tianjin. Wu did not appeal to the provincial governor before conducting this capital appeal, which was procedurally inappropriate. The court also wondered why there was only one petitioner if three counties were affected as Wu claimed.111 Nonetheless, the emperor sent two censors, Cheng’an and Li Junjian, to Wuqing county to investigate. The two censors found no such sluice in the area named Kuang’erjiang in Wuqing county. Instead, there was a stone dike to discharge excess water so as to maintain the navigation of the Grand Canal. Upon this stone dike there was an earth dike to block the water. It turned out that the excess water discharged from the stone dike used to flow into the sea through a small canal (yinghe). Yet the soil along this canal was too soft to build a solid dike. As a result, farmland on both sides of the 110 111

The memorial of director-general of the Grand Canal Wang Jing, JQ12/9/13 (October 13, 1807), GCMC-Jiaqing-Water Control, Box 2, No. 709–11. The memorial of censor Jilun et al., JQ17/5/5 (June 13, 1812), GCMC-Jiaqing-Water Control, Box 3, No. 1380–82.

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canal was often inundated. This small canal became completely blocked after heavy rain in 1801, and some seventy-one villages to the south of the canal were flooded almost every year. Although the government had reduced their annual land taxes by 40 percent, the villagers found it hard to make a living. In 1803, the gentry of these villages pleaded with the prefectural government to allow them to build an earth dike upon the stone dike in the third and fourth lunar month each year so that they could plant wheat. In the fifth month, they would destroy this earth dike for the purpose of maintaining the navigation of the Grand Canal. This practice was not only noted in the government records each year, but also confirmed by inquiries with the gentry of these seventy-one villages during the field investigation. The censors also found that among the villages that Wu Lianfeng claimed were annually inundated, some were actually located upstream of the stone dike, such as Wangjiazhuang. Those located downstream, such as Majiakou, were on the east bank rather than the north bank.112 The two censors further summoned a number of people from the villages that Wu Lianfeng claimed to be victims of the manmade floods; yet none of them considered the construction of the earth dike to be harmful to their lands. The lack of support from his fellow villagers was disastrous to Wu’s petition and he was punished for false accusation.113 Peaceful collective petitions such as those discussed were treated differently than cases that involved popular protests. In 1741, government officials were ordered to dredge a canal between Huai’an and Yangzhou that was crucial for transporting salt, a commodity subject to state monopoly and a major source of revenue. This, however, could not be carried out due to heavy rain. Hydraulic officials asked the magistrate of Tongzhou, Wang Shidang, to open two sluices to discharge extra water so that the dredging could be conducted. Wang only agreed to open one sluice, the Tangjia sluice, and he postponed doing so. Wang was obviously concerned about the farming needs of peasants. Indeed, when the people heard about this plan, they worried that there would be inadequate water for irrigation. They pleaded with the prefectural government not to open the Tangjia sluice, and there were 112 113

The memorial of censors Cheng’an and Li Junjian, JQ17/5/12 (June 20, 1812), GCMCJiaqing-Water Control, Box 3, No. 1396–99. The memorial of censors Chengan and Li Junjian, JQ17/5/18 (June 26, 1812), GCMCJiaqing-Water Control, Box 3, No. 1401–5.

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market strikes to pressure the government. Faced with these two competing claims among local peasants and the powerful salt merchants, Yang Sijing, an official in the Board of Personnel in Beijing, tried to impeach the hydraulic officials for their callous attitudes toward the peasants. But the Qing state was determined to find the organizers of the market strike and punish them severely.114 In response to petitions made by representatives of local communities who expected the state to behave as an impartial arbitrator, the Qing state often weighed the impact on a wider region more heavily, as can be seen from the example of Dongting Lake in Hunan province. Illegally constructed private dikes served the farming interests of some communities, but, by obstructing the discharge of excessive water from the lake, they posed a danger to much larger areas in Hunan province. The doctrine of the greater good allowed the Qing state to justify its destruction of these dikes, despite the harm caused to the communities that relied on them.115 In the same manner, the Qing state gave priority in disputes to larger areas of farmland that contributed more taxes to the state at the expense of much smaller communities. In some cases, government officials tried to seek a solution that would satisfy both sides in disputes. For example, the excess water of both the Guyang and Xujia Rivers in Xian county in Zhili province flowed into the Ziya River. When the government built a long dike against the Ziya River, villages in the lower areas began to suffer from inundation caused by the Guyang and Xujia. In 1780, downstream villagers appealed to the magistrate to let them build a dike to block the water from upstream. Villages in the upstream region petitioned the magistrate to remove this newly built dike as the excess water had no route out. Violent conflicts happened when the upstream villages tried to use force to destroy this dike while downstream villagers resisted. The magistrate conducted field investigations along with some villagers and decided to dig a new canal to release the excess water, so that both upstream and downstream villages would be free from inundation. This solution was approved by the superior officials.116 In adjudicating these litigations, the Qing state consistently portrayed itself as an impartial patriarch that treated its subjects on an equal basis 114 115 116

Imperial edict, QL6/4/guihai (June 12, 1741) QSL, vol. 10, 1034. See Perdue, Exhausting the Earth, ch. 7, for a discussion of this case and the limits of Qing administrative capacity to prevent manmade environmental degradation. The memorial of Zhili governor-general Yuan Shoutong, QL 46/11/8 (December 22, 1781), GCMC-Qianlong-Law, Box 1, No. 2135–45.

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(yishi tongren). Social actors then utilized this norm in capital appeals by demanding fair adjudication on the basis that both sides in litigation were “all innocent subjects” (tongwei chizi) of the emperor, which resonated with the authorities. It is important to note here that the examination here of how the Qing state reacted to collective petitions presented by representatives of communities with clashing interests is based upon official documents preserved in central archives. Sometimes the original petitions were attached to the memorials sent to the central government. The unfortunate lack of independent local archives or of extant accounts by local people makes it extremely difficult to cross-check the fairness and impartiality of the official adjudications. However, the point of interest is how the state’s proclaimed norms of legitimacy permitted social actors to organize petitions to negotiate and renegotiate with a state that was expected to be an impartial protector of the public interest. The tolerance of the Qing state toward such organized collective petitions, and the possibility of counterpetitions against official arbitration results perceived as partial and unfair in consequence, allowed a limited yet important lawful space of political participation.

4.4 Conclusion The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation common to early modern England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China served as a common normative platform for social actors to engage with the ruling authorities, in spite of the differences in their political institutions. The negotiation and even contestation of social actors with the state occurred mainly over specific welfare issues that were held by both state and social actors as intimately connected to the organic conception of public interest that the state had the duty to safeguard. The right of subordinates to demand that the state redress welfare grievances in all three cases was based upon a passive conception of right as it was entailed by the norms of state legitimacy. Since the state determined the terms of negotiation and contestation, the pattern of state reactions to popular claims and demands justified by the norms of state legitimacy was similar across these three cases. The right of individuals to petition was permitted; in such instances, the situation was seen as similar to the model of a benevolent patriarch listening to the complaints of a family member. In practice, however, individual claims accomplished little.

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Meanwhile, each state’s reaction to crowd petitions was quite hostile. Such petitions were viewed as potential challenges to authority and as a threat to the hierarchical social order. No matter how carefully the claims and demands were justified by the same norms that the state used to legitimate its power, organizers and leaders of crowd petitions over welfare grievances were subject to harsh punishment. The rulers in Tokugawa Japan did not tolerate even small-scale crowd petitions, and the Qing state did not hesitate to mete out the death penalty to ringleaders. The English state, which did not have a standing army before 1640, reserved the power of capital punishment for when it felt threatened by social disorder. In all three cases, certain concessions to popular claims and demands were granted only after leaders of crowd petitions had been subjected to brutal punishment, although the majority of followers were typically pardoned as innocent subjects misled by “evil elements.” However, each of these states tolerated collective petitions that sought for the state to impartially arbitrate and resolve interregional or intersectoral conflicts of interest. Both sides in disputes were treated as subjects entitled to the paternalist compassion of the state on an equal basis. In the process of drafting petitions and counterpetitions, the subordinates acquired valuable political and legal knowledge, developed organizational skills, and enhanced their ability to articulate common interests across regions and segments. This kind of collective petition was thus an important form of political participation in societies with highly restricted formal representation like early modern England, or with no formal representation as in Tokugawa Japan and Qing China. We therefore should not underestimate the ramifications of passively conceived rights for political participation. Moreover, as economic development and integration of domestic markets generated new kinds of welfare grievances and more cross-regional or intergroup conflicts of interest, social actors could appeal to the state as the highest political authority and request its intervention as an impartial arbiter. Even when the welfare grievances in these disputes remained specific, the scale of petitioning increased when a given issue affected the interests of an increasing number of people or of wider regions. Claims from both parties in disputes were made upon the connection to the public interest that the state was held to have the duty to protect. The state–society interactions upon the same normative platform of state legitimacy therefore constituted a dynamic process that could evolve with economic and industrial development. The expansion of political

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participation can be measured by the increasing scale of such collective petitions and the organizational capacity of petitioners. Although the petitions were still based upon the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation, the connection between particular welfare demands and public interest became more complicated and more contestable. In the expansion of political participation justified by the norms of state legitimacy under new socioeconomic circumstances, what continuities and discontinuities are observed? Part II addresses this question.

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Part II THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN POLITICS

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Prologue Limits to Early Modern State Resilience

In Part I, I have attempted to highlight how the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation common to Tudor and early Stuart England (1533–1640), Tokugawa Japan (1640–1853), and Qing China (1684–1840) was conceived and functioned in each case. The previous chapters devoted to famine and poverty relief, financing infrastructural projects, and popular petitioning have identified the contributions of this discourse to domestic governance and to the maintenance of social order. Part II explores what happened in each case when the collapse of this vital equilibrium in state–society interactions led to a decline in state legitimacy, and sometimes the fall of the state itself: England between 1640 and 1780, Japan between 1853 and 1895, and China between 1840 and 1911. Chapter 5 will examine how, following this collapse, each state, having enhanced its fiscal capacity, continued to legitimate itself by the same norm of state duty to the public interest, but with divergent outcomes. Before turning to this question, however, I here review very briefly the nature of that equilibrium and sketch how the resilience of these early modern states came to be stretched to its limits, precipitating a crisis of legitimacy for each state.

Equilibrium and Its Limits As shown in Part I, a sense of political duty to serve the public interest was found among state actors in these three early modern states that legitimated their respective power by safeguarding the public interest, regardless of whether they were unsalaried officeholders in early modern England, retainer-officials in Tokugawa Japan, or salaried bureaucrats in 185

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Qing China. All such local officials held the status of state agents. This entailed that the authorization of their use of political power in localities came from the state as the highest political authority; and that they had the duty to protect the welfare of the region under their respective jurisdictions as “the father to the family,” or “shepherding officials.” Considering the discrepancy between the state’s proclaimed duty to the public interest and its weak fiscal capacity, state legitimation through solving specific welfare problems was accomplished by a process of negotiation and contestation between the center and state agents in localities, as well as between state and social actors. The normative basis of state legitimacy thence provided a common platform for state actors at different levels of the early modern state to negotiate and bargain over how to reconcile clashes of interest between the local community and the realm. Meanwhile, state actors at lower echelons of the state could question whether the central government was fulfilling its duty to protect the public interest of the country or not, as seen in critiques of the economic projects of Tudor and early Stuart governments and of the shogunate’s famine relief and national defense policies. Provincial governors in Qing China could also criticize central policies of famine relief as counterproductive to protecting the public interest in practice. Meanwhile, the state could delegate to social actors the responsibility for public infrastructural facilities that benefited local communities. The state could even authorize them to collect local taxes to meet the spending needs of local public welfare. Meanwhile, upon the same normative basis of state responsibility for the public interest, social actors or local officials could ask the central government for coordination and financial assistance when they were troubled by problems beyond their capacities to resolve. Without the collaboration of social actors, it was impossible for the early modern state to maintain governance; yet without the state’s intervention, social actors were likewise unable to provide large-scale public goods vital to the welfare of wider regions, nor could they peacefully resolve interregional or intersectoral conflicts of interest. Ordinary subjects could also petition higher authorities to redress their grievances. Instances in which social actors consciously invoked the terms of state legitimacy to justify their demands for the state to intervene in welfare protection appear in each case. Such engagement with the state might sometimes take the form of popular petitions and even riots or protests. It is important to note that these were by no means “premodern and reactive” types of contention that aimed to protect the traditional norms, habits, and interests of local communities against a

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penetrating and centralizing state.1 Nor did they inevitably imply a rejection of state authority. Instead, they were couched as forms of “rightful resistance” within the framework of passively conceived rights; and they held the state accountable by using its own terms of legitimation.2 This is not unique to late imperial China, but appeared also in early modern England and Tokugawa Japan. Therefore, we should not view state formation in early modern England as a process of society prevailing over the state, and that in China as a process of the state suppressing society.3 The meaning of popular sovereignty in the context of early modern England is quite different from that in the twentieth century. The royalist version that had developed in England by the 1640s was undergirded by the notion of passive rights. It emphasized that the people were the passive beneficiary of the divinely ordained royal power, and thence the people possessed the right to demand that the crown redress their welfare grievances, but no right to change their sovereign.4 Here “the people” was conceived as a corporate entity rather than an assembly of rightsconscious and rights-assertive individuals. Such a conservative conception of popular sovereignty remained strong among the ruling elites in England as late as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.5 Such a passive right of subjects as the beneficiary of the state’s protection was similar to the treatment of the people as the basis of the state in the ideology of benevolent rule in Tokugawa Japan and Qing China. 1

2

3 4 5

Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978),143– 46; Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 45; Tilly, Contention and Democracy in Europe, 55–57; George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848, rev. ed. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981); Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959). For the political significance of early modern petitions, see David Zaret, “Petition-andResponse and Liminal Petitioning in Comparative/Historical Perspective,” Social Science History 43, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 431–51. For petitions as rightful resistance in contemporary authoritarian regimes, see Kevin J. O’Brien, “Rightful Resistance,” World Politics 49, no. 1 (October 1996): 31–55; Kevin J. O’Brien and Lianjiang Li, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Elizabeth J. Perry, “Popular Protest: Playing by the Rules,” in China Today, China Tomorrow: Domestic Politics, Economy, and Society, ed. Joseph Fewsmith (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 11–28. Dingxin Zhao, The Confucian-Legalist State. Lee, Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought, 304–5. Mark Philp, “Talking about Democracy: Britain in the 1790s,” in Re-Imaging Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–1850, ed. Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 110–11; Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 19.

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Public interest in these earlier periods mainly centered on domestic welfare; relevant state–society interactions typically concerned how to provide public goods and redress concrete welfare grievances. The central government had some advantages over specific regions and residents in handling large-scale welfare concerns. However, the connection between particular instances of welfare in localities and the public interest of the realm was recognized and open to negotiation and contestation; this was especially so in times of changing socioeconomic circumstances. Conflicts of interest could not be settled by violence only, but required normative persuasion backed up by coercion. The operation and expansion of this space of political participation were of course far from perfect in practice. However, domestic governance would have been impossible in the absence of such state–society interactions. Yet the resilience that these early modern states derived from state– society interactions upon a common platform of public interest-based discourse of state legitimation had its limits. This equilibrium would collapse when the state was unable to fulfill its basic functions in public goods provision due to a dramatic decline of state capacity, as in Tokugawa Japan between 1853 and 1868 and Qing China in the 1840s and 1850s. In England in the 1640s, the state could not resolve conflicts among various dimensions of the public interest, particularly the issue of the Church of England as a “public good” in the context of religious strife and division. In this situation, great protests and rebellions that rejected existing state authority resulted in each case. Here I briefly sketch the circumstances under which each state confronted such a crisis of legitimacy.

England before the Civil War The exhaustion of state fiscal capacity from the 1620s onward was exacerbated by England’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) in continental Europe. Although Charles I (r. 1625–1649) justified the protection of the Reformation against Catholic France and Spain as safeguarding the public interest of England, members of Parliament did not consider the wars as posing an imminent threat to England. In accordance with the fiscal constitution of the demesne state, Parliament refused to grant the crown extraordinary supplies in the absence of an emergent danger of invasion.6 The crown was thus left without adequate revenue. Lacking a 6

See a synthesis of the great debates between the fiscal constitution of the demesne state that had become dysfunctional in practice and the scheme for a tax state to replace that demesne state in the 1620s and 1630s in He, Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State, 27–29.

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centralized fiscal system to fund the standing navy, the cost of naval warfare fell heavily upon coastal cities such as Bristol. They in turn bitterly complained to the royal government in 1628 that neighboring shires were reluctant to contribute to the cost of mobilizing merchant ships and seamen for the naval wars that served the general interest of the realm.7 This forced Charles I to appeal to nonparliamentary means such as forced loans and ship money to raise the revenue necessary for military purposes, such as to build a professional navy to protect England’s strategic and commercial interests. His advisors justified these nonparliamentary levies as covered by the sovereign’s prerogative power to protect the general welfare of England. However, Parliament preferred a defensive rather than offensive approach.8 Ship money after 1634 constituted a de facto nationwide annual tax among propertyowners. Its collection was reasonably effective in practice before the war against the Scots in 1639, although it was widely resented by both the magistrates who had to collect it and those who had to pay it.9 The conflicts over fiscal measures were further complicated by the increasing religious division in the 1630s. Relations between the Church of England and the Puritans had become quite strained; the changes that Archbishop Laud introduced from 1633 on were widely considered as moving toward Catholicism. The years 1641 and 1642 saw waves of petitions that expressed concerns about the conflict between the Long Parliament and Charles I. Of the forty English counties, thirty-eight sent petitions signed by local gentry and freeholders to Parliament, and a number of towns also followed.10 However, these mass petitions of grievance did not necessarily indicate disloyalty to the crown.11 One common theme was the defense of the Reformation in England: “True Christianity” was held as the “public good” that Charles I as the sovereign and the head of the Church of England should safeguard.12 7

Sacks, “The Corporate Town and the English State,” 324–27. Brooks, Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England, ch. 7; Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 9 For an evaluation of the relative performance in collecting ship money, see Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I, 583–88. For this resentment, arrears in collection, and principled critiques of ship money, see Henrik Langelüddecke, “‘I finde all men & my officers all soe unwilling’: The Collection of Ship Money, 1635–1640,” Journal of British Studies 46, no. 3 (July 2007): 509–42. 10 Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 195. 11 Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, 223. 12 Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, 200, 212–13; Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” 331; Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 287. 8

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The redress of economic and constitutional grievances was achieved by the Long Parliament: repeal of ship money, abolition of Star Chamber and High Commission, and even the Triennial Act to ensure that Parliament met every three years. The religious grievances, however, were deeply divisive.13 Was the “true Christianity” to be understood as the Church of England stripped of Laud’s changes, or as a more fundamentally reformed church modeled on continental Protestantism? Conflicts over religion ultimately led to the outbreak of the Civil War, in which many who had demanded redress of economic and constitutional grievances chose to stand with Charles I.14

Japan after Commodore Perry’s Arrival The coming of Commodore Perry’s “black ships” to Japan in 1853 caused great political turmoil. Many shogunal officials involved in negotiating the treaty had significant knowledge of Western countries and well understood the importance – and inevitability – of opening up.15 However, in the eyes of those influenced by Nativist Learning, Japan was a peerless divine imperial state, and the commercial treaties represented an unacceptable “insult and shame.” The opening to foreign trade in 1858 forced the shogunate to adopt a debasement policy to mitigate the deflationary pressure resulting from the enormous outflow of gold coins.16 However, the ensuing severe 13

14

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16

For example, mass petitions by puritans from Chester conflicted with pro-episcopal petitions in 1641. See Peter Lake, “Puritans, Popularity and Petitions: Local Politics in National Context, Cheshire, 1641,” in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell, ed. Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 259–89. John Morrill called them “legal-constitutionalists” and David Smith referred to them as “constitutional royalists.” See John Morrill, “The Religious Context of the English Civil War,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 34 (1984): 155–78; David L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c.1640–1649 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 4; Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), ch. 5. For the pro-opening view of the shogunal scholar-officials who had a deep knowledge of both Confucianism and Dutch Learning and their roles in making foreign policy for the shogunate, see Makabe Jin, Tokugawa ko¯ki no gakumon to seiji: Sho¯geuzaja Gakumonjo jusha to bakumatsu gaiko¯ hen’yo¯ [Late Tokugawa scholarship and politics: The transformation of Sho¯heizaka Academy scholars and late Tokugawa diplomacy] (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2007); Nara Katsuji, Meiji Ishin to sekai ninshiki taikei: Bakumatsu no Tokugawa seiken shingi to seii no aida [The Meiji Restoration and worldview systems: Tokugawa administration in the bakumatsu era and the space between faith and foreign conquest] (Tokyo: Yu¯shisha, 2010). He, Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State, 37–38.

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inflation triggered serious social turbulence and widespread riots in both rural and urban areas across Japan.17 The “ee jya nai ka” millenarian popular protests that erupted in 1867 across Japan showed a rejection of existing political authority. In this situation, the unequal treaties signed with Western powers, particularly their terms of extraterritoriality and a standard 5 percent tariff duty imposed on Japan in 1866, were widely viewed not only as a national dishonor but also the cause of economic chaos. Even scholar-officials such as Yokoi Sho¯nan who called for learning from the West considered it important for Japan to renegotiate the treaties to make them equal and fair.18 As the shogunate was seen to have failed in its duty to protect the public interest of Japan in both its domestic and international aspects, major daimyo, the court, and many shogunal officials could use that public interest as a normative basis to debate fundamental political reforms. These debates ended with the return of sovereign power to the emperor in the Meiji Restoration of 1868.19

Qing China in Rebellion The defeat of Qing forces by the British in the Opium War in 1840 did not destroy the legitimacy of the Qing state in and of itself. Opium smuggling since the 1820s had caused massive outflows of silver and hence huge deflationary pressures on the domestic economy. As the Qing state did not mint silver coins but used silver by weight as the currency, it could not use devaluation of currency to mitigate these pressures. Chronic domestic deflation led to widespread unemployment, tax arrears, and contraction in interregional trade. The rising exchange rates of silver to copper coins in markets across the country affected rich and poor: It bankrupted even wealthy and politically connected salt merchants and also greatly increased the tax burden on peasants who had to convert copper coins to silver to pay taxes.20 17 18

19

20

Suda Tsutomu, Bakumatsu no yonaoshi bannin no senso¯ jo¯tai [World renewal in the late Tokugawa: The people in a state of war] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2010). Yokoi Sho¯nan, “Shinsei ni tsuite Shungaku ni kengen” [A proposal to Matsudaira Shungaku in regard to the political reform] [November 1867], in Nihon shiso¯ taikei, vol. 55, Watanabe Kazan, Takano Cho¯ei, Skuma Sho¯zan, Yokoi Sho¯nan, Hashimoto Sanai, ed. Sato¯ Sho¯suke, Uete Michiari, and Yamaguchi Muneyuki (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1971), 467. Aoyama Tadamasa, Meiji Ishin to kokka keisei [The Meiji Restoration and state formation] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2000); Mikami Kazuo, Ko¯bu gattairon no kenkyu¯: Echizen han bakumatsu-ishinshi bunseki [A study of the efforts to unify the court and shogun: An analysis of the history of Echizen in late Tokugawa and early Meiji], rev. ed. (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobo¯, 1990). He, Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State, 34–35.

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As opium imports continued to increase after 1840 and the Arrow War (also known as the Second Opium War, 1856–1860) legalized the opium trade, the capacity of the Qing state dropped dramatically. It could hardly deliver even basic performance in protecting public welfare, and its legitimacy fell quickly. This is the crucial background for the contemporaneous popular protests that appeared more resistant to state authority, as has been noted by Ho-Fung Hung.21 The outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), which convulsed much of China, constituted a major threat to the Qing state and was highly destructive to life and property. The collapse of state–society interactions in public goods provision in England between 1640 and 1642, Japan between 1853 and 1868, and China in the 1840s and 1850s was mainly due to the widely recognized failure of the state to fulfill its proclaimed duty to protect the public interest. To overcome the crisis of state legitimacy, the state in each case needed to enhance its fiscal capacity through reforms in public finance and to demonstrate its ability to safeguard the public interest under new circumstances. In Chapter 5, I turn to how state–society interactions over various issues of public interest unfolded in England between 1640 and 1780, Japan between 1853 and 1895, and China between 1840 and 1911, and how that process shaped the transition from an early modern to a modern politics.

21

Hung, Protest with Chinese Characteristics, ch. 5.

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5 A Political “Great Divergence” England (1640–1780), Japan (1853–1895), and China (1840–1911)

In this chapter, I demonstrate how the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation continued to serve as a common normative platform for state and society to interact in the situation of increasing state capacity, great socioeconomic change, and new international circumstances in England between 1640 and 1780, Japan between 1853 and 1895, and China between 1860 and 1911. Great changes happened to the state in these three cases. England from 1640 onward experienced several regime changes. The republican government after the execution of Charles I in 1649 was replaced by a restored Stuart monarchy in 1660. The Glorious Revolution in 1688 established a government of parliamentary sovereignty. Sources of state legitimacy varied as well, ranging from parliamentary sovereignty and even popular sovereignty between 1649 and 1659 to the divine origin of monarchical power in 1660. The Glorious Revolution in 1688 appealed to the safeguarding of the Protestant religion to justify the ousting of the Catholic James II (r. 1685–1688), whose kingship was legitimate in terms of blood yet illegitimate due to his religion. In Japan, a new sovereign of the restored imperial Meiji government replaced the shogunate in 1868. In China, there was no change in sovereign power; the Qing state survived the great Taiping Rebellion and other major rebellions. Nonetheless, the performance of the state in protecting the public interest by providing necessary public goods remained vital to legitimate state power. In each episode, the fiscal capacity of each state was greatly enhanced. The English tax state efficiently extracted revenue from excises and customs; after 1720 it engaged in long-term borrowing from the markets on a massive scale. The Meiji state rapidly centralized institutions of public 193

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finance after abolishing the domains in 1871. The centrally collected taxes, particularly the indirect taxes on alcohol, allowed the Meiji government to issue long-term state bonds from domestic markets in the 1880s and 1890s. The Qing state after 1870 enjoyed not only domestic peace but also a huge inflow of silver due to the increase of the global silver output and the great fall of its value relative to gold in Western markets. Annual tax receipts in the 1880s reached some 80 to 90 million taels of silver, double that before 1840. Nearly half of this revenue was derived from two new sources of indirect taxes: the customs duties and the lijin duties levied upon domestic consumer goods. Short-term loans from Western banks operating in China were also available to the Qing state when it could not meet emergency spending needs in times of war or calamity relief.1 Enhanced fiscal capacity allowed each state to resume state–society interactions upon the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation in the new circumstances of economic development and international power struggles. Upon the same basis of state legitimacy, two kinds of state–society interactions centered on the public interest occurred. The first was similar to that in early modern times: state–society collaboration in public goods provision for domestic welfare and social actors’ appeals to the state to redress specific welfare grievances. The political nature of these interactions remained continuous with those examined in previous chapters. Their scale and frequency, however, might increase dramatically with industrial and urban development. The second kind was qualitatively different and thence represented the political great divergence from early modern politics. This was the rise of large-scale collective petitions of public grievances, which were not about specific welfare grievances but were closely connected to general issues of public interest. Although they demanded fundamental political reforms, they were justified by the state’s duty to protect the public interest and therefore did not reject state authority. The collective petitions of public grievance across regions and social sectors represented a watershed in state–society interactions upon the commonly accepted platform of state legitimacy and passive rights entailed by the state’s duty to protect the public interest. The necessary condition for the emergence of mass petitions of public grievances was the presence of certain issues widely held to be crucial to the public interest. In particular, a conflict between general domestic welfare and the international dimension of public interest is at the crux of this political great divergence. 1

He, Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State.

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In England after 1640, the protection of the Church of England from both Catholics and nonconformist Protestants was held as a “public good” that the sovereign had a duty to uphold. It remained vital to state legitimacy until the doctrine of religious freedom became influential after the 1830s.2 In Japan, the legitimacy of the Meiji state established in 1868 was closely linked with its proclamation that it, unlike its shogunal predecessor, would effectively implement benevolent rule and defend Japan’s “national honor” or “national dignity” in international affairs. “True Christianity” in England and “national honor” in Japan mobilized participation over general political issues rather than simply redress of specific material grievances. The nonmaterial aspect of the public interest in each case generated serious conflicts between the domestic and international dimensions of that public interest. The terminal years of the episodes – 1780 for England and 1895 for Japan – were thus determined by the rise of sustained collective petitions of public grievance to demand fundamental political reforms to better safeguard the public interest. China is the negative case. It demonstrates the resilience of the early modern state, which could legitimate its power through attention to general domestic welfare and which faced no conflicts between different dimensions of public interest. This remained true for Qing China until the very end of the dynasty. Despite the extraordinarily destructive and expensive domestic rebellions between the 1850s and 1860s, as well as imperialist inroads on its territory in this period, the Qing state had more fiscal resources to consolidate its legitimacy by public goods provision in domestic governance in the period between 1870 and 1895. Moreover, it encouraged social actors to expand their participation in public goods provision, including cross-provincial famine relief. A serious conflict between the domestic and international dimensions of public interest did not appear until the astronomical indemnities imposed on China after the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Boxer incident (1900). Mass petitions of public grievances demanding the establishment of a constitutional monarchy and an elected parliament emerged between 1907 and 1910, precipitating the collapse of the dynasty in 1911. 2

The vital connection between state legitimacy and protecting the “Protestant Constitution” remained strong before the mid-nineteenth century. J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime, 2nd ed. (­Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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5.1  England, 1640 –1780 England experienced violent political struggles after 1640 that challenged the received theory of sovereignty and the relationship between the state and the people. The execution of Charles I in 1649 cut off not only his head as a private person, but also his Head as the spiritual sovereign of England. During the English Civil War, there were heated debates over alternative sources of sovereign power, including the theory of parliamentary sovereignty advocated by the Long Parliament and the more radical one of popular sovereignty associated with the Levellers. The latter contended that the legitimacy of the state rested upon the consent of the people, who enjoyed actively conceived political rights independent of the state, including the rights to religious belief different from the Church of England. Various Protestant congregations and sects that flourished after 1649 debated fervently the relationship between the state and religion and the liberty of conscience. Proponents of a secular state called for religious toleration and rejected taking the Church of England as a public good.3 Petitioners and counterpetitioners to the government over these general political issues intensively used print media to reach a wider audience. Pamphlets and newspapers argued over issues such as the accountability of Parliament, the transparency of parliamentary proceedings, liberty of religion, the relationship between the state and religion, the origin of sovereignty, and even universal male suffrage. Along with discussions in formal and informal meetings, in places such as coffeehouses and taverns, petitioning in this period greatly expanded the public sphere and political participation.4 Despite different conceptions of the origin of sovereign power, state performance in delivering specific public goods in domestic governance remained crucial to its legitimacy. When food prices soared due to harvest failures from 1647 to 1650 and Oliver Cromwell’s military campaigns in Ireland in 1649, the popular expectation expressed in petitions to the Rump Parliament highlighted that the state should protect 3

4

Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 122–27; Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 177; Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 314–15. David Zaret, “Petitions and the ‘Invention’ of Public Opinion in the English Revolution,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 6 (May 1996): 1497–555; Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 287–95.

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subsistence, much as in the Tudor and early Stuart eras. Similar measures were adopted, such as banning grain exports and prohibiting forestalling, hoarding, and brewing.5 Likewise, numerous petitions lodged with the Protectorate regime concerned mundane welfare issues such as payment of arrears to sailors and shipowners, pensions to the families of soldiers, tax reduction, and financial aid to towns stricken by the plague in 1651. In order to exert pressure on Parliament, petitions were printed and circulated widely so as to seek sponsors or more signatures.6 Port cities such as Great Yarmouth continued to petition the Rump Parliament and later the Protectorate to authorize the collection of toll duties and to order neighboring counties to contribute money for repairing its harbor, which was held to be vital to the “public affair of the town,” just as they had petitioned the Privy Council or Parliament before 1640.7 The poor performance of the Interregnum regimes with regard to public goods provision made ordinary English people welcome the return of Charles II (r. 1660–1685) in 1660. Petitions of public grievances were strictly restricted by the state after Charles II resumed his status as the Spiritual Head. The acts against tumultuous petitions passed by the restored Stuart monarchy in 1661 ordered that petitions with more than twenty signatures had to receive approval from three or more justices of the peace (JPs) or the majority of a grand jury before being presented to Parliament. These acts remained in effect after 1688.8 The expansion of political participation seen in the 1640s and 1650s thus did not represent the starting point of a unilinear trajectory toward liberal democracy.9 England from 1660 onward witnessed significant economic and social changes. The expansion of overseas trade greatly stimulated the growth of the urban sector and manufacturing. The population increased from some 5.5 million in the first half of the eighteenth century to some 8.7 5 6

7 8 9

Steve Hindle, “Dearth and the English Revolution: The Harvest Crisis of 1647–50,” Economic History Review, new series 61, no. S1 (August 2008): 64–98. Derek Hirst, “Making Contact: Petitions and the English Republic,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 1 (January 2006): 26–50; Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution, 270–95. Perry Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth, 1660–1722 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 49–52. Robert Poole, “Petitioners and Rebels,” 554. Mark Knights, “‘The Lowest Degree of Freedom’: The Right to Petition Parliament, 1640–1800,” in “Pressure and Parliament,” ed. Richard Huzzey, supplement, Parliamentary History 37, no. S1 (2018): 19; Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain, 115.

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million in 1801, and 13.5 percent of the population lived in towns of more than 5,000 inhabitants.10 The rise in the degree of market integration and in agricultural productivity made England a major grainexporting country in Europe. As consecutive good harvests drove down domestic grain prices, the English state in 1672 granted a bounty of 5 shillings per quarter to exported grain, a measure that became permanent after the 1760s.11 But the government of parliamentary sovereignty after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 still had to face threats to subsistence caused by high food prices in years of poor harvests and economic recessions. The government confronted waves of food riots in 1692–1699, 1727–1729, 1740, 1756–1757, and 1766. Similar to the Tudor and early Stuart states, it responded by issuing proclamations against forestalling, regrating, and engrossing by grain merchants. Enforcement was at the discretion of unsalaried magistrates who searched for hoarded grain and pressured farmers and merchants to bring grain to market, and who called for public subscriptions to purchase food to sell at below-market prices.12 Food riots continued to serve as a means for subordinates to demand that the authorities fulfill their duty to safeguard the public interest. Although, unlike its predecessors, the eighteenth-century English state possessed a standing army, magistrates were reluctant to call for troops to suppress food rioters.13 In addition to worrying about the disruption to local communities from soldiers, paternalist sympathy for the hungry remained strong.14 In numerous petitions from towns and cities to Parliament during the food crisis in 1757, the control of grain prices was described as a “national affair” that was of “more importance to the public” than foreign relations.15 As the integrated domestic markets facilitated grain

10 11 12

13 14

15

R. B. Outhwaite, Dearth, Public Policy and Social Disturbance in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–2. Bohstedt, The Politics of Provisions, 94. Adrian Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 116–18; H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 143–45; Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 68–69. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 148–49. Outhwaite, Dearth, Public Order and Social Disturbance in England, 44; Alan Booth, “Food Riots in the North-West of England 1790–1801,” Past and Present, no. 77 (November 1977): 105–6. Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain, 71, 73.

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exports to Europe, the vast majority of food rioters targeted the transportation of grain out of the locality and merchants who were suspected of exporting.16 The bans on grain export issued by Parliament, or by royal proclamation when Parliament did not sit, were important measures to mitigate food crisis.17 Over time, however, the royal government came to view intervention in the grain markets as counterproductive, and Parliament repealed the statutory laws against middlemen and dealers in the grain trade in 1772. Nonetheless, in the food crises of 1795 and 1805, municipal authorities in large cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Bristol used money from the municipal treasuries as well as money raised through public subscriptions to provide relief food at below-market prices.18 Although the concern of authorities in the eighteenth century for securing food provision for the poor in times of high prices remained as important as before 1640, food rioters had to face the brutal Riot Act passed in 1715. Implemented to contain popular protestors hostile to the Hanoverian succession, it mandated that those participating in riots of twelve or more would be punished for capital felony if they had not dispersed an hour after being ordered to do so. The Riot Act bypassed the jury and habeas corpus and enabled the government to use the standing army or militia to suppress popular disturbances perceived as threatening to social order.19 In contrast to such harsh measures against crowd petitions and riots, the government was more tolerant toward petitions to redress interregional and intersectoral clashing interests, much as before 1640. Parliament after 1688 met annually and had longer sessions; it thence provided a regular channel for local society to petition for legislation related to the welfare needs of specific towns, cities, and counties, such as canal building, road maintenance, harbor repair, lighting and pavement of streets, and river navigation.20 Although Parliament in principle did not receive petitions 16 17 18

19 20

Bohstedt, The Politics of Provisions, 102, 110. Dale E. Williams, “Morals, Markets and the English Crowd in 1766,” Past and Present, no. 104 (August 1984): 56–73. Roger Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1793–1801 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988), 326–28; Steve Poole, “Scarcity and the Civic Tradition: Market Management in Bristol, 1709–1815,” in Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, ed. Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 103–5. On the background of the passage of the Riot Act, see Nicholas Rogers, “Popular Protest in Early Hanoverian London,” Past and Present, no. 79 (May 1978): 74–75. Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 143.

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against bills to levy new taxes proposed by the Treasury, the Commons in practice allowed opposing petitions on the grounds that the negatively impacted people had the right to express their grievances.21 Bills about the “public affairs” of local communities were taken in Parliament as “local” or “private” in regard to the general interest of the whole realm.22 The average number of local acts related to specific welfare grievances passed by each session of Parliament rose from only five in the 1690s to fifteen in the 1740s and 1750s, and to between fifty and seventy in the 1770s. Including failed bills, there were as many as 3,000 local bills presented to the Commons in the eighteenth century.23 The 330 petitions sent to the House of Lords on legislative matters had a total of 56,000 signatures between 1689 and 1720.24 The petitioning for parliamentary legislation was a way to seek sanction for the use of the political power necessary for local projects, such as collection of rates or tolls, compulsory purchase of land for canal construction, and defeating rival interests in projects of river navigation or turnpikes.25 Private bills about local welfare inevitably produced cross-regional or cross-sectoral conflicts of interest. For example, attempts to dig canals or improve river navigation to reduce the transportation costs of shipping bulky commodities were often opposed by landholders along the way. Petitions and counterpetitions to Parliament were expensive.26 But this did not deter weavers and tailors whose interests were damaged by imported French silk or Indian cotton cloth. They utilized informal networks such as mutual aid and friendly societies to raise funds to lodge petitions with the Commons.27 The scale was quite 21 22

23

24

25 26 27

Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 236. Paul Langford, “Property and ‘Virtual Representation’ in Eighteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 31, no. 1 (March 1988): 83–115. See the emphasis on the public nature of municipal governance in eighteenth-century England in Paul D. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), particularly 41–49. Joanna Innes, “The Local Acts of a National Parliament: Parliament’s Role in Sanctioning Local Action in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Parliamentary History 17, no. 1 (February 1998): 26. Philip Loft, “Involving the Public: Parliament, Petitioning, and the Language of Interest, 1688–1720,” Journal of British Studies 55, no. 1 (January 2016): 2. For a more comprehensive survey of petitions to Parliament in 1660–1788, see Philip Loft, “Petitioning and Petitioners to the Westminster Parliament, 1660–1788,” Parliamentary History 38, no. 3 (October 2019): 342–61. Innes, “The Local Acts of a National Parliament,” 35–37. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 172–73. See the example of the knitters in the East Midlands in 1778; they raised funds for lodging a petition to Parliament to set a piece rate. Randall, Riotous Assemblies, 146.

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impressive. In 1765, some 8,000 silk weavers in London petitioned Parliament to protect their welfare by restricting foreign competition and fixing wages.28 Petitioners claimed that their interests were concrete parts of the public interest that Parliament as the representative body of the nation had a duty to protect and that the Members of Parliament (MPs) should represent the public interest rather than the narrow interests of their constituency.29 The same platform was used by their opponents to lodge counterpetitions.30 In order to persuade Parliament to view a local bill favorably, promoters tried hard to argue that the proposed bill about a particular concern contributed to the public good in general; counterpetitioners appealed to the same concept of public interest to argue that the contested project mainly served the private interests of promoters at the cost of the wider public.31 People with competing interests often held meetings open to the public to discuss how to compensate the victims of projects such as canal building and river navigation before presenting petitions. To facilitate compromise among conflicting local interests, Parliament required promoters of a bill on local welfare to inform the wider public in advance.32 In 1774, the Commons ordered that bills on enclosure and drainage should be posted on the door of the parish church and be deliberated at quarter sessions, and turnpike bills advertised in local newspapers. Local bills on urban improvement were often discussed in public town meetings.33 In this light, the terms of state legitimacy accommodated the active development of a public sphere in which people could debate how to address specific welfare concerns. 28 29

30 31

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Randall, Riotous Assemblies, 144. Langford, “Property and ‘Virtual Representation’ in Eighteenth-Century England”; David Eastwood, “Parliament and Locality: Representation and Responsibility in LateHanoverian England,” Parliamentary History 17, no. 1 (February 1998): 68–81; Loft, “Petitioning and Petitioners to the Westminster Parliament,” 352–55. William Pettigrew, “Constitutional Change in England and the Diffusion of Regulatory Initiative, 1660–1714,” History 99, no. 338 (December 2014): 851. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 204; Gauci, Politics and Society in Great Yarmouth, 188; Perry Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 216; Mark Knights, “Regulation and Rival Interests in the 1690s,” in Regulating the British Economy, 1660–1850, ed. Perry Gauci (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 71–72. Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 170; Sheila Lambert, Bills and Acts: Legislative Procedure in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 155. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 57.

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In order to demonstrate that the interest at stake was of a more general nature, organizers of petitions not only sought more signatures, but also actively allied with other parties that had a similar stake. For example, London weavers in 1719 approached the weavers in Norwich regarding petitions against the Calico Bill that affected the interests of all English weavers. The Levant Company likewise collaborated with London silkweavers and silkthrowers to coordinate petitioning strategies and testimony before parliamentary committees.34 Port cities such as Great Yarmouth, Folkstone, Dover, and Hastings frequently presented joint petitions to Parliament to advance their common interests.35 Unincorporated overseas traders and provincial traders organized united petitions to Parliament to show that they represented the wider interest of society against the big chartered overseas trading companies.36 Thence the concern of Parliament in legislating bills of infrastructural facilities such as turnpikes was not just the protection of property rights, but how to balance competing interests. Failure to protect the interests of the weaker side in disputes, such as the use of turnpikes by poor laborers, often incurred riots and critiques of Parliament’s partiality by local gentry.37 In settling industrial disputes with clashing interests between employers and laborers, Parliament tried to appear impartial by hearing from both sides. Although the laws strictly prohibited laborers from organizing unions (or “combinations” in contemporary terms) to bargain over wages and working conditions with employers, Parliament urged local magistrates to implement the Elizabethan wage-fixing statutes to mitigate the hardships of laborers when trade slumped. When facing large-scale labor riots, Parliament often sent out agents to investigate the causes and adopted remedial measures.38 Meanwhile, the post-1688 Parliament was not simply reactive to private bills initiated from below. Public-spirited

34

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Tim Keirn, “Parliament, Legislation and the Regulation of English Textile Industries, 1689–1714,” in Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689–1750, ed. Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn, and Robert B. Shoemaker (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), 15. Loft, “Involving the Public,” 7. Gauci, The Politics of Trade, 213–14. See the examination of turnpike roads from the perspective of property rights protection in Dan Bogart, “Did the Glorious Revolution Contribute to the Transport Revolution? Evidence from Investment in Roads and Rivers,” Economic History Review 64, no. 4 (November 2011): 1073–112. For riots over and critiques of the self-interest of turnpike projectors, see Randall, Riotous Assemblies, 154–60. Randall, Riotous Assemblies, 138–39; Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 153.

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backbenchers in the Commons proposed public acts related to the general welfare, such as reforming the poor relief system, the penal laws against small debtors, and the prison system.39 The testimony of parties with rival interests before parliamentary committees allowed a certain degree of public involvement in the parliamentary process of making local acts.40 Although Parliament prohibited the reporting of parliamentary debates in the press, the concerned public learned about the bills being introduced, such as the stage of bills in Parliament, votes on a bill, and reports of parliamentary committees. Brief notes about parliamentary debates also managed to appear in the press, and were supplemented by the circulation of informal handwritten accounts of parliamentary debates on major bills.41 Petitioning in eighteenth-century England thus stimulated public deliberation on the drafts of local petitions both in public meetings in boroughs and counties and in local newspapers, as well as the development of organizational networks for raising funds and circulating drafts. Despite their increasing number, these petitions still involved redress of particular welfare grievances and were similar to the petitions to the crown or to the irregularly convened Parliament before 1640. Despite the fact that the post-1688 Parliament proclaimed itself as the true representative of the nation and its duty as safeguarding the public interest, it rejected petitions on state affairs such as wars and foreign relations or on constitutional principles.42 Thus the growth in numbers and organizational scale of collective petitions of specific welfare grievances did not necessarily lead to petitions of public grievances that demanded fundamental political changes. However, petitioning related to religious grievances had a quite different political nature. Deep religious division instigated mass petitions of public grievance between 1679 and 1681, similar to those organized between 1640 and 1642. Following a bent toward Catholicism at court after 1670 and the prospect of James II succeeding as a Catholic king, petitioners demanded that the crown fulfill its duty to protect the 39 40 41

42

Joanna Innes, “Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century English Social Policy,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 40 (1990): 63–92. Loft, “Involving the Public,” 13. Joanna Innes, “Legislation and Public Participation, 1760–1830,” in The British and Their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, ed. David Lemmings (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 104–5. Loft, “Involving the Public,” 3–4; Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain, 129.

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“true Christianity” that was held as a public good of the nation. Although no social actors had the right to interfere with the royal succession, a Catholic king, even one who came to the throne through the legitimate royal line, was seen to be against the public good conceived as the preservation of the Reformation in England. As Charles II insisted that he had the prerogative power to convene and dissolve Parliament, petitions to the king to let Parliament sit for enough time to discuss state affairs became an indirect strategy to prevent a Catholic succession.43 The political space to debate state affairs that had been closed in 1660 was reopened as a result. Both Anglicans and nonconformists turned to propaganda pamphlets and the press to influence public opinion and demonstrate that they represented the true voice of the people. An estimated five to ten million pamphlets were circulated. In coffeehouses and taverns, the common people heatedly debated the succession and Parliament’s role in defending the Reformation.44 A campaign to seek signatures to a petition drafted by ten peers requesting the king to let Parliament sit started in London, despite royal proclamations denouncing it as “tumultuous” and royal troops being sent in to scare petitioners. This petition, with an estimated 18,000 signatures, was presented to the king on January 13, 1680.45 The mass petitions for redressing public grievances between 1679 and 1681 were not rejecting the authority of the state, but were justified by the crown’s duty to protect the Reformation as a public good. In response, Charles II was forced to appeal to the wider public so as to consolidate loyalty and support by portraying himself as the defender of the Church of England against the enemy consisting of both Catholics and nonconformists.46 In reaction to James II’s catholicizing policies after 1685, the Dutch troops of William and Mary were invited jointly by Tory and Whig leaders to protect the Protestant religion in England in 1688, resulting in the Glorious Revolution. The ensuing Nine Years’ War (1689–1697) against France and her allies caused severe disruption to foreign trade, domestic deflation, widespread unemployment, financial chaos, and 43

44 45 46

Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 185 and 198; Mark Knights, “Petitioning and the Political Theorists: John Locke, Algernon Sidney and London’s ‘Monster’ Petition of 1680,” Past and Present, no. 138 (February 1993): 94–111. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 172–73. Mark Knights, “London’s ‘Monster’ Petition of 1680,” Historical Journal 46, no. 1 (March 1993): 46–47. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 329–45.

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high prices of food.47 In 1701 a group of Whig JPs and grand juries in Kent presented a petition to Parliament, calling for a more aggressive policy toward France so as to protect Protestantism in both England and Europe. The Commons rejected it as “scandalous, insolent, and seditious” and imprisoned the promoters.48 The Legion Memorial drafted by Daniel Defoe protested the arrest of the Kent petitioners as “arbitrary and tyrannical,” while pointing out that the Declaration of Rights in 1688 granted the people the right to use “extrajudicial methods” to express the “nation’s grievances” when MPs did not “proceed according to the duty, and the people’s interest.”49 Although the Kent petitioners claimed to represent the “voice of the people,” the English economy in 1701 had not recovered from the serious recessions and disruptions caused by the Nine Years’ War. Considering the widespread hatred of heavy taxation and state debts, and suspicion of financial institutions and government corruption, it was unlikely that the majority of English people would have been willing to further sacrifice their welfare to launch another war against France at the time.50 There was a clear conflict between protecting the “public interest” along the international dimension by fighting foreign wars and protecting domestic welfare. When the War of the Spanish Succession broke out in 1701, Tories and Whigs were deeply divided over the question of whether the protection of Protestantism merited greater sacrifice of domestic welfare, though they both agreed to the use of force to contain France. Tories wanted to protect the supremacy of the Church of England and were worried about dissenters such as Presbyterians and Quakers, who became more active after the Toleration Act in 1689. They preferred less expensive wars at sea. In contrast, Whigs, who aimed at a wider Protestant union, favored more expensive wars in continental Europe. Both Tories and Whigs appealed to the wider public to demonstrate that they represented the true will of the nation. Both put tremendous efforts into using partisan newspapers, 47

48 49 50

Brodie Waddell, “The Politics of Economic Distress in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1702,” English Historical Review 130, no. 543 (2015): 318–51; for the impact on foreign trade, see D. W. Jones, War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), ch. 5. The Kentish Petition, cited from The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, vol. 3, 1695–1706 (London: Printed for Richard Chandler, 1742). The Legion Memorial, cited from The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, vol. 3, 1695–1706. For the suspicion and hatred of the financial revolution, see Julian Hoppit, “Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790,” Historical Journal 33, no. 2 (June 1990): 310–11.

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periodicals, and pamphlets to shape public opinion. Their fierce propaganda wars, particularly after the lapse of prepublication censorship in 1695, greatly encouraged the development of the press, which carried partisan politics into coffeehouses, taverns, clubs, and societies.51 The accession of George I in 1714 caused widespread riots and popular protests in London and many provincial towns. The protestors viewed the Hanoverian accession as “foreign and illegitimate” and blamed their economic hardship on Whig financial and war policies.52 The Jacobite rebellion in 1715 made the new Hanoverian regime feel insecure. After winning the election of 1715, the Whig party consolidated its dominance in Parliament by replacing the Triennial Act with the Septennial Act; thenceforth, general elections were held only once every seven years instead of every three years. Moreover, the Whig party charged Tories with being crypto-Jacobites and purged them from both the ministries and local government from 1715 to 1760, often referred to as the proscription period. The Whig oligarchy that had full control of the standing army and militia, however, could not rely upon coercion to silence Tories who were important members of the traditional ruling elites. While the Whigs controlled the high clergy of the Church of England, most lower clergy were Tories. Anglican loyalty among the majority of English people constituted the social base of the Tories competing in the parliamentary elections that were heavily manipulated by the Whigs.53 Exclusion from government forced Tories to appeal to the public by criticizing corruption in the ministries and in parliamentary elections, the use of the army and militia to suppress protestors, and heavy excise duties.54 As a major opposition force in extraparliamentary politics, Tories utilized newspapers and pamphlets to criticize the Whig oligarchy and organized political societies and clubs to mobilize their supporters.55 51

52

53

54 55

Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain, ch. 5; Brian W. Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), ch. 7. Rogers, “Popular Protest in Early Hanoverian London”; see Tory sympathy for the Jacobite riots and protests in provincial towns in Paul K. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 179–94. See the popular support for Tory candidates in parliamentary elections in the period of proscription in Linda Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–60 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ch. 5. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy, 152–60. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 112–16; Linda

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The Whig government after 1715 reacted by applying libel or sedition laws against the anti-government press and issued general warrants to arrest printers. Agents of the Whig government closely checked newspapers and pamphlets to prevent subversive conspiracies by Jacobites. In 1719, a Jacobite pamphlet applied the theory of popular sovereignty to justify the succession of James Francis Edward Stuart, the “Old Pretender,” to the throne. The Whig government arrested and executed one of the printers.56 However, as the Whig oligarchy could not rely upon censorship or coercion to silence the Tories, it had to organize progovernment propaganda in officially sponsored newspapers and used the government-managed postal service to reach provincial readers.57 The first half of the eighteenth century witnessed the rapid development of newspapers: The number of daily newspapers in London increased to four in 1760 from only one in 1715, and there were thirty-five newspapers in important provincial towns by 1760.58 The Whig–Tory fracture in the ruling elite was conducive to a highly politicized public sphere; and the great expansion of that public sphere happened within the framework of the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. The political stability after 1720 under the Whig oligarchy was accompanied by rapid expansion of well-paid positions in the Treasury, the Departments of Excise and Customs, and the Navy and Army. The steadily growing fiscal capacity of the state enabled the Whig executive to use bribery to purchase the votes of MPs and to leverage contracts of shipyards and supplies to the military to control parliamentary elections in coastal cities. Royal patronage dominated elections in small boroughs. The general elections became more expensive and less contested.59 The Commons after the 1720s became dependent upon ministerial

56 57

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Colley, “Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism before Wilkes,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (1980): 7. For discussion of associational activities, see Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People, 115–16. Between 1721 and 1742, Walpole dispensed as much as £50,000 from the Treasury and the secret service fund to sponsor the printing of pro-government newspapers and pamphlets. Michael Harris, “Print and Politics in the Age of Walpole,” in Britain in the Age of Walpole, ed. Jeremy Black (London: Macmillan Education, 1984), 198. G. A. Cranefield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper, 1700–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (London: Longman, 2000). In 1761, there were contested elections in only four counties out of forty and in fortytwo boroughs out of 203. Cited from John Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 1640–1832 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 49–50.

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management and royal favor, as the majority of MPs either received placement and pensions or other kinds of bribes from the executive or served as commissioners for the Navy and Victualling Office.60 The entrenched ministerial control of the Commons effectively blocked the bills in the 1730s and 1740s that sought to resume the independence of the Commons by excluding placemen, pensioners, and officers from Parliament and curtailing bribery and spending in elections. Parliament in this situation did not appear to the public as the true representative of the public interest.61 Over the course of the eighteenth century, the rise of patriotism among the English led to the resurgence of public petitions to the King or Parliament.62 These petitions of public grievance were justified by the state’s proclaimed duty to the public interest. The anti-government patriots in extraparliamentary politics consisted of both Tories and independent or dissident Whigs; they appealed to the “interest of the Country” or the “good of the public” to demand that foreign and war policies serve the economic interests of Britain rather than the dynastic interests of the Hanoverian regime.63 They charged that rampant government corruption was detrimental to the public interest.64 Between the 1730s and 1760s, 60–70 percent of government revenue came from excises and customs, and patriots made a strong case to the public that heavy and regressive indirect taxes mainly benefited big financiers and corrupt ministers at the cost of the majority of the people.65 In 1733, Walpole’s proposal to replace customs duties on imported tobacco with a new excise duty on tobacco triggered nationwide anti-excise campaigns, and numerous instructions 60 61

62 63

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Between 1715 and 1830, only the general election in 1741 led to major changes in the ministry. Innes, “People and Power in British Politics to 1850,” 132. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform, 45; H. T. Dickinson, “The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the Sovereignty of Parliament,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976): 189–210. Innes, “People and Power in British Politics to 1850,” 139; Wilson, The Sense of the People, ch. 3. Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 135; Wilson, The Sense of the People, 131; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 85–100; Hugh Cunningham, “The Language of Patriotism, 1750–1914,” History Workshop, no. 12 (Autumn 1981): 8–33. J. A. Downie, “The Development of the Political Press,” in Britain in the First Age of Party, 1680–1750: Essays Presented to Geoffrey Holmes, ed. Clyve Jones (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), 124; Wilson, The Sense of the People, 123–27; Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 30–36. Harris, Politics and the Nation, 70; Wilson, The Sense of the People, 132.

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were sent from constituencies to their MPs to vote against the bill. The anti-excise sentiments expressed in the press and coffeehouses were not only about specific economic grievances, but also about public grievances against government corruption and “parliamentary tyranny.”66 In 1769 and 1770, a nationwide movement of petitioning to George III (r. 1760–1820) was triggered by the Commons’ decision to disqualify John Wilkes as the elected MP for Middlesex. These petitions, which had a total of 55,000 signatures, came from both franchised boroughs and unfranchised towns.67 They did not simply petition George III to confirm the election result, but expressed many general grievances such as “arrests by general warrants, neglect of habeas corpus and trial by jury, failure to consider petitions, attacks on freedom of the press, and … the violating of the rights of electors, the squandering of public funds.”68 Radical supporters of Wilkes proposed fundamental parliamentary reforms such as an annual Parliament, equal representation, and bills to remove placemen and pensioners from the Commons. But they carefully framed these demands, which were in essence calls for active political rights, in terms of their loyalty to the crown, whose duty it was to protect the public interest.69 Their claims thus appeared to be based in passive rights, which made the petitions of public grievance less threatening to the establishment. The demands of parliamentary reforms mainly focused on how to remove corruption in government to better serve the general interest of the country. The crown was taken as the “Father of his people” or “common Parent and Benefactor” of faithful subjects against corrupt ministers and MPs.70 The strategy to petition the king was used again during the crisis over the 66 67 68

69

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Paul Langford, The Excise Crisis: Society and Politics in the Age of Walpole (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975); Wilson, The Sense of the People, 124–27. John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 179. John A. Philips, “Popular Politics in Unreformed England,” Journal of Modern History 52, no. 4 (December 1980): 606–8; George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 109. John Brewer, “English Radicalism in the Age of George III,” in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III, 189–90; H. T. Dickinson, “The Precursors of Political Radicalism in Augustan Britain,” in Britain in the First Age of Party, 1680–1750: Essays Presented to Geoffrey Holmes, ed. Clyve Jones (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), 63–84. The appeal to the crown as “Father of the country” to protect the passive rights of subjects against the abuses of ministers and MPs is very common in the collective petitions of public grievances submitted from counties and cities in 1769 and 1770. Home Office Records (HO) 55/4/6, National Archives, London.

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American colonies in 1775 and 1776, when people in favor of a peaceful settlement petitioned to repeal the war policies made by Parliament.71 The parliamentary sovereignty established in 1688 asserted that elected MPs had the right to reject “instructions” from their constituencies.72 When Parliament came to be viewed by the public as detrimental to the public interest due to its corruption, they turned to the crown as the symbol of sovereignty, leading to waves of large-scale petitions of public grievance that insisted the public interest was above parliamentary sovereignty.73 In the Association movement in the 1780s, peers and country gentlemen organized political meetings to discuss drafts of petitions of public grievance to the crown, communicated with each other across the country, and used printed pamphlets and local newspapers to reach a wider audience and attract more signatures on petitions. Petitioners of public grievance justified their demands by the state normative discourse of protecting the public interest and criticized corruption in ministries and Parliament. The reforms that they proposed included an annual Parliament that was independent of ministerial control, better representation by enfranchising large industrial towns, and removing corruption that squandered public money, which resonated with reform-minded ruling elites.74 The 1780s thus marked the beginning of a new dynamic in state and society interactions in England. Two different kinds of popular petitioning, one demanding the state redress specific welfare grievances and another demanding fundamental parliamentary reforms, were now grounded in terms of the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. Moreover, both were accommodated by the ruling authorities, who persistently rejected calls for political reforms made upon the basis of active inalienable rights of citizens before the mid-nineteenth century.75 71 72

73 74

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James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986). Paul Kelly, “Constituents’ Instructions to Members of Parliament in the Eighteenth Century,” in Party and Management in Parliament, 1660–1784, ed. Clyve Jones (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984), 169–70. Knights, “‘The Lowest Degree of Freedom,’” 29–34. Ian R. Christie, Wilkes, Wyvill and Reform: The Parliamentary Reform Movement in British Politics, 1760–1785 (London: Macmillan, 1962); Peter Fraser, “Public Petitioning and Parliament before 1832,” History 46, no. 158 (1961): 195–211; Eugene C. Black, The Association: British Extraparliamentary Political Organization, 1769–1793 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). Philip Harling, The Waning of “Old Corruption”: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes, eds., Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780–1850 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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The conflict between the international dimension of public interest in the form of “national interest” or “national honor” and the domestic dimension of welfare continued in the second half of the nineteenth century, when nonconformists and Catholics gained political rights and suffrage was significantly extended.76

5.2  Japan, 1853–1895 From 1853 onward, the failure of the shogunate to both safeguard domestic welfare and protect Japan’s national honor against Western powers greatly damaged its legitimacy.77 Furthermore, the public interest of Japan constituted the common basis for the court, the shogunate, and major daimyo to discuss how to reform the political system. Bicameralism was widely considered an institution to incorporate “public discussion or public deliberation” (ko¯gi yoron) into the making of major policies so as to better serve that public interest. In a bicameral institution, the upper house would consist of the shogun, court nobles, and daimyo; the lower house, of competent samurai and even commoners.78 However, events brought shogunal rule to an end before these discussions bore institutional fruit. This historical background is crucial to understand how the Meiji state established in 1868 after overthrowing the shogunate by force attempted to justify its sovereign power. It needed to demonstrate better performance in safeguarding domestic welfare and defending the national dignity of Japan in international affairs, two different dimensions of the public interest. Each was a daunting task, given the financial and military weakness of the new Meiji state. The Meiji government did not possess the military strength to repeal the unequal treaties, but in fact had to inherit them. Pressure from antiWestern zealots, who had played a significant role in bringing about the 76 77

78

Jonathan P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Sho¯ji Kichinosuke, Yonaoshi ikki no kenkyu¯ [Studies on world-renewal uprisings] (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo¯, 1975), 38, 65, and 236; Suda Tsutomu, “Bo¯ryoku ho¯ka to iu jissen ko¯i” [Practical acts of violence and arson], in Minshu¯ undo¯shi: Kinsei kara kindai e, vol. 4, Kindai iko¯ki no minshu¯zo¯, ed. Arai Katsuhiro (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2000), 43–46. Mitani Hiroshi, Meiji Ishin to nashonarizumu: Bakumatsu no gaiko¯ to seiji hendo¯ [The Meiji Restoration and nationalism: Late Tokugawa diplomacy and political change] (Tokyo: ¯ kubo Takeharu, Kindai Nihon no seiji ko¯so¯ to Oranda Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1997); O [The early modern Japanese conception of politics and Holland] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 2010), 56–57; Sugimoto Fumiko, Kinsei seiji ku¯kanron, ch. 7.

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Restoration, exerted great pressure on the Meiji government to demonstrate its ability to defend Japan’s national honor in international politics. To mitigate this, the Meiji government hoped to use diplomatic means to modify the treaties. The new central government formed after abolishing the domains in August 1871 dispatched the Iwakura Mission in December to negotiate with Western countries for new “fair and just” treaties that would end extraterritoriality and recover sovereignty in setting the tariff duty. However, the Meiji government was not prepared to accept the counterproposals from the United States and Britain, which demanded the opening of more ports for foreign trade, reform of the Japanese legal system, and allowing Westerners to travel and reside in areas beyond the opened treaty ports.79 To legitimate the new regime by reforming unequal treaties appeared to be impractical. In domestic governance, one big challenge was how to collect adequate taxes for domestic governance and modernize the military forces. Due to the unequal treaties, the Meiji government could not increase its revenue by raising tariff duties. Before the central government set up tax institutions to extract indirect taxes from commercial sectors, it had to depend heavily upon land taxes. The urgent fiscal needs of the central government conflicted with the material interests of Japanese peasants, particularly between 1868 and 1871 when flooding and cold weather led to poor harvests in most regions of Japan. The Ministry of Finance ¯ kurasho¯) refused to grant tax reduction and spent little for relief; peas(O ant rioters complained that the “restored” imperial government performed even worse in famine relief than the former shogunate. The harsh policy of the Ministry of Finance was even resisted by prefectural magistrates, who held it as vital for the Meiji government to show benevolence through tax reduction and provision of relief grain.80 The Meiji government abolished the village as a collective taxation unit, issued deeds to landowners, and collected land taxes from these landowners in cash. Land taxes were based upon the market value of land, which was calculated according to the average price of agricultural 79 80

Michael R. Auslin, Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 168–94. Senda Minoru, “Ishin seiken no chiho¯ zaigyo¯sei seisaku” [On the local policy of the Ishin government], Shigaku zasshi 85, no. 9 (September 1976): 42–71. For relief efforts by village notables on the Kanto plain, see Matsuzawa Yu¯saku, “Ishinki chokkatsuken ni okeru kyu¯jutsu to biko¯ chochiku” [Poor relief and famine relief funds in directly administered prefectures in the Restoration period], Shakai shigaku 70, no. 4 (November 2004): 71–92.

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produce in the previous five years. The calculation of land value for the whole country was thus complicated and subject to disputes and complaints from peasants. The peasants turned to the benevolent rule proclaimed by the Meiji government to justify their resistance to official calculations and their demands for tax reduction in years of calamity. The Meiji government’s “enlightenment policies,” such as establishing Western-style public schooling in the countryside and introducing conscription, also encountered resistance. In the case of public schooling, peasants were angry that they had to shoulder the heavy cost of building and maintaining modern schools that had rigid teaching schedules and offered subjects seemingly irrelevant to their daily life.81 Collective protests by peasants against government policies in early Meiji Japan were thus neither for revolutionary causes nor democratic demands. Instead, they were justified by the ideology of benevolent rule. Terms such as “benevolent relief” (jinshutsu) and “benevolent rule” (jinsei) frequently appeared in peasants’ petitions for reducing taxes or providing relief food; they emphasized their status as “innocent subjects of the emperor.” Violent conflicts with the government occurred only after local officials repeatedly rejected peaceful petitions.82 The political nature of these locally organized petitions about specific welfare grievances was similar to those in the Tokugawa era, even though the sovereign was now the emperor. The reaction of the Meiji regime to these crowd petitions was likewise similar to that of the shogunate. In addition to sending troops to suppress the protests, the Meiji government in 1876 issued a draft of a penal law based upon the French model. One charge was against the “public gathering of multiple rogues in front of a government office with evil intentions.” If such crowds did not disperse after persuasion and warnings by officials, the ringleaders would be punished by imprisonment, and followers would be fined. Those who killed anyone or set fire to property would be punished by death.83 Compared with the repressive measures of the shogun and daimyo, the punishments meted out to the organizers or ringleaders of crowd petitions were somewhat lighter, yet a large 81 82

83

Brian Platt, Burning and Building: Schooling and State Formation in Japan, 1750–1890 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), ch. 5. Stephen Vlastos, “Opposition Movements in Early Meiji, 1868–1885,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. 5, The Nineteenth Century, ed. Marius B. Jansen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 367–431. Cited from Inada Masahiro, Nihon kindai shakai seiritsuki no minshu¯ undo¯: Konminto¯ kenkyu¯ josetsu [Popular movements during the formative period of modern society in Japan: An introduction to research on the Distressed People’s Party] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1990), 210–11.

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number of followers were subject to heavy fines, a new punitive measure learned from Western countries. To some extent, the tension between the Meiji government and peasants over collecting land taxes was mitigated by local magistrates, who were still heavily influenced by the ideology of benevolent rule and considered themselves to be “shepherds of the people” (bokumikan). While the Ministry of Finance focused mainly on fiscal centralization and tax extraction, the magistrates gave priority to welfare issues crucial to local governance, and they considered the protection of the welfare of the people under their jurisdiction as their duty in serving the general interest of Japan.84 In years of poor harvests or natural calamities, they often requested that the central government reduce or exempt land taxes to show benevolence, though those who implemented such measures without receiving central sanction were later removed from their posts.85 Similar to the situation in the late Tokugawa, the Meiji government encouraged local elites in urban and rural areas to participate in local welfare provision. The formation of people’s assemblies (minkai) after 1871 at the village, town, and district levels constituted an important opportunity for well-to-do farmers and rural merchants to participate in local governance. These local notables were active in maintaining local granaries, relieving the poor, and managing local public works. Magistrates considered these assemblies a forum to not only embody “public discussion” in local governance, but also to convey government policies and regulations to the people. Nonetheless, most magistrates set the function of people’s assemblies in prefectures under their jurisdiction as purely consultative. The magistrate of Chiba prefecture explicitly prohibited representatives in prefectural assemblies from discussing national politics. People’s assemblies were thus mainly a form of participation in specific local welfare issues, and the magistrates had the discretion to decide whether or not to adopt the suggestions or proposals made by assemblies.86 84

85 86

Nishikawa Makoto, “Meiji reinendai no chiho¯ keiei ni kansuru oboegaki” [Memoranda regarding local governance in the first decade of the Meiji era], in Nihon kindaishi no saiko¯chiku, ed. Ito¯ Takashi (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1993), 89–91; Mikuriya Takashi, “Chiho¯ seido kaikaku to minken undo no tenkai” [Reforms to local institutions and the development of the People’s Rights Movement], in Mikuriya Takashi, Meijishi ronshu: Kaku koto to yomu koto (Tokyo: Yoshida Shoten, 2017), 153–58. Nishikawa Makoto, “Meiji reinendai no chiho¯ keiei ni kansuru oboegaki,” 84. ¯ shima Mitsuko, Meiji kokka to chiiki shakai [The Meiji state and local society] O (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1994), 94–95; Ariizumi Sadao, Meiji seijishi no kiso katei: Chiho¯ seiji jo¯kyo¯ shiron [Fundamental processes of Meiji political history: A history of local political conditions] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1980), 21.

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Although the Meiji government considered crowd petitions a threat to social order and government authority, it granted common people the right to lodge petitions with the government. Ordinary people petitioned the central government to express their grievances, hopes, and suggestions on a wide range of issues with regard to the economy, public finance, religion, and public morality. Before 1876, the vast majority of these petitions were single authored, though some of them addressed general issues such as Shinto¯ or how to quickly return foreign loans.87 The Meiji government also allowed collective petitions from those who shared common interests or grievances to seek impartial arbitration from the state. For example, the prefectures established after 1871 often included people previously governed by different daimyo who had quite different customs. The drawing of prefectural boundaries triggered many collective petitions from villagers. The elected representatives brought petitions signed by villagers to magistrates and even to Tokyo, similar to the province-based collective petitions in the late Tokugawa era.88 As for international issues, the Meiji government continued to come under heavy pressure from ex-samurai and anti-Western zealots who were angered by the new regime’s inability to reform unequal treaties. The alternative approach to enhance Japan’s status through aggression toward Korea was turned down by the fiscally still weak Meiji government in 1873, which led to a severe split in the central government. Several major figures in the central government resigned in protest, including military leaders such as Saigo¯ Takamori and Itagaki ¯ kubo Toshimichi and Taisuke. To pacify government opponents, O ¯ kuma Shigenobu in February 1874 decided to launch a punitive O expedition to Taiwan after the killing of fifty-four shipwrecked sailors from the Ryu¯kyu¯ kingdom (today’s Okinawa) by indigenes of southern Taiwan. This decision was widely criticized in the Japanese newspapers.89 Despite the call from ex-samurai radicals to go to war with Qing 87

88

89

Makihara Norio, Meiji shichinen no daironso¯: Kenpakusho kara mita kindai kokka to minshu¯ [The great debates of Meiji 7 (1874): Modern state and people as seen from petitions] (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyo¯ronsha, 1990). Taniyama Masamichi, Minshu¯ undo¯ kara miru bakumatsu ishin [The late Tokugawa and the Restoration as seen from popular movements] (Osaka: Seibundo shu¯ban, 2017), ch. 12. Shiode Hiroyuki, “Taiwan shuppei wo meguru Higashi Ajia no ko¯ron ku¯kan” [The East Asian space of public debate regarding the expedition to Taiwan], in Ko¯ron to ko¯sai no Higashi Ajia kindai, ed. Shiode Hiroyuki (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 2016), 186–95.

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China, the fiscally poor Meiji government managed to end this conflict through negotiations.90 For the ex-samurai who were unhappy at the Meiji government’s appeasement of Western powers and the inadequate material benefits they received after overthrowing the shogunate, the demand to embody “public deliberation” in policymaking served as a rightful and powerful anti-government weapon. On January 17, 1874, a petition to establish an elected parliament was lodged with the Meiji government. It was jointly signed by the four high officials who had resigned from the government in 1873 (Itagaki Taisuke, Edo¯ Shinpei, Go¯to Sho¯jiro¯, and Soejima Taneomi) and four former government officials who were advocates of representative institutions. They justified the petition by the Charter Oath that had been proclaimed by the Meiji emperor in 1868, the first clause of which read: “Deliberative councils shall be widely established and all matters decided by public discussion.”91 They highlighted the importance of having an elected parliament to represent the “public opinion of the realm” (tenka ko¯gi) so as to achieve harmony between the emperor and his subjects. This action was not isolated; there were twenty-three petitions to the Meiji government from officials and scholars calling for the establishment of an elected parliament between March of 1871 and December of 1873.92 Although the Meiji government rejected this petition, it was published in 1874 in Tokyo by Nisshin shinjishi, a newspaper funded by a British publisher. The Left Chamber (sain), the consultative branch of the Meiji government, had granted this newspaper the privilege of publishing selected petitions submitted to government. It triggered heated debates in newspapers and magazines among intellectuals and government officials over whether or not an elected parliament was feasible for Japan.93 In reaction to this political pressure, the Meiji government had to issue an 90

91 92

93

Danny Orbach, “‘By Not Stopping’: The First Taiwan Expedition (1874) and the Roots of Japanese Military Disobedience,” Journal of Japanese Studies 42, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 29–55. Cited from Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 338. Watanabe Takaki, “Minken kessha no seiritsu to chiho¯ minkairon” [The establishment of people’s rights associations and the debate over people’s assemblies], in Osatake Takeki kenkyu¯, ed. Meiji Daigaku Shi Shiryo¯ Senta¯ (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyo¯ronsha, 2007), 155–56. Kyu Hyun Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), 102–14.

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imperial edict on April 14, 1874 to promise to gradually establish a constitutional monarchy. Nonetheless, the meaning of “public deliberation” or “public opinion” remained vague. Ex-samurai advocates of an aggressive foreign policy held that the enhancement of Japan’s dignity in foreign relations represented the true “public opinion” of the Japanese. However, most commoners were not enthusiastic about foreign aggression. Some rural notables such as Kubota Jiro¯ even argued that since the decision to send expeditionary forces to Taiwan was made by a few officials without consulting the public, the ensuing costs should be paid by these officials rather than by taxpayers.94 Ex-samurai and commoners were thus divided over the relationship between protecting the public interest of Japan in the international arena and in domestic welfare. In order to better prepare for attaining the goal of defending Japan’s national honor in international power struggles, the Meiji government implemented a series of reforms that aimed to mobilize resources from the whole country so as to “confront overseas countries”; these included abolishing domains and the status system, replacing the samurai troops with a conscript army, and centralizing public finance.95 In the process, ex-samurai who were deeply concerned about national issues lost their privileges as professional warriors and their hereditary stipends. In this situation, they were eager to play the role of “representing” the voice of the nation. The ex-samurai advocates for the parliamentary cause had studied Western political thought and nationalism; they emphasized that the Japanese as citizens (kokumin) had the duty to serve the national interest of Japan and that “all 30 million Japanese should be prepared to sacrifice for the national interest of Japan.” Ex-samurai, who included many elite intellectuals, often dismissed peasants as unpatriotic because of their evasion of conscription.96 They viewed the concern for material welfare by villagers or merchants as narrow or selfish.97 At the 94

95 96

97

Arimoto Masao, Kai Hideo, Rai Kiichi et al., Meijiki chiho¯ shiso¯ka no kenkyu¯: Kubota Jiro¯ no shiso¯ to ko¯do¯ [Studies of local enlightenment thinkers during the Meiji period: The thought and action of Kubota Jiro¯] (Hiroshima: Keisuisha, 1981), 84. Mark Ravina, To Stand with the Nations of the World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). On the conflict between the idea of citizens (kokumin) espoused by ex-samurai intellectuals and the specific welfare concerns of peasants over conscription, see Makihara Norio, Kyakubun to kokumin no aida: Kindai minshu¯ no seiji ishiki [Between subjects and citizens: The political awareness of early modern people] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 1998), 81–84. Katsuta Masaharu, “Minken undo¯ka no mishu¯zo¯” [The image of the people among People’s Rights Movement activists], in Minshu¯ undo¯shi: Kinsei kara kindai e, vol. 4, Kindai iko¯ki no mishu¯zo¯, ed. Arai Katsuhiro (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2000), 210–14.

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same time, although ex-samurai intellectuals brandished the slogan of “no representation, no taxation,” they did not pay any taxes in practice. Newspapers, periodicals, and associations constituted a new public sphere in the 1870s. Newspapers flourished in metropolitan areas and their subscribers included many rural notables. Local newspapers also appeared in the countryside. The total number of newspapers distributed through the postal system rose from 514,610 in 1873 to 2,629,648 in 1874.98 Moreover, various associations and clubs emerged in cities, towns, and the countryside. Between 1874 and 1890, some 2,133 associations formed in Japan.99 These new types of publications and organizations allowed intellectuals and even government officials (using aliases) to debate general political issues. Western ideas about representative institutions, human rights, freedom of association and speech, constitutional monarchy, and general suffrage were popularized in this way.100 Associations organized by ex-samurai such as Risshisha (Self-Help Society) in the prefecture of Ko¯chi provided important forums for disgruntled ex-samurai to use “public discussion” or “public opinion” to express their anger toward the Meiji government. However, local Risshisha associations had close ties with local government, as ex-samurai depended upon the government to receive official funds to start businesses, transfer pieces of government farm or forest land, and obtain administrative jobs.101 Despite the expansion of the public sphere from the 1870s onward and heated debate about the merits of an elected parliament, the meaning of “rights” remained vague: It did not refer only to an active conception of individual rights. Many of the ex-samurai activists considered the privileges they had previously held as professional warriors to be their “rights.” To attract support from peasants, ex-samurai advocates of “people’s rights” often made unrealistic promises such as tax exemption or granting hereditary privileges.102 98

Emura Eiichi, “Jiyu¯ minken wo kangaeru” [Thinking about Freedom and People’s Rights], in Jiyu¯ minken to Meiji kenpo¯, ed. Emura Eiichi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1995), 2. 99 Arai Katsuhiro, “Jiyu¯ minken to kessha” [Freedom and People’s Rights and associations], in Kesshu¯, kessha no Nihonshi, ed. Fukuta Ajio and Ayabe Tsuneo (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2006), 190. For the active association movement among samurai from different domains in the late Tokugawa era that debated “public discussion” and political reforms, see Maeda Tsutomu, Edo no dokushokai, ch. 5. 100 Kim, The Age of Visions and Arguments, ch. 4. 101 Matsuzawa Yu¯saku, Jiyu¯ minken undo¯: “Demokurashii” no yume to zasetsu [The Freedom and People’s Rights Movement: The dream and the frustration of “democracy”] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2016), 53–61. 102 Matsuzawa Yu¯saku, Jiyu¯ minken undo¯, 94–96.

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Peasants, well-to-do farmers, and merchants, unlike ex-samurai and elite intellectuals, shouldered the tax burden. Their primary concerns were specific domestic welfare issues. Associations formed by rural notables such as well-to-do farmers, doctors, and merchants were more interested in improving farming techniques and advancing manufacturing in sectors such as raw silk filature. To them, progress in local welfare contributed to the national interest of Japan (kokueki).103 Rural elites used the term “public discussion” to refer to deliberations in town- and village-level people’s assemblies over issues like using water or improving transportation facilities. Nonetheless, these rural elites absorbed new political ideas through purchasing books, traveling to big cities such as Tokyo, and inviting urban-based scholars to give lectures to their reading clubs and debating societies.104 Kubota Jiro¯, a rural physician and teacher in the prefecture of Oda, contended that the elected people’s assemblies at the level of the prefecture would serve as the basis for establishing an elected parliament at the national level in future.105 In contrast, ex-samurai political activists held that the public interest of Japan should be attained by defending Japan’s honor in foreign relations. The rebellion of Satsuma ex-samurai under the leadership of Saigo¯ Takamori in 1877, which charged the Meiji government with being against “public discussion,” attracted little sympathy from peasants, who were more concerned about specific welfare issues such as reducing land taxes.106 The failure of armed rebellion forced the anti-government exsamurai to turn to peaceful petitions to demand an elected parliament as an indirect strategy to attack the Meiji government. Ex-samurai activists across Japan shared strong militant patriotism and the desire to reform unequal treaties and enhance Japan’s dignity by hardline foreign policies. Under the leadership of Itagaki Taisuke, the Aikokusha, or “Society of

103

104 105 106

Fukui Atsushi, “Tasai na kessha katsudo¯” [The diversity of association activities], in Jiyu¯ minken to Meiji kenpo¯, ed. Emura Eiichi (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1995), 70. The association organized by rural notables in Okayama prefecture stated that its purpose was to advance the great benefit of society and the capital of the country. See Naito¯ Seichu¯, Jiyu¯ minken undo¯ no kenkyu¯: Kokkai kaisetsu undo¯ o chu¯shin to shite [Studies of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement: The establishment of a national assembly] (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1964), 274. Maeda Tsutomu, Edo no dokushokai, 359–73. Arimoto Masao et al., Meijiki chiho¯ shiso¯ka no kenkyu¯, 62. For the attempt to use “people’s rights” to attract support from ex-samurai in places other than Satsuma, see Ogawara Masamichi, Seinan senso¯ to jiyu¯ minken [The Satsuma Rebellion and Freedom and People’s Rights] (Tokyo: Keio¯ Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 2017).

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Patriots,” not only set up branches in various places, but also tried to organize a national confederation of associations of ex-samurai in Osaka. Meanwhile, the rapid centralization of public finance had great impacts on local welfare. The Meiji government’s ambitious economic policies for industrial development (shokusan ko¯gyo¯) generated a massive deficit that the government covered by overprinting paper notes. The inflation and falling prices of the bonds issued to terminate the hereditary stipends of exsamurai after 1878 worsened the economic hardships of ex-samurai and their families. In order to stabilize the value of government paper notes, the ¯ kuma Shigenobu in 1878 decided to further reduce the finance minister O government deficit by dramatically cutting expenditures on local welfare. By November 1880, the central government had reduced local expenditures by 2.1 million yen, while increasing the ratio of local taxes from one-fifth of the land taxes to one-third.107 Expenditures on education, building and maintaining of prisons and official lodgings, water control, and road construction and maintenance were transferred to local communities. These policies had great impacts on local welfare across the country and forced rural notables to look beyond the local community to national politics. Inflation between 1878 and 1881 did reduce the burden on peasants who paid land taxes in cash. Yet the transfer of central spending to the localities greatly increased their financial burden. This was particularly the case in water control. The Meiji government considered hydraulic projects to be crucial to the welfare of the nation. But it adopted the Dutch model in 1876 and gave priority to improving transportation facilities by repairing piers and harbors and digging canals, which also aimed to increase job opportunities for unemployed ex-samurai.108 It thence did not invest adequate funds to maintain dikes and banks along major rivers to prevent flooding.109 Central allocation of funds for major hydraulic projects and transportation dwindled sharply from 2,278,000 yen in 1880 to 338,000 yen in 1881.110 Local communities and prefectural 107 108

109 110

Ariizumi Sadao, Meiji seijishi no kiso katei, 36. Kokaze Hidemasa, “Kigyo ko¯sai to nairiku ko¯tsu¯mo¯ no seibi: Seisaku ko¯so¯ wo chu¯shin ni” [Public bonds and the development of an inland transportation network: Policy conception], in Michi to kawa no kindai, ed. Takamura Naosuke (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1996), 35; Yamazaki Yu¯ko¯, “Nihon kindaika Shuho¯ wo meguru so¯koku: Naimusho¯ to Ko¯busho¯” [Conflicts in the modernization policies in Japan: The Ministry of Civil Affairs and the Ministry of Industry], in Ko¯busho¯ to sono jidai, ed. Suzuki Jun (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2002), 134–35. Hattori Takeshi, Kindai chiho¯ seiji to suiri doboku, 64 and 102–27. Takayose Sho¯zo¯, Meiji chiho¯ zaiseishi [History of local finance in the Meiji], vol. 2 (Tokyo: Keiso¯ Shobo¯, 2002), 241.

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governments found it hard to rely upon the formal local taxes (chiho¯zei) and informal rates levied upon related communities (kyo¯gihi) to repair and maintain major hydraulic projects. As a result, the number of major floods affecting multiple villages (defined as incurring a total cost of above 50,000 yen) rose from 174 in 1882 to 320 in 1887.111 Between 1878 and 1881, inflation and the Meiji government’s drastic reduction of expenditures on local infrastructure instigated nationwide petition movements. These petitions were triggered by specific welfare concerns in local communities, yet were closely connected to central policies that aimed mainly at confronting foreign powers. Thus these concerns were expressed as public grievances that demanded the establishment of an elected parliament to resolve the crisis in public finance. Rural notables began to join the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (jiyu¯ minken undo¯) that had previously been dominated by ex-samurai. Some representatives from rural political associations participated in the third conference convened by the Aikokusha in Osaka in November 1879 to discuss how to petition the Meiji emperor to establish an elected parliament.112 On November 14, 1879, on behalf of some 44,513 people in Fukuoka prefecture, two commoner representatives lodged a petition of public ¯ kuma Shigenobu through the prefecgrievances with finance minister O tural magistrate. In this petition, unequal treaties were held to be the cause of outflows of specie from Japan, the deficit in international trade, and the falling value of paper notes. Similar views were expressed in collective petitions from the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce on September 15, 1879 and in a petition to the Chamber of Elders (Genro¯in) from seven ex-samurai on behalf of 2,986 people in Fukuoka prefecture on December 9, 1879.113 Ex-samurai and peasant petitioners now converged on the importance of establishing an elected parliament, which was considered important not only to reform unequal treaties, but also to safeguard domestic welfare by resolving the current financial crisis and reducing the burden on local communities.114

111 112 113 114

Takayose Sho¯zo¯, Meiji chiho¯ zaiseishi, vol. 2, 331. Matsuzawa Yu¯saku, Jiyu¯ minken undo¯, 100. All in Meiji kenpakusho shu¯sei, vol. 5 [A compilation of Meiji petitions], ed. Mogi Yo¯ichi and Tsurumaki Takao (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo¯, 1996), 545–48, 520–30, 572–74. See one example in the petition lodged with the Senate by twelve representatives on behalf of 19,089 people in Shizuoka prefecture on October 13, 1881. Meiji kenpakusho shu¯sei, vol. 6, 523–24; Emura Eiichi, Jiyu¯ minken kakumei no kenkyu¯ [A study of the Freedom and People’s Rights Revolution] (Tokyo: Ho¯sei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 1984), 72–90.

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The number of petitions of public grievances from various prefectures submitted to the Meiji government rose from five in 1877 to eighty-five in 1880.115 Moreover, petitions were printed and circulated to reach a larger audience across regions. The petition drafts were often discussed in local people’s assemblies and the final petition that the representatives brought to Tokyo carried a large number of signatures of local residents, although many signatures of individual villagers were made by one headman of the village, similar to the signature of multiple names by one person on collective petitions of public grievances in eighteenth-century England. The petition lodged by a representative of the Aikokusha with the Meiji government on April 17, 1880 represented more than twenty branches across two cities and twenty-two prefectures and had about 95,000 signatures.116 The total number of signatures on petitions for an elected parliament across the country was over 300,000.117 Moreover, representatives of prefectural assemblies in different prefectures actively corresponded with each other to advance the campaign. The local newspapers in Shizuoka prefecture in 1880 called for a joint petition for an elected parliament from all prefectures so as to demonstrate the general will of the whole country.118 The petition of December 25, 1882 from Ko¯chi prefecture with 435 signatures and a petition from Niigata prefecture in the same year explicitly pointed out the importance of freedom of assembly and speech to the public deliberation of general issues related to the public interest of Japan, such as treaty reform and public finance, and demanded that the government remove laws that restricted such freedom.119 The Meiji government reacted to this wave of petitions by promulgating a series of statutes in April 1880 to regulate assemblies and public speeches with political agendas. The formation of a political association or club had to receive approval from the relevant prefectural government; it was prohibited from connecting with political societies in other prefectures and from setting up branches in other prefectures. In order to prevent government officials from colluding with activists of the Freedom and People’s 115 116 117 118

119

Emura Eiichi, Jiyu¯ minken kakumei no kenkyu¯, 92. Makihara Norio, Minken to kenpo¯ [People’s rights and the constitution] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2006), 14. Emura Eiichi, Jiyu¯ minken kakumei no kenkyu¯, 95. Shizuoka-ken Minken Hyakunen Jikko¯ Iinkai, ed., Shizuoka-ken jiyu¯ minken shiryo¯shu¯ [Compilation of historical materials on Freedom and People’s Rights in Shizuoka Prefecture] (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo¯, 1984), 295–97, 299–301, 313–16. In Meiji kenpakusho shu¯sei, vol. 6, 990–93 and 1000–1.

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Rights Movement, on October 12, 1881 a coup expelled from the govern¯ kuma Shigenobu and his followers, who advocated a British-style ment O constitutional monarchy. At the same time, however, the Meiji government was forced to promise to establish a National Diet by 1891. The influence of Western ideas of popular sovereignty and individual rights is clearly seen in these national petitions of public grievance. For example, the petition submitted to the Meiji government by Kataoka Kenkichi and Ko¯no Hironaka on behalf of the Kokkai kisei do¯mei (“League for the Establishment of a National Convention”) on April 17, 1880 appealed to the “natural-born political right” of the Japanese to have political representation. This petition even warned that if the Meiji government resisted this demand, the representatives elected from different regions of Japan would convene to establish a National Convention (shiritsu kokkai), a representative institution of popular sovereignty such as was seen in France after the Revolution in 1789.120 Nonetheless, the vast majority of petitions of public grievances submitted to the Meiji state from regional representatives between 1877 and 1881 did not challenge the authority of the imperial government.121 Instead, an elected parliament was taken as the means to incorporate “public opinion” into state policies so as to better serve the public interest, as the Meiji government had pledged in the Charter Oath in 1868. A parliament was held to represent imperial benevolence and would secure concord between the emperor and his subjects. Terms such as “subjects” (shinmin) and “citizens” (kokumin) were used in an interchangeable manner in the petitions of public grievance.122 The petitions to establish an elected parliament thus appealed to passive rights and did not necessarily imply a radical political revolution or a demand for an active rights-based democratic movement. The policies adopted by the new finance minister, Matsukata Masayoshi, to curb inflation in 1882 caused severe deflation and economic hardship for peasants and rural notables. Falling rice prices 120 121

122

Matsuzawa Yu¯saku, Jiyu¯ minken undo¯, 109–11. On the difference between the petitions that pleaded for, and those that demanded, an elected parliament, see Kanai Takanori, “‘Aiso’ to iu shiso¯” [The idea of the “appeal”], in Minshu¯ undo¯shi: Kinsei kara kindai e, vol. 4, Kindai iko¯ki no minshu¯zo¯, ed. Arai Katsuhiro (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2000), 157–81. For examples of using “subjects” in petitions over treaty reform in 1889, see the petition from representatives on behalf of eleven prefectures in northeastern Japan, that from ex-samurai in Nagano prefecture (with 539 signatures), and that from commoners of Fuyama prefecture (with 366 signatures), in Meiji kenpakusho shu¯sei, vol. 9, 151–56, 363–86, 431–54.

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made it hard to pay land taxes. Well-to-do farmers who had taken out loans before the unexpected deflation found their debt burden greatly increased; many were forced to sell their land. Despite these hardships, the ex-samurai radicals who wished to use violence to overthrow the Meiji government after 1882 could not mobilize popular support. As the Meiji government in 1881 had prohibited cross-prefectural collective petitions, petitions for redressing grievances could only come from individual prefectures. In consequence, the number of signatures on a single petition was in the hundreds, far less than in 1880 and 1881. These were about specific grievances in localities, such as the heavy burden of taxes and debt in a deflationary economy, or the inability of local communities to fund large infrastructural facilities in water control and transportation. The petitioners appealed to the “boundless benevolence” of the emperor to take care of the welfare of his “innocent and loyal subjects.”123 Riots by peasants in Fukushima prefecture were mainly caused by the financial burden of building new roads imposed by the magistrate and the unfair distribution of cost among regions.124 The petitions or the peasant riots over specific welfare grievances were viewed sympathetically by many Meiji officials. Acting out of paternalist concern for domestic welfare and worry about social disorder, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Naimusho¯) managed to allocate special funds to repair major hydraulic works to compensate for the inadequate allocation of the Ministry of Finance in the annual budget.125 The Meiji government hoped that, if the central government increased expenditure on large infrastructural facilities, local assemblies would focus only on welfare issues common to local communities rather than on issues of national politics.126 The institution of local self-governance (chiho¯ jichi) designed by the Meiji government aimed to contain political participation to specific welfare issues in local society only.127 In addition to daunting problems in domestic governance, the Meiji government in the 1880s found it hard to use foreign aggression to defend Japan’s “honor,” as its military forces were inadequate even to challenge 123 124 125

126 127

Meiji kenpakusho shu¯sei, vol. 7, 350–61, 372–401, 637–52, 708–11. Matsuzawa Yu¯saku, Jiyu¯ minken undo, 155–61. Mikuriya Takashi, Meiji kokka keisei to chiho¯ keisei: 1881–1890 [The formation of the Meiji state and local management: 1881–1890] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 1980), 31–35 and 62–67. Mikuriya Takashi, Meiji kokka keisei to chiho¯ keisei, 229–30. Yamada Ko¯hei, Kindai Nihon no kokumin kokka to chiho¯ jichi [The nation-state and local self-government in early modern Japan] (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 1991), 319.

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China. During the Sino-French War in 1884 and 1885, the coup d’état launched by pro-Japan Korean reformers was quickly crushed by Chinese troops in December 1884. Japanese casualties in this event instigated many ex-samurai who were active in the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement to demand that the Meiji government defend the dignity of Japan by sending troops to Korea. But the military leaders of the Meiji government realized that the Japanese Navy could not compete with the Chinese Navy, and that they had to focus on building up Japan’s navy rather than challenge China’s dominance of Korea.128 Commoners, however, gave priority to issues of domestic welfare rather than international power struggles. A collective petition from 101 brewers of soy sauce in Kanagawa prefecture on July 30, 1885 pleaded with the government to reduce taxes on soy sauce, cut military expenditures, and provide more relief to the people.129 To avoid becoming involved in the escalating rivalry between Britain and Russia in the waters of Korea in 1885, the Meiji government decided to settle the dispute with China peacefully and to turn again to diplomacy to negotiate reform of the unequal treaties.130 Major concessions were offered; these included the employment of Western judges in the Supreme Court of Japan, consulting with Western countries in advance when the Japanese government planned to revise its laws, and permitting foreigners to own real estate and travel freely in Japan. When these concessions were revealed by newspapers, they aroused huge domestic opposition. Opponents, particularly ex-samurai activists of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, considered these concessions to infringe on Japan’s sovereignty and to be a national dishonor. They claimed that the entrance of Westerners with significant resources and of cheap Chinese laborers would threaten the economic survival of Japan.131 A new wave of collective petitions of public grievance emerged in 1887. These focused on issues of national politics such as the reduction of land taxes, the 128 129 130

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Takahashi Hidenao, Nisshin senso¯ e no michi [The road toward the First Sino-Japanese War] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ So¯gensha, 1995), 200–27. Meiji kenpakusho shu¯sei, vol. 8, 174–82. Okamoto Takashi, Zokkoku to jishu no aida: Kindai Shin-Kan kankei to Higashi Ajia no meiun [Between dependency and autonomy: Early modern Sino-Korean relations and the fate of East Asia] (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku Shuppankai, 2004), ch. 9; Tsukiashi Tatsuhiko, Fukuzawa Yukichi no Cho¯sen: Nichi-Cho¯-Shin kankei no naka no “datsua” [Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Korea: “DeAsianization” in the context of relations between Japan, Korea, and China] (Tokyo: Ko¯dansha, 2015), ch. 2. See the petition from ex-samurai of Nagano prefecture (with signatures of 642 chief representatives) on September 15, 1889 in Meiji kenpakusho shu¯sei, vol. 9, 159–62.

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protection of freedom of speech and assembly, the reform of unequal treaties, and the opening of a National Diet earlier than 1891. However, public opinion remained divided over how to reform unequal treaties. The collective petitions from 61 commoners from Hyo¯go prefecture on August 21, 1889 supported the plan to end extraterritoriality by employing Western judges in Japan for a limited period; they pointed out that it was an international norm to allow foreigners to own property and travel freely in another country. This view was shared by the petition signed by 7 commoners from Nagano prefecture lodged on August 13, 1889 and a petition of 162 commoners from Nagano prefecture on September 5, 1889.132 A petition from 366 commoners of Toyama prefecture in 1889 (month and date unknown) held that the concessions offered to reform unequal treaties did not damage the sovereignty of Japan; Western judges would be employed by the Japanese government (which could lay off them after twelve years) and the entrance of foreigners into Japan could make the Japanese more competitive and thus contribute to its welfare in the long run. They criticized ex-samurai opponents of these concessions as disloyal to Japan and detrimental to the true interest of the country.133 Some associations of well-to-do farmers in Kanagawa prefecture even began to learn English to prepare for the situation of Westerners freely traveling in Japan.134 Among the collective petitions submitted to the Meiji government by September 30, 1889, 185 petitions (with a total of 56,857 signatures) were against the Meiji government’s concessions to reform the unequal treaties, while 120 petitions (with a total of 6,759 signatures) supported the concessions in return for equal treaties.135 Nonetheless, one important consensus among these different views was that Japan should replace secret diplomacy in negotiating with Western powers with an appeal to public opinion, and an elected parliament was to be the means to embody the general will of the Japanese. The conflicts between the domestic and international dimensions of public interest mobilized massive petitions of public grievance, which ultimately led to the opening of the National Diet in 1891, consisting of a House of Peers and a House of Representatives. It provided a formal institution for participation in national politics as well as for deliberation of policies with 132 133 134 135

Meiji kenpakusho shu¯sei, vol. 9, 108–12, 114–16, 135–45. Meiji kenpakusho shu¯sei, vol. 9, 431–54. Irokawa Daikichi, ed., Santama jiyu¯ minken shiryo¯ shu¯ [Collected historical materials on Santama Freedom and People’s Rights] (Tokyo: Daiwa Shobo¯, 1979), vol. 2, 780, 944. Cited from Komiya Kazuo, Jo¯yaku kaisei to kokunai seiji [Treaty revision and domestic politics] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2001), 62–63.

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regard to the public interest of Japan. Although merely 1 percent of the population had the right to vote for the 340 representatives of the House of Representatives in the first general election in 1890, the elected representatives brought petitions of local welfare grievances for deliberation. Meanwhile, local notables who obtained tickets to sit in the Diet to listen to debates often took notes and sent them to local newspapers.136 Between 1891 and 1895, there were strong demands for the central government to increase its expenditure on water control projects while reducing military spending. Among the 204 petitions that the House of Representatives received in the first session of the Diet in 1891, as many as 131 requested that the central government allocate more funds for hydraulic infrastructure on forty-four major rivers so as to reduce the burden on local communities.137 These public debates indicated that two fates were viable for Japan at the juncture of 1894 and 1895. Japan could become a commercial power with a military adequate for self-defense.138 Alternately, Japan could become an aggressive military power that actively participated in international power struggles, as the military leaders had planned. The sweeping victory over China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) was a turning point for Japan. The war not only greatly enhanced its international status, but also brought Japan 360 million yen in indemnities from China; this amounted to some four and a half times Japan’s state budget in 1894.139 The huge fortune obtained from this military victory greatly reduced the tension between taking care of domestic welfare and enhancing Japan’s national status by military means. In the period between 1895 and 1931, the ideology of benevolent rule continued to motivate many Japanese to petition the central government to redress welfare grievances, including new ones brought by rapid industrial development, as so to safeguard the public interest in domestic governance.140 In the meantime, the Japanese government continued 136 137

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Iizuka Kazuyuki, Meijiki no chiho¯ seido to meibo¯ka [Local systems and local leaders during the Meiji period] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Ko¯bunkan, 2017), 192–94. Maeda Ryo¯suke, Zenkoku seiji no shido¯: Teikoku Gikai kaisetsugo no Meiji kokka [The beginnings of national politics in modern Japan: The Meiji state reform under the parliamentary system, 1890–1898] (Tokyo: To¯kyo¯ Daigaku Shuppankai, 2016), 103–6. Nakamoto Takatoshi, “Kurihara Ryo¯ichi to Jiyu¯to¯ ‘Tosaha’ no ‘tsu¯sho¯ kokka ko¯so¯’” [Kurihara Ryo¯ichi and the “vision of a trading state” of the Liberal Party’s “Tosa School”], Nihonshi kenkyu¯, no. 516 (August 2005): 28–52. Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 121. Thomas C. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), ch. 10; Timothy S. George, “Tanaka Sho¯zo¯’s

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to expand its military forces in the name of defending Japan’s national interest in international politics, particularly after the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). The continued tension between domestic welfare and international power struggles greatly stimulated political participation that demanded the extension of suffrage. Such demands were to a large extent based upon the passive rights that were entailed by the state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest of Japan even under new circumstances.141

5.3  China, 1840 –1911 The context of China in the late nineteenth century was quite different from England between 1640 and 1780 and Japan between 1853 and 1895. While the civil wars that took place in China between 1853 and 1863 were even more devastating than those in England or Japan, no regime change occurred. There was no religious division as in England to drive conflict directly connected to state legitimacy. Both China and Japan were affected by Western imperialism. Western economic penetration in China was even deeper than that in Japan; foreign ships could conduct business along the Yangzi River and Westerners could own real estate in China. The Qing government in 1868 and 1869 did try to renegotiate treaties with Britain with an aim to raise tariff duties on imported opium; but this was rejected by the British government.142 As there had been no regime change in China, however, treaty reform was not vital to the legitimacy of the Qing state as it was to the newly established Meiji government. Unlike Meiji Japan, which set China as the hypothetical enemy in its naval expansion after 1882, China’s military modernization was mainly for securing its northwestern frontiers and for maritime defense, which was attained before 1894. The legitimation of state power in Qing China thus remained mainly along the dimension of domestic welfare. The broader economic circumstances during the post-Taiping reconstruction were beneficial to the Chinese economy and the Qing state’s efforts to recover its capacity. In addition to the great increase of silver in

141 142

version of an alternative constitutional modernity for Japan,” in Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Wildman Nakai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), 89–116. Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Banno Masataka, Kindai Chu¯goku gaiko¯shi kenkyu¯ [Diplomatic history of early modern China] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970), 232–42.

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the world, falling prices of silver in relation to gold in the European and American markets from the 1870s led to massive silver inflows into China and stimulated Chinese exports.143 Its enhanced capacity due to revenues from customs and lijin duties allowed the Qing to reestablish its legitimacy by reducing land taxes by some 27 percent from the level before 1850 in the Lower Yangzi Delta.144 Meanwhile, its fiscal system became less rigid; provincial governments for the first time had official budgets independent from central auditing.145 This enabled provincial governments to better accommodate the needs of public goods provision in water control, bridge construction, road repair, and so on in their jurisdictions.146 The greater ease with which provinces could spend on infrastructural facilities did not obviate participation by nonstate actors. Indeed, local gentry participation in financing the maintenance and repair of local water control projects increased even further.147 Meanwhile, state–­ society ­collaboration in public goods provision in domestic welfare persisted. The practice of advancing official funds for repairing hydraulic projects after disasters, which were to be returned later interest free by the affected communities, continued when local communities were unable to shoulder the repair cost. In 1879, the Jiangxi provincial government advanced a total of 74,403 taels of silver to eight counties to repair dikes destroyed by major floods; the money was to be returned to the provincial government in two years.148 When the residents of Tongcheng county of Anhui 143

144

145 146

147

148

For a positive evaluation of the economic performance of Qing China in the late nineteenth century, see Richard von Glahn, The Economic History of China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 378–96. Zhou Jian, Wei zheng zhi gong: Qingdai tianfu yu guojia caizheng (1730–1911) [The mainstay of government finance: Land taxes and state revenue in the Qing (1730– 1911)] (Beijing: Beijing shifandaxue chubanshe, 2020), 291. He, Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State, 154. For a representative example of the use of lijin revenue belonging to provincial governments to fund local water control projects in Zhejiang province in the late nineteenth century, see Morita Akira, Shindai no suiri to chiiki shakai, [River work and local society in Qing China] (Fukuoka: Chu¯goku Shoten, 2002), 145–46. For active participation by gentry in post-Taiping urban public affairs, local water control projects, and local charity, see Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, ch. 2; R. Keith Schoppa, “Power, Legitimacy, and Symbol: Local Elites and the Jute Creek Embankment Case,” in Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance, ed. Joseph W. Esherick and Mary B. Rankin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 140–61; Mary B. Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986). The memorial of Jiangxi governor Li Wenmin, GX5/ruan 3/28 (May 18, 1879), GCMC-Guangxu-Water Control, Box 1, No. 684–85.

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province in 1883 decided to build a new dike to protect their farmland, they were unable to raise the necessary amount of money on time. As a result, they petitioned the county magistrate to advance 6,000 taels of silver to fund this project, to be returned to the government within six years by collecting an extra rate in annual land taxes.149 After considering the urgency to repair the long dike across Zhongxiang and Qianjiang counties in Hubei province after it was breached by floods in 1889, the Hubei provincial government advanced official funds of 24,374 taels of silver to the local gentry to manage the reconstruction. The advance was paid back to the government in a period of six years through extra duties of land taxes collected from four counties that benefited from this project.150 Merchants also requested that the government advance funds for expensive public works as well. For example, local merchants decided to raise money to repair a dike in Hanyang prefecture in Hubei province in 1887. Due to the urgency of the project, gentry merchants petitioned the Hubei provincial government to advance 40,000 taels of silver from official funds so that they could start the repair immediately. The merchants agreed to pay an extra rate in their lijin duties so as to return this amount of money within three years.151 There were also cases of joint investment by the provincial government and local communities in financing larger hydraulic projects. For example, in Nanhai and Shunde counties in Guangdong province, the maintenance and routine repair of a long dike across the two counties usually came from the interest return on a specially allocated fund deposited for that purpose. When the residents of the two counties in 1873 could not afford the 20,000 taels of silver for a major repair after a severe breach, local gentry successfully petitioned the Guangdong provincial government for financial aid.152 In a major repair of the Dujianyan irrigation 149 150 151

152

The memorial of Anhui governor Yulu, GX9/2/6 (March 14, 1883), GCMC-GuangxuWater Control, Box 1, No. 874–75. The memorial of Huguang governor-general Zhang Zhidong, GX18/3/24 (April 20, 1892), GCMC-Guangxu-Water Control, Box 1, No. 2823–25. The memorial of Huguang governor-general Yulu and Hubei governor Kuibin, GX13/3/18 (April 11, 1887), GCMC-Guangxu-Water Control, Box 1, No. 1488–90. The advanced official funds were paid back to the government on time; see the memorial of the Huguang governor-general Zhang Zhidong and Hubei governor Tan Jixun, GX18/1/22 (March 8, 1885), GCMC-Guangxu-Water Control, Box 1, No. 2804–5. The memorial of Liangguang governor-general Liu Kunyi and Guangdong governor Zhang Zhaodong, GX4/3/14 (April 16, 1878), GCMC-Guangxu-Water Control, Box 1, No. 626–27.

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facilities in Sichuan province in 1878, local gentry raised money to repair the outer part of the project and petitioned the government to fund the repair of the inner part. After considering the importance of this irrigation facility to farming and the heavy tax burden of local residents, the Sichuan provincial government allocated 90,000 taels of silver to fund this repair and dispatched troops to serve as labor.153 At the same time, the central state remained indispensable to financing the maintenance and repair of big infrastructural facilities that neither provincial governments nor local communities could afford. In its decentralized fiscal operation, the Qing state still had authority to order provincial governments to satisfy central allocations of spending for urgent needs such as military campaigns or returning interest payments on foreign loans. Such central coordination did not work smoothly for ordinary allocation orders, however, as provincial governments often delayed sending the required amount of funds to spending destinations.154 The same operation could be observed in allocating funds for major hydraulic projects that were crucial to domestic welfare, as provincial governors used every means to meet these urgent assignment orders from the center. The shared concern for domestic welfare was the platform on which the center and provincial governments collaborated in financing big water control projects. For example, a major breach of the Yellow River in 1873 threatened millions of people in several provinces, and the repair was not only expensive but also urgent. In order to block the breach in Shizhuanghu in Shandong province in time, the Board of Revenue ordered a number of provincial governments to allocate assigned amounts of money out of specific accounting items listed in the central government bookkeeping to Shandong province. The pressure from the center and the recognition of the importance of this project to the welfare of people in Shandong and neighboring provinces prompted provincial governments to remove money from revenue items not designated by the center to cover the deficit in the items designated by the center. For example, the Jiangxi provincial government was ordered by the Board of Revenue to send 180,000 taels of silver out of the lijin revenue stored in the province. However, the actual funds available under this item were not adequate. The Jiangxi provincial government then 153 154

The memorial of governor-general of Sichuan Ding Baozhen, GX3/12/28 (January 30, 1878), GCMC-Guangxu-Water Control, Box 1, No. 607–10. He, Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State, 157–64.

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removed 100,000 taels of silver from the land tax revenue to send to Shandong.155 According to the report of the Shandong provincial government, by the end of 1875 it had received the amounts assigned by the center from Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan, and the salt bureau of Lianghuai, which amounted to 1,200,000 taels of silver. For the rest of the 520,900 taels of silver that were in arrears from Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, Sichuan, and Henan provinces, the Shandong government decided to use its own revenue to cover this deficit and then reported it to the Board of Revenue; this amount would be deducted from spending assignments that the center would allocate to Shandong province in future.156 This decentralized fiscal operation, which combined central allocation of revenue and ad hoc measures taken by provincial governors to meet urgent assignment orders from the center, sustained state capacity in funding major repairs of large-scale hydraulic projects in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, the Qing state could take loans from foreign banks operating in China to meet the spending needs for public infrastructural facilities. For example, the breaching of the Yellow River at Zhengzhou in Henan province on September 29, 1887 affected nearly two million people in Henan and Anhui provinces. It took the Qing state two years to repair, at a total cost of some 11 million taels of silver. This included 2 million taels in short-term loans borrowed from the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation at an annual interest of 7 percent. The huge cost of repairing the breach forced the Board of Revenue in 1888 to temporarily suspend funds to the Navy for purchasing new warships. This policy was adopted during a time of peace in East Asia, when Japan was giving priority to renegotiating unequal treaties with Western powers. In the late nineteenth century, gentry participation in famine relief became even more extensive than their participation in water control projects. The reserves in the nationwide ever-normal granaries had been declining since the early half of the nineteenth century and suffered enormously during the Taiping Rebellion. The restoration of the state granaries had to start almost from scratch.157 The Qing state encouraged local 155 156 157

The memorial of Jiangxi provincial governor Liu Bingzhang, GX1/3/6 (April 11, 1875), GCMC-Guangxu-Water Control, Box 1, No. 22–23. The memorial of Shandong provincial governor Ding Baozhen, GX1/12/9 (January 5, 1876), GCMC-Guangxu-Water Control, Box 1, No. 85–86. Hoshi Ayao, Chu¯goku shakai fukushi seisakushi no kenkyu¯: Shindai no shinsaiso¯ o chu¯shin ni [History of social welfare policy in China] (Tokyo: Kokusho Kanko¯kai, 1985), 195.

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gentry to build and manage community or charity granaries in both rural and urban areas to provide relief to community members. The stocks of these nonstate charity granaries came mainly from extra duties in land taxes as well as donations from wealthier members of the community. These granaries were managed by gentry and their administration was independent of local officials. They proved to be more efficient than their state-run counterparts. The managers rotated their posts regularly and the bookkeeping records were subject to supervision by members of the community. The stocks of these communal granaries were a mixture of money and grain.158 Although their individual scale was small, the total amount of grain and money stored was impressive. The reserves in the Lower Yangzi Delta in the early 1870s were equivalent to some 1 million shi of grain.159 This was a significant resource for famine relief; it was equivalent to some 5 percent of the total stored grain in the state granaries. Between 1876 and 1879, global climate change caused severe calamities in China. Northern provinces had little rainfall for three years, while South China suffered from heavy rainfall and flooding.160 Northern provinces were badly prepared for this calamity. Many ever-normal granaries in Shanxi and Shaanxi were in fact empty when the disaster struck. The total casualties in North China between 1876 and 1879 were estimated to be between ten and twenty million. The misery of North China was reported by both domestic and foreign newspapers. Western missionaries raised donations in both China and abroad to provide relief.161 In the meantime, the gentry merchants in the Lower Yangzi Delta organized large-scale, cross-provincial campaigns of “charity relief” (yizhen). This was the first time in Qing history that famine relief provided by private charity organizations went beyond the provincial boundary.162 158

159 160

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Concern for their reputation in the community motivated gentry managers of these local granaries. For the details of various management methods, see Wu Siwu, Qingdai cangchu de zhidu kunjing yu jiuzai shijian, 137–94. Wu Siwu, Qingdai cangchu de zhidu kunjing yu jiuzai shijian, 195. See the larger context of global climate change in this period in Mike Davies, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York: Verso, 2001). Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), ch. 5. Li Wenhai, “Wan Qing yizhen de xingqi yu fazhan” [The rise and development of charity relief in late Qing], Qingshi yanjiu, no. 3 (1993): 27–35; Zhu Hu, “Jiangnanren zai Huabei: Cong wan Qing yizhen de xingqi kan difangshi lujing de kongjian juxian” [Jiangnan people in North China: The spatial limitations of the local history approach as seen from the rise of late Qing charity relief], Jindaishi yanjiu, no. 5 (2005): 114–48.

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The total relief funds raised through charity organizations in Suzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Yangzhou amounted to more than 1 million taels of silver. Moreover, private charity organizations under the leadership of gentry merchants such as Jing Yuanshan and Zhu Qi’ang directly distributed money and grain to more than one million people in Shandong, Henan, Shanxi, and Zhili. They not only attracted donations through advertising in newspapers such as Shenbao, but also made their bookkeeping accounts available for public supervision.163 The calls for donations in the Lower Yangzi Delta explicitly appealed to compassion for the victims as fellow “Chinese” (Zhongguo zhi ren) living in North China.164 The huge difficulties of transporting grain overland to North China also led to a consensus among officials and gentry on the importance of building railways to improve domestic welfare.165 Although the Qing state was waging expensive military campaigns on its northwestern frontiers in this period, it managed to provide significant government funds for famine relief. The total amount raised for Shanxi province alone amounted to more than 2 million taels of silver.166 After this disastrous famine in North China, Shanxi governor Zeng Guoquan in 1879 allocated 1 million taels of official funds for purchasing grain for the ever-normal granaries in Shanxi province. Their stocks reached some 800,000 shi in 1895. The grain reserved in granaries in Sichuan province in 1881 amounted to 553,000 shi. Similar efforts could be observed in other provinces such as Shandong, Zhili, and Hubei.167 To combat major famines in the late nineteenth century, both the Qing state and the charity organizations managed by gentry merchants jointly allocated enormous resources for cross-regional famine relief. This contrasted sharply with the dominance of the state in cross-provincial famine relief before 1840. Interactions between the state and gentry merchants in public goods provision also made the Qing state recognize the importance of taking care of the interests of merchants. Gentry merchants who had actively participated in charity provision and public works could

163 164 165

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167

Zhu Hu, “Jiangnanren zai Huabei,” 132. Zhu Hu, “Jiangnanren zai Huabei,” 136. Ho Hon-wai, Guangxu chunian (1876–1879) Huabei de dahanzai [The great drought in North China in the early Guangxu reign (1876–1879)] (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1980), ch. 5. It consisted of 15,779,961 taels of silver, 276,557,700 wen of copper coins, and 1,029,851 shi of grain. Ho Hon-wai, Guangxu chunian (1876–1879) Huabei de dahanzai, 81. Wu Siwu, Qingdai cangchu de zhidu kunjing yu jiuzai shijian, 212–15.

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have their grievances heard by the central government through memorials sent by provincial governors. For example, memorials from major tea-producing provinces often used the grievances of tea merchants to suggest that the center reduce the lijin duties on tea so that Chinese tea could compete with Indian or Japanese tea in international markets.168 The proclaimed benevolence of the Qing state as embodied in protecting domestic welfare continued to motivate subordinates to petition the state to redress their specific grievances, as they had before the early nineteenth century. However, crowd petitions remained subject to the brutal statute on rogues as before. For example, the collective petitions in Dongxiang county in Sichuan province in the 1870s against the collection of extra rates and corruption by local gentry were reported by the local magistrate as rebellion. The troops requested by the magistrate to suppress protestors conducted indiscriminate massacre and looting. Some forty-seven officials from Sichuan who were serving in Beijing urged the Qing government to thoroughly investigate the case. In the end, organizers of the collective protests in the county who lodged the capital appeal were sentenced to death, along with the county magistrate and the military commander.169 In the late nineteenth century, the Qing state continued to apply the statute on rogues to mete out capital punishment to organizers or ringleaders of crowd petitions prompted by local welfare grievances if they involved actions such as entering government offices, beating officials, or smashing government office property.170 One example suffices to illustrate. In Xiangshan county of Zhejiang province, the government in 1889 added three new lijin stations to collect duties on domestic opium produced in the county. A conflict broke out between the collecting commissioners and a peasant who went to market to sell opium. Bystanders destroyed the tables and chairs of the lijin station and more peasants came to petition the magistrate to abolish this lijin duty. A large crowd entered 168 169 170

He, Paths toward the Modern Fiscal State, 169. Guangyuan Zhou, “Illusion and Reality in the Law of the Late Qing: A Sichuan Case Study,” Modern China 19, no. 4 (October 1993): 427–56. For examples, see the following cases: exempting land taxes after heavy rainfall in Pinghu county of Zhejiang province in 1890 – the memorial of Zhejiang governor Songjun, GX16/ruan 2/29 (April 18, 1890), GCMC-Guangxu-Peasant Revolution, Box 38, No. 1123–27; stopping the shipping out of rice in Guangxi in 1895  – the memorial of Guangxi governor Zhang Liangui, GX21/7/21 (September 9, 1895), GCMC-GuangxuPeasant Revolution, Box. 40, No. 374–79; and in Hunan in 1888 – the memorial of Hunan governor Bian Baodi, GX14/6/12 (July 20, 1888), GCMC-Guangxu-Peasant Revolution, Box 38, No. 2106–8.

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the magistrate’s office and broke things. Two leaders of this crowd petition were decapitated, while the government abolished these three lijin checkpoints.171 The reaction of the Qing state toward crowd petitions justified by the terms of state legitimacy remained the same as before 1840. It showed benevolence by redressing the grievances through reducing the tax burden, providing relief, and punishing abusive local officials. Yet the ringleaders of crowd petitions were to be isolated from the majority of “innocent and ignorant” subjects and punished ruthlessly. The statute on rogues was even applied to peaceful collective protests against government policy. In Changchun, a prefecture in Jilin province, there was a merchant organization called Gongyihui that collected lijin duties from its members on behalf of the government. In 1892, the Jilin provincial government planned to replace this tax farming with government direct collection. Upon hearing the news, Li Luorong and Zu Luocu, two leaders of the Gongyihui, convened its members to discuss how to respond. They decided to use a market strike to pressure the government to repeal this policy. If it had no effect, they would send representatives to Beijing for a capital appeal, and the cost of the capital appeal would be distributed among all member merchants. Some 470 shopkeepers attended the meeting and stamped their business seals on the pledge of contributing funds to show their commitment. All shops closed in protest on the day after the opening of the lijin bureau. Government officials first tried to persuade the merchants to resume business, but members of Gongyihui could not reach an agreement on whether to end the strike or not. In consequence, government officials arrested the leading merchants. Although there were no riots, one leader was sentenced to death while thirteen people were punished by beating with a bamboo stick and exile, including a government clerk who had passed government information and documents to leaders of this market strike.172 The Qing state in the late nineteenth century illustrates the resilience of an early modern state that legitimated itself by protecting the public interest under new socioeconomic circumstances. The norms of state legitimacy continued to serve as a common platform for the state and social actors to work together in public goods provision, and the scale and organizational capacity of social participation in public welfare 171 172

The memorial of Zhejiang governor Songjun, GX16/10/4 (November 15, 1890), GCMC-Guangxu-Peasant Revolution, Box 38, No. 1128–34. The memorial of Changshun, GX18/10/19 (December 7, 1892), GCMC-GuangxuPeasant Revolution, Box 36, No. 3036–48.

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increased significantly. The Qing state viewed this expanding gentry involvement not as a political threat, but as a virtuous – and necessary – activity to be encouraged and rewarded. The gentry themselves also acknowledged the importance of the state in financing and maintaining large-scale public works. The state granted subordinates the right to petition the state to redress their grievances over specific welfare issues, as long as they did not take the form of crowd petitions. Collective petitions were permitted only if they sought impartial adjudication of the state over interregional or intersectoral clashing interests. In these aspects, little had changed compared to the pre-1840 period. Given the huge territory of China and the slow pace of industrial development compared with England, issues of welfare grievance would be unlikely to generate collective petitions that mobilized common stakeholders across regions or across sectors. In this situation, the emerging public sphere of newspapers and associations of gentry merchants alone would not lead to petitions of public grievances.173 Although there was no serious tension between the domestic and international dimensions of the public interest between 1870 and 1894, the international circumstances of China changed fundamentally after the sudden outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894, a war no one would have anticipated even in 1893. After China’s defeat, the Qing state lost Korea as its tributary, ceded Taiwan to Japan, and had to pay reparations of 230,000,000 taels of silver (equivalent to some three years’ government revenue). The annihilation of its modern navy made China more vulnerable to the aggression of Western powers: Germany in 1898 forced the Qing government to lease Qingdao for ninety-nine years. The Qing government was deeply divided over how to handle the crisis. The empress dowager Cixi supported Zhili governor-general Li Hongzhang’s plan to ally with Russia against Japan. The Guangxu emperor, however, promoted radical young officials such as Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong, and Liang Qichao, who advocated closer ties with Japan, even forming a confederate with Japan (hebang).174 Given the rivalry between Britain and Russia at the time, to ally with Russia would alienate Britain; while to ally with Japan implicitly entailed an alignment with Britain due to the secret alliance that Japan and Britain had agreed in 1894. 173

174

For studies of newspapers in late nineteenth-century China, see Rudolf G. Wagner, ed., Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870–1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). Mao Haijian, Wuxu bianfa shishikao [A detailed study of the historical facts of the Reforms of 1898] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2005), 463–68.

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The already thorny issue of foreign policy at this juncture was complicated by the power struggles between the empress dowager Cixi and the Guangxu emperor. When Cixi returned to power and put an end to the Hundred Days’ Reform implemented by radical officials in 1898, the Japanese and British governments helped Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao to flee to Japan, which made her suspicious that the Japanese and British governments were supportive of the emperor. However, Cixi’s plan to replace Guangxu with a new emperor was opposed by Western legations in Beijing; even the successor to Guangxu that Cixi designated was not accepted by Western powers. Cixi and the conservatives then attempted to exert pressure on Western countries by appealing to the xenophobic Boxers.175 In consequence, the allied forces of eight countries occupied Beijing in 1900 and imposed a punitive indemnity of 450 million taels of silver. This series of closely connected events between 1895 and 1900 ended with two huge indemnities that greatly affected the relationship between the Qing state and society. Foreign powers forced the Qing government to guarantee the timely payment of annual installments of indemnities, regardless of the fact that it involved dramatically reducing spending on domestic welfare and defense. Provincial governments whose annual income had been siphoned off by the center to pay indemnities had to find the means to pay for both normal governance and the implementation of the modernization programs requested by the center after 1901. As a result, people throughout China suffered from dramatically reduced government investment in domestic welfare and a greatly increased tax burden, as well as abuses in collection.176 Nonetheless, the enormous annual installments of indemnities that the Qing state had to pay to Western powers thence could be viewed as a 175

176

Zhou Yumin, “Jihai jianchu yu Yihetuan yundong” [The attempt to establish a crown prince in 1899 and the Boxer movement], Qingshi yanjiu, no. 4 (November 2000): 8–17. For interactions between the succession issue and the Qing court’s changing attitudes and strategies toward the Boxers, see Lin Huaguo, Yihetuan shishi kao [Research on the history of the Boxer Uprising] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1993); Sato¯ Kimihiko, Giwadan no kigen to sono undo: Chu¯goku minshu¯ nashonarizum no tanjo¯ [Origins of the Boxer Movement: The rise of Chinese popular nationalism] (Tokyo: Kenbun Shuppan, 1999), 390–96. On the rampant abuses in tax collection after 1900, see Susan Mann, Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy, 1750–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 155–62; Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1988), 60–66; Wei Qingyuan, Gao Fang, and Liu Wenyuan, Qingmo xianzhengshi [Late Qing constitutional history] (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1993), 268–69.

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proxy to the international dimension of public interest. In this natural experiment, we can test a counterfactual causal argument: countrywide mass petitions of public grievance that demanded fundamental political reforms, yet were justified by the state’s proclaimed duty to protect the public interest, would have occurred in late nineteenth-century China had China faced a conflict between the domestic and international dimensions of the public interest. The victory of Japan in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 and the increasing threat of uprisings and assassinations forced the Qing government to consider constitutional monarchy as an option. The promulgation of the imperial edict to establish a consultant institution (Zizhengyuan) on September 20, 1907 stimulated waves of well-organized collective petitions from various provinces. These petitions of public grievance were not about specific welfare grievances, but instead demanded the establishment of an elected parliament to safeguard the public interest. The associations of constitutionalists such as the Common Council for Preparing for Constitutionalism (yubei lixian gonghui) in Zhejiang province and merchant chambers such as the Autonomous Society of Cantonese Merchants (Yueshang zizhihui) in Guangdong province were involved in the organization of these collective petitions. The drafts were read in public assemblies with thousands of attendants; and for the final petitions to be lodged with Beijing, signatures were solicited from a wide range of society members. The total number of signatures in the three waves of nationwide petitions for establishing an elected parliament between 1907 and 1910 was over half a million.177 The contents of these petitions were also published in newspapers or printed as pamphlets to be distributed to a wider audience. The organizers were either officials or well-known gentry merchants. They did not challenge the authority of the Qing state, but appealed to its proclaimed obligation to safeguard the general interest in both domestic and foreign affairs. In the petition of 1910, representatives from sixteen provinces first convened in Shanghai to discuss the drafts of petitions. The finished petitions with signatures of representatives were then lodged with the central government. The petitions explicitly stated that policies of state debt (guozhai) and taxation should be made upon the deliberation of the elected parliament. Petitions to establish an elected parliament in both 1907 and 1910 were supported by Han and Manchu constitutionalists. 177

Hou Yijie, Qingmo guohui qingyuan fengyun [The storm of petitions for an elected parliament in the late Qing] (Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue chubanshe, 2015).

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Although the Qing government ordered the political associations to dissolve, in August of 1907 it officially promised to set up a constitutional monarchy within nine years. In 1909, a consulting institution of the central government (Zizhengyuan) was created in preparation for a future elected parliament. It consisted of both imperially appointed and provincially elected representatives. However, the Qing government in 1910 rejected the mass petition to establish an elected parliament within two years. This decision alienated the gentry, moderate reformers, and even many of the provincial governors. The Qing dynasty collapsed shortly afterward in the Republican Revolution of 1911.

5.4 Conclusion Great changes to public finance and significant economic development happened to varying degrees across England between 1640 and 1780, Japan between 1853 and 1895, and China between 1840 and 1895. However, the public interest-based discourse of state legitimation continued to serve as a common platform for state–society negotiation, collaboration, and contestation. Increasing economic integration and industrial development might generate new types of welfare grievances, but state– society collaboration in public goods provision and the engagement of social actors with the state over concrete welfare concerns remained much the same in terms of their political nature. The state in each case still showed no tolerance of collective protests or crowd petitions perceived as threats to social order, regardless of how carefully protestors justified their claims by the terms of state legitimacy. This is seen in the Riot Act in eighteenth-century England, the criminal law against collective protests adopted in Meiji Japan, and the continued enforcement of the statutes against rogues in Qing China. Nonetheless, social actors’ participation in public goods provision for domestic welfare was encouraged by each state. The scale of such participation and the organizational capacity of social actors in public goods provision did not necessarily threaten state authority as both sides agreed on the importance of public welfare. Meanwhile, the state continued to permit collective petitions seeking arbitration by the state of clashing interregional or intersectoral interests, which increased with industrial and urban development. The tolerance of the state toward such collective petitions could be accommodated by the paternalist ideologies of rule found in all three cases. Nevertheless, collective petitions over the redress of specific welfare grievances did not necessarily lead

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to demands for fundamental political changes, despite their dramatic increase in scale. In contrast, nonmaterial forms of the public good, such as true Christianity in England and the national honor in Japan, could mobilize petitions of public grievance across the country. In both countries, such issues led to acute conflict between the domestic and international dimensions of public interest. Should the greatly enhanced state capacity be devoted to improving domestic welfare or to fighting expensive foreign wars as in the case of England? Or to military expansion at the cost of domestic welfare as in the case of Japan? The collective petitions of public grievance that erupted in England after the 1760s and in Japan after the 1870s demanded fundamental political reforms: the Parliamentary reforms in England and the establishment of a National Diet in Japan. These movements were well organized and mobilized a large number of cross-regional and cross-sectoral participants. Their emergence greatly expanded the public sphere in which social actors formed associations, circulated drafts of petitions, and printed pamphlets and newspapers to influence the wider public. They thus marked the beginning of modern politics. These calls for political change and the growth of the public sphere were, however, not rejecting of state authority. Instead, they were still justified by the same public interest-based discourse of state legitimation, and were not yet for the most part inspired by the radical ideas of natural or citizen rights that we often associate with this political moment. China in the late nineteenth century provides a negative case that demonstrates the resilience of an early modern state that justified its power mainly through its protection of domestic welfare. Between 1870 and 1895, the Qing state had more fiscal resources to take care of infrastructural facilities than had been the case before 1840. Moreover, it encouraged social actors to expand their participation in public goods provision, including cross-provincial famine relief. Enhanced state capacity and state–society collaboration in public goods provision worked reasonably well to address welfare concerns and to secure Qing frontiers. As it did not adopt an aggressive strategy in international power struggles, it did not experience the conflict between safeguarding domestic welfare and fighting foreign wars. Although the Qing state proved unable to protect dependent states such as Vietnam and Ryu¯kyu¯, the damage that their loss as tributary states entailed to its legitimacy was minimal. These state–society collaborations thus resulted in a stable early modern state before the sudden outbreak of war with Japan in 1894.

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It was only the astronomical indemnities imposed on China after that war and the Boxer incident (1900) that generated cross-regional and cross-sectoral petitions of public grievance for the establishment of an elected parliament and a constitutional monarchy in the years between 1907 and 1910. Nonetheless, the two sets of reparations only serve as a proxy for the international dimension of public interest in a natural experiment for strengthening the causal argument made here. In practice, their magnitude greatly undermined state legitimacy by ruining its capacity to safeguard both domestic welfare and international status, which contributed to the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Had there been no war with Japan or Boxer reparations, this early modern state could have persisted for much longer.

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Conclusion Toward a Contextualized Comparative Historical Analysis

Warfare is not the only driving force of state formation, and the state is not simply a violent machine. As the preceding chapters have shown, state formation in England, China, and Japan was also propelled by safeguarding the public interest. This occurs first along the dimension of domestic welfare, and later extends to diverse and sometimes conflicting aspects of nonmaterial forms of public good. I identify across the three cases similar organic conceptions of public interest, each of which the respective state proclaimed its duty to protect. Consent to state authority was to a large extent based upon the subjects’ evaluation of the state’s performance in safeguarding that interest, as judged by particular projects and policies. Both the concept of public interest and the terms of state legitimacy are shown to be open to negotiation and contestation in specific circumstances. The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation thus connected state agents in the center and those in localities into one governing apparatus directed and coordinated by the center as the highest political authority. It provided a common basis for the interactions among state actors to attain good governance and thus strengthened state capacity. Meanwhile, it served as a common normative platform for the collaboration between state and social actors in public goods provision vital to domestic welfare. The specific forms varied, but the patterns of state–society collaboration remained the same. Importantly, they complemented the state’s limited fiscal capacity in domestic governance and the locality’s limited ability to provide crossregional large-scale public goods vital to domestic welfare and hence to governance. 243

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In early modern England and Tokugawa Japan, which exhibited a high degree of fiscal decentralization, the royal government and the shogunate as the highest political authority intervened to mobilize resources to provide large-scale public goods that went beyond the capacity of self-governed local communities, such as major repairs of harbors and buildings and maintenance of cross-regional hydraulic projects. In Qing China, where the state was equipped with a centrally managed yet rigid fiscal institution, the central government encouraged local communities and merchant organizations to participate in public goods provision. For public works that were too big for local communities to shoulder but too small for the Qing state to incorporate into its annual budget, official funds might be lent to social actors, as we see in the “people’s projects.” Neglecting these interactions makes it difficult to understand how domestic governance was maintained with very limited state fiscal capacity in Tudor and early Stuart England between 1533 and 1640, Tokugawa Japan between 1640 and 1853, and Qing China between 1684 and 1840. These two-directional collaborations between the state and society to provide public goods in domestic governance contributed to the stability of fiscally limited early modern states, even in the face of significant commercialization and social change. This stability was quite remarkable as long as the state was not involved in expensive foreign wars. Tied together by the organic conception of public interest, state and society could have a relationship that was to an important degree collaborative rather than purely confrontational or competitive. Such a conception of public interest was also dynamic, as it could accommodate new types of interests and welfare concerns generated by commercial and industrial development. State capacity is therefore determined neither by social origin nor by state autonomy alone, but is tied to the interactions between state and society that take place upon the shared normative basis of state legitimacy. Historically, the enhancement of state capacity did not necessarily depend upon the consent of local communities, as suggested in the theories of the social origins of state power. Indeed, the state’s involvement in large-scale public works often needed to overcome the narrower interests of local communities to secure the welfare of a larger region or population. The state justification of the welfare of wider regions or even the whole realm as prevailing over local or segmental interests also prompted local communities or particular social groups to present claims related to their specific welfare concerns as integral components of the public interest. The consent of social actors to state power was thus to a large extent

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a constructive process of negotiation and sometimes contestation upon the same normative platform shared by all parties. This process was of course constrained by a serious asymmetry of power and information between state and social actors. The state could disguise abuses of power or policies favorable to certain social classes in the name of serving the public interest of the realm. When the degree of economic and political integration was low, it was difficult for social actors in different regions or different sectors to organize collectively to pursue a common interest. When the interests of a local community and a wider region clashed, the local community was often at a disadvantage in bargaining with a state that possessed more information collected by its agents across the territory and reported to the center. Despite this disparity, we should not underestimate the willingness and ability of social actors to contest the meaning of public interest in the context of specific welfare problems and the contribution of such state–society negotiation and contestation to stability in domestic governance. Nor was the development of state capacity simply a result of competition between an assertive civil society and the state. Instead, there is a complementary effect between state intervention and societal participation in public goods provision. The general welfare of the realm served as a normative basis for the state to encourage local notables, gentry, or private merchants to participate in particular aspects of domestic governance. The increasing ability of society to maintain large communal granaries or invest in public works of flood control, for example, reduced the burden on the state. Moreover, even a resourceful and assertive civil society still had to seek help from the state in large-scale public goods provision and conflict mediation. This complementary relationship was a learning process: Both state and social actors had to figure out how to resolve new clashes of interest that emerged in economic development. Neither a society-centered nor a state-centered approach can capture this complex interactional relationship between state and society. More importantly, the norms of state legitimacy cast new light on understanding the relationship between state and society in both state formation and state transformation. In all these three cases, the organic conception of public interest permitted the expression of specific welfare interests of particular segments or communities: The health of the “body politic” was inseparable from the wellbeing of its components. Upon that common normative basis, state and social actors interacted constantly over how to provide public goods to safeguard the general interest of the realm. Claim-making to the authorities – through peaceful petitions,

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riots, or protests – represented an important opportunity for political participation for subordinates in the hierarchical societies of early modern England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. Nonetheless, the terms by which ordinary subjects could negotiate with the ruling authority were strictly defined by the state. In each case it was hostile to crowd petitions; these were perceived as threats to social order and organizers were punished severely. All three states, however, tolerated organized collective petitions concerning cross-regional or cross-segmental clashes of interest. Both sides in such disputes requested impartial arbitration from the state as the guardian of the public interest. While such impartiality might not always be forthcoming, that too could be contested by social actors. Moreover, the relative tolerance of the state for this type of collective petition meant that this political space could expand as economic and industrial development generated more conflicts of interest across regions and social segments. The cases studies presented here have documented the complex and multifaceted interactions that took place between state and society upon the common platform of a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. This normative basis provided a limited yet significant space for political participation when formal political representation remained highly restricted or did not exist. Importantly, the active participation of social actors in public goods provision in these three early modern states was not perceived as a potential threat by the state. Instead, the state authorities encouraged the development of the organizational and financial abilities of social actors in such provision. Bargaining, negotiation, and even contestation between social and state actors over how to safeguard the public interest in specific, concrete circumstances were thus permitted. Political participation by social elites in public goods provision and through commoners’ collective petitions or protests thus by no means implied a rejection or defiance of state authority. Furthermore, even if such demands increased dramatically in number and scale, they were still over specific welfare grievances and did not necessarily escalate into demands for fundamental political changes. Therefore, increasing participation in and of itself does not necessarily imply a gradual accumulation of social forces that will ultimately undermine or overthrow the state. Instead, the collapse of these state–society interactions in domestic governance and subsequent serious threats to state legitimacy were mainly due to the state’s own failure to fulfill its basic duty in protecting the public interest. We see this occur with the early modern English state during the severe religious strife of the early

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1640s that challenged the Church of England as the public good; with the shogunate in a hyperinflationary economy after 1858; and with the Qing state in a situation of chronic domestic deflation between the 1830s and 1850s. The recovery and enhancement of state capacity are therefore necessary conditions for the resumption of state–society interactions over public goods provision. Nevertheless, these states with enhancing capacities remained hostile to crowd protests or petitions that were perceived as challenging the state authority or threatening the hierarchical social order: the 1715 Riot Act; the Meiji penal laws; and the continuance of the Statutes against Rogues in Qing China until 1911. However, when the state improved its fiscal capacity and society underwent significant commercial and industrial development, we observe two kinds of expansion in political participation. Both were justified by the state’s duty to protect the public interest, yet their political nature differed greatly. One represented strong continuity from the early modern state. Economic and social elites continued to participate in public goods provision, collaborating with the state over infrastructural facilities and securing the food supply in times of food crisis; their organizational and financial capacities increased significantly, as shown by the enormous amount of resources that gentry merchants in the Lower Yangzi Delta mobilized for North China famine relief in the late 1870s. Meanwhile, the subjects continued to demand that the state safeguard the public interest by redressing their specific welfare grievances and by impartially arbitrating interregional or intersegmental disputes that came to involve ever larger populations. With economic and industrial development, these petitions grew significantly in number and scale. Many were responses to new welfare problems such as working conditions in factories, industrial unemployment, and pollution. However, increases in the scale and organizational capacity of such petitions or contentious collective actions do not necessarily constitute a political threat. Because they continued to center on concrete welfare grievances, the state could, as before, redress welfare grievances and mitigate hardship though making new social policies. The state could thus still tolerate such collective petitions; examples of acceptable petitions include those lodged by English workers in the late eighteenth century or by victims of industrial pollution in Meiji Japan. The political nature of state–society interactions over domestic welfare remained essentially the same as in the early modern era. In contrast, the rise of collective petitions of public grievance in both England and Japan represented a qualitatively different form of political

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participation. Such petitions centered on nonmaterial issues of public interest, such as “true Christianity” in England or “national honor” in Japan, mobilized a large number of people across each country, and went further than their predecessors to call for fundamental reforms in the state. They did not, however, reject the state authority; their demands were still justified by the shared public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. Such collective petitions of public grievance arose in special historical contexts in each country. Nonetheless, these nonmaterial issues concerning the public interest engendered serious conflicts between the international and domestic dimensions of public interest, which is of general significance and could apply to cases other than England and Japan. As centralization of public finance greatly enhanced the capacity of both the English and the Meiji states, the connection between public finance and the welfare concerns of society became clearly recognizable to a wide range of social actors. Ordinary people in both England and Japan knew that their heavy tax burden was caused by highly regressive indirect consumption taxes, which formed the major pillar of public finance. In eighteenth-century England, state actors could hardly use the protection of the public interest to justify rampant corruption in government and military spending and a regressive tax structure that taxed property and capital lightly but ordinary consumers heavily. The state could not simply dismiss the criticism that such public finance was unfair and detrimental to the general welfare. In Japan in the 1880s, serious underinvestment by the government in domestic welfare had negative impacts across the country, a fact that was widely recognized at the time. This underinvestment contrasted sharply with the steadily increasing military spending from 1882 onward. Although each state justified massive government spending on foreign wars or on military expansion as protecting the international dimension of public interest, social actors could point to the domestic dimension to demand tax reduction, elimination of corruption, and increased expenditure on domestic welfare. The primary means to achieve these goals would be through fundamental political changes and reforms: to make Parliament more representative in England by reforming parliamentary elections, or to establish an elected parliament in Japan to incorporate “public opinion” into policymaking and to make public finance more accountable to domestic needs at a time when Japan was not threatened by foreign invasion. Such contentious claim-making over general issues of public interest did not resist state authority, but was justified by the state’s duty to protect the public interest in new circumstances. However, it greatly

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stimulated the development of cross-regional and cross-segmental associations, the organizational capacities of petitioners, and the broader development of the public sphere as newspapers and printed pamphlets took up these issues. In this negotiation and contestation, we observe the expansion of two different kinds of public sphere. In one kind, state and social actors negotiated over how to better redress specific welfare grievances in concrete circumstances; in the other, social actors contested fundamental political reforms to better safeguard the public interest. Despite still being justified by the terms of state legitimacy, the rise of large-scale petitions of public grievance represented a great political divergence in the transition from early modern to modern state. This divergence occurred at a time when radical demands for political change based in a notion of active individual rights either were not yet influential among ordinary people or were suppressed by the state, as seen by the English government’s deep hostility to active rights-based political demands linked with the French Revolution. The dynamic described here sheds new light on the expansion of political participation at a time when theories of active individual rights and a democratic understanding of popular sovereignty did not yet have widespread social influence. The historical contexts of England between 1640 and 1780 and Japan between 1853 and 1895 are indeed unique. However, there is no hint of “exceptionalism.” Instead, I would argue, their shared pattern attests to the general implications of the conflict between domestic and international dimensions to the expansion of political participation and state transformation. In China in the late nineteenth century, by contrast, there was neither a nonmaterial issue of public interest nor a pressing tension between the international and domestic dimensions of public interest to mobilize cross-regional and cross-segmental mass petitions of public grievances. Political participation by gentry merchants, local literati elites, and common subjects did show an increasing degree of organizational capacity and resources, but it remained tied to specific issues of welfare and for the most part complemented state efforts in public goods provision. Prior to the imposition of enormous indemnities in 1895 and again in 1900, the Qing state showed the remarkable resilience of an early modern state that legitimated its power primarily through protecting domestic welfare. The relative underdevelopment of civil society or of a public sphere is thus not the reason for the absence of fundamental political reform in China before 1895. On the contrary, it was the absence of serious conflict among diverse dimensions of the public interest that the state was

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obligated to protect. Such a conflict constitutes the necessary condition for mobilizing cross-regional and cross-sectoral actors to engage with the state over general issues of public interest through associations and mass media, and thence the great expansion of the public sphere. The rise of cross-regional collective petitions of public grievances that demanded the establishment of an elected parliament between 1907 and 1910 shows that China is not a case of “exceptionalism.” The contextualized comparative historical analysis presented here thus demonstrates both continuity and discontinuity in the transformation from early modern to modern state. The nature of political participation in the early modern era was not parochial or local, but had general implications. Popular petitions over specific welfare grievances, even where they showed the increase in scale emphasized by Charles Tilly, did not represent a qualitatively different form of popular contention. Discontinuity in popular contentious politics is reflected rather in the rise of collective petitions of public grievance, whose growing scale and organizational capacity greatly stimulated the development of a public sphere as well as associational activities and public assemblies. Such discontinuity is not a linear result of the accumulation of political participation over time in the forms of contentious collective actions and petitioning for redress of specific welfare grievances. Contextualization is therefore a crucial component in comparative historical analysis in social science. State formation, the example at hand, is inherently a temporal process, spanning decades or even centuries. The nature of the state varies greatly in the different historical contexts that constitute this process; for example, proto-state, early modern state, and modern state. In the first, the ruler’s use of political power could be quite personal and the degree of institutionalization of government remains low. In the early modern state, the ruler was constrained by relatively well-developed political institutions, as well as by a large volume of written documents and archives that were indispensable to the making of government policies, and which went beyond the ability of any individual ruler to handle. As a result of the increasing institutionalization of government, the ruler as a public figure (the rulership) became separate from the ruler as a private person, and the public duty of an administrative office came to be held as distinct from the private interest of officeholders, at least in principle if not always in practice. The political nature of the state as an impersonal governing apparatus over a delimited territory in the early modern state persisted into the modern state, which possesses centralized institutions of public

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finance and a full-grown bureaucracy. The modern state thence has a much greater fiscal capacity and the institutional ability to regulate the economy and provide a wider range of social welfare to its citizens than did its predecessors. Meanwhile, the boundary between public duty and private interest of officials becomes more clearly drawn. Still, considering the fundamental differences in the political nature and institutional features of state across proto-, early modern, and modern states, we should not assume a linear or teleological trajectory leading from one stage to another. Each is like a different paradigm in the sense described by Thomas Kuhn for scientific revolutions. Although Western European historical experiences have shaped much of our understanding of this process of state formation, the process is of course not unique to that part of the world. From a comparative standpoint, for example, the early modern state exemplified by England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be found in China after the tenth century and Japan after the late seventeenth century, and perhaps in other places as well. This raises the question of why and how the modern state first emerged in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century, and not elsewhere. Guided by the conventional comparative methodology, scholars not unreasonably look for causal factors that exist only in Western Europe to explain the rise of the modern state. Candidates include individualism; a conception of individual rights upon which the contractual relationship between the individual and the state is developed; representative institutions such as a parliament that effectively defend private property rights against the encroachment of the state; or contentious social movements that demand general citizen rights. However, the danger in such efforts is anachronism: One may project concepts back into history to explain political changes that occurred at times in which these concepts were not yet available to historical actors. As this book has tried to show, “rights” in the early modern period were mostly understood in passive terms; that is, as derived from the obligation of the state to protect the public interest. Active conceptions of rights as inalienable to individuals independent of the state are quite different. The “people” as the passive beneficiary of the state’s protection had no right to command the sovereign to make changes, nor to change the sovereign. This contrasts sharply with the more assertive “people” as an assembly of individuals with inalienable rights that possess the power to set the terms of the state in modern liberal democracies. The stress on the role of popular sovereignty in contentious politics by Charles Tilly or the use of general citizen rights by Margaret Somers

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are  highly illuminating to understand the relationship between contention and democracy from the late nineteenth century on. Their work has stimulated much further research (including my own). However, to apply  the modern conception of rights and popular sovereignty to understand the rise of modern politics and liberal democracy implicitly assumes that the transformation of the state results from the resistance or defiance of society. Accordingly, the driving force of state transformation is identified in society: class in Marxian theory; the development of a public sphere and increasing scale of contentious collective actions in the scholarship of contentious politics; or the taming of the state by propertied elites in neoclassical political economy. However, these diverse strands of theory share the view of a fundamentally confrontational relationship between state and society in the predemocratic past, as well as in contemporary nondemocratic countries. They tend to overlook how key concepts such as rights might be differently used in early modern states. Inadequate attention to the heterogeneous historical contexts intrinsic to even a single temporal process of state formation in one country such as pre-nineteenth-century England can be a major source of bias in comparative historical analysis. How to balance the deep investigation of specific historical contexts and building general theory in social science is always a big challenge. Comparative studies paying inadequate attention to complexity in historical context often take two forms. The first derives a theoretical insight by studying a case with which the researcher is relatively familiar. It then either explicitly or implicitly determines the direction of investigation of other cases of which the same researcher possesses relatively less contextualized knowledge. Instead of putting the cases in dialogue with each other, historical materials from the less familiar cases are often selected to fit the theory derived from the first, most familiar case. This imbalance leads to a biased conclusion. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is a classic (and still influential) example. Barrington Moore was obviously much more familiar with English history, and his case study of Japan depended on the limited Englishlanguage scholarship available to him at the time. While highlighting the contribution of commercialized agriculture to the rise of democracy in England, he failed to recognize the great development of commercialization in agriculture in Japan from the late eighteenth century onward. The imbalance of contextual knowledge of the cases being compared thus leads to a lack of further investigation that could be more fruitful to theory-building.

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The second form is often seen in quantitatively oriented comparative studies. Once a dataset coded from various countries has been prepared, it becomes the empirical basis of theoretical exploration. Too little attention is paid to reexamining the historical context that generated the raw materials from which the data is being coded, particularly in light of new historical scholarship. For example, quantitative comparative studies of state capacity rely heavily upon annual taxation and expenditures recorded by the central government. Such data, however, should be viewed against the institutional contexts of tax extraction and allocation of state spending. The amounts recorded by the central government may not properly reflect the true quantity of fiscal resources being mobilized by the state in practice. As we saw in our examination of famine relief and public works, a large portion of the resources that these early modern states mobilized from society for public goods provision were not recorded at the central level. Neglect of such resources leads to serious underestimation of state capacity in concrete historical contexts. In order to understand the underlying causal mechanism of a given instance of state formation, we need to carefully examine different meanings of key concepts as they were understood by contemporaneous historical actors. Context becomes even more important when our analysis involves multiple historical cases in different times and places. From the perspective of theory-building, a more deeply contextualized examination of the cases can provide a more solid empirical basis not only to test theoretical hypotheses, but also to question well-established paradigms in social science. To do so, historical studies and social scientific research should keep up with the advancing scholarship on both sides of the disciplinary divide. The basic theoretical models of state formation are derived from creative interpretation of historical materials. For example, Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol fruitfully explored how fighting foreign wars would have divergent impacts on the development of state capacity, ranging from building a strong state to the collapse of the state under the pressure of foreign threat. The historical studies upon which this exploration was based, however, were those studies available to them at the time. But historical scholarship, like history itself, does not stop. A lack of continuous engagement with that evolving historical scholarship risks turning dynamic theories into fixed doctrines. One effective way to avoid the ontological fallacy caused by limited knowledge of cases is not to detach empirical materials from their original historical contexts, but to actively engage with the advancing

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historical scholarship. This means not only a thorough and careful reading of the secondary historical scholarship, but also an examination of primary historical materials when necessary. A deep historical exploration is therefore important to theory-building in comparative historical analysis. Instead of applying ideas that were not available to actors in these specific times and places, we should examine carefully each political process to construct state legitimacy in those respective historical contexts and understand the behavior of historical actors in the terms they themselves used. Where do we go after this long journey of comparative historical analysis of early modern England, Japan, and China? First, we can look for other states that legitimate their power by safeguarding the public interest of the realm. Are similar patterns of state–society collaboration in public goods provision in domestic governance found in those cases? Have other specific nonmaterial issues of public interest mobilized crossregional and cross-sectoral political participation to demand fundamental political reforms? To test the external validity of the causal account developed in this book requires deep contextualized comparative analysis of further cases. Second, what is the relationship between the kinds of expansion of informal political participation described here and the development of formal representation? This study has argued that any such relationship is not linear, but it leaves open the question of what form it might take. Did political participation justified by passively conceived rights influence political movements that appeal to actively conceived rights? What are the connections, if any, between that older tradition and a politics grounded in inalienable individual rights or human rights that not only demands changes in the basic political system, but also reconceptualizes state legitimacy and popular sovereignty? These questions await future research. Finally, both performance-based legitimacy and organic conceptions of public interest are found in many contemporary authoritarian regimes. Such states legitimate their power not by fair and competitive democratic elections, but by public goods delivery in domestic governance. They in principle reject actively conceived citizen rights or human rights that are held to exist independent of the state. Nonetheless, the discourse of state legitimation in these authoritarian regimes still entails the passively conceived rights of subordinates to use collective action to remind the state to make good on its proclaimed duty. It is not surprising, then, that authoritarian states can allow and even encourage the participation of social actors in specific forms of public

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goods provision – even to the point of accepting well-organized and wellfunded civil organizations – as long as these organizations focus only on delivering public goods necessary for domestic welfare. Examples include Francoist Spain and contemporary China. Such states can respond to petitions regarding specific welfare grievances, even though leaders of these sorts of organized petitions would be singled out for punishment (if not for death), as shown in the literature on contentious politics in contemporary China. An authoritarian state may try to portray itself as an impartial protector of the public interest when arbitrating between different regions or different social segments over specific welfare disputes. It may promote an ideology of social harmony in which local communities or groups willingly subsume their interests for the wider welfare or the general interest of the country. Such ideologies may even find a certain degree of acceptance among the populace. One prediction that may be derived from this book is that as long as there is no serious tension among diverse aspects of public interest, an authoritarian state that legitimates its power primarily through domestic public goods provision can be quite stable. Such a state may have a reasonably good performance in public goods provision, yet not tolerate any challenge to its authority made upon the basis of actively conceived human rights. In this situation, the development of political participation, civil associations, and a public sphere over specific welfare grievances would be unlikely to go beyond the boundaries set by the terms of the public interest-based discourse by which the authoritarian state legitimates itself. We should therefore not assume that increasing participation in a well-governed authoritarian regime would necessarily lead to political transformation of that state. There is no teleological or unilinear trajectory from participation over specific welfare concerns to popular demands for fundamental political reforms. The patterns of state–society interactions grounded in a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation examined here can thus be further applied to study the resilience and limits of contemporary authoritarian regimes.

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Bibliography

Abbreviations APC GCMC PM QSL

Acts of the Privy Council Grand Council Memorial Copies Palace Memorials Qing shilu

Unpublished Archives Grand Council Memorial Copies (军机处录副奏折) [GCMC], microfilm copies preserved in the Fu Ssu-nien Library, Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei. Palace Memorials in the reigns of the Jiaqing and Daoguang emperors (嘉庆朝-道 光朝宫中朱批奏折) [PM-Jiaqing and PM-Daoguang], copies preserved in the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei. Home Office Records (HO), 55/4/6, National Archives, London.

Published Primary Materials Acts of the Privy Council [APC], access through Privy Council of England, Acts, British History Online. Gongzhongdang Guangxuchao zouzhe 宮中檔光緒朝奏摺 [Palace memorials of the Guangxu reign]. Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1973–1975. Gongzhongdang Qianlongchao zouzhe 宫中檔乾隆朝奏摺 [Palace memorials of the Qianlong reign]. Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1982–1987. History and Proceedings of the House of Commons. Vol. 3, 1695–1706. London: Printed for Richard Chandler, 1742. Hennen hyakusho¯ ikki shiryo¯ shu¯sei 編年百姓一揆史料集成 [A compilation of Ikki documents]), edited by Aoki Ko¯ji and supplemented by Hosaka Satoru. 19 Volumes. Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo¯, 1979–1997. 257

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Index

Acemoglu, Daron, 3, 14 Act for Relief of the Poor, England (1596), 110–11 Act for the Punishment of Unlawful Assemblies, England (1549), 149 active rights, 6–11 collective actions and, 6–7 individual entitlement and, 6 natural, 6–7 protests and, 6–7 adjudication, 21, 40, 67–68, 136, 154, 172, 179–80 Aikokusha (Society of Patriots), 219–22 “all under Heaven”, 50. See also tenka; tianxia alternate attendance (sankin kōtai), 48 assize, 45, 111–12 Association movement, 210–11 autonomy, of state consent and, 18 state legitimacy and, 18 in Tudor/Stuart England, 42–43 bellicist approach, to state formation, 11–14 Bendix, Reinhard, 16 benevolent rule in Meiji Restoration government, 213, 227 during Qing dynasty, 59 redress of grievances and, 169 in Tokugawa regime, 49 public interest as core of, 50–51 redress of grievances under, 160, 162

subsistence crisis during, 81 block association (machi kaisho), 88, 90–91, 93 Board of Revenue (Hubu), 59, 63–64, 127, 130, 132, 133, 231–32 body politic, in Tudor/Stuart England, 38, 45 Bohstedt, John, 69 Book of Orders, in Tudor England, 43 during subsistence crisis, 76–77, 79–80 Boxer Incident, 33, 195, 242 Braddick, Michael, 25, 45 Brooks, Christopher, 47 capacity, of state, 1–2. See also specific states centralization of public finance, 248 comparative historical analysis of, 243–55 determining criteria for, 244–45 expansion of petition system, 247–49 measurement of, 20 public goods and, 245 capital appeal, 67–68, 177, 179–80, 236 Censorate, 174–75 changpingcang. See ever-normal granaries Charles I (King), 147, 188–89 Charles II (King), 197–98, 203–204 Charter Oath (1868), 223 chihō jichi (local self-governance), 224 chihōzei (local taxes), 220–21 China. See also Qing dynasty Boxer Incident, 33, 195, 242

299

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009334525.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

300 China (cont.) ever-normal granaries, 88–89, 95–97, 99, 103–106, 232–33 debates over, 62 First Sino-Japanese War, 33, 195, 227, 237 formation of modern state in, 27–30 institutionalization of state, 29 gongzhi tianxia, 28 guojia in, 26–28 infrastructural facilities in, 1 Ming dynasty, 49–50 Mongol invasion of, 29 Northern Song dynasty, 28–29 petitions in, 31, 237 political context in, from 1840–1911, 228–40 famine relief programs, 232–33 foreign policy, 238 infrastructural issues, 230–32 Lijin duties, 194, 228–32, 235–36 state-society collaboration, 229 Spring and Autumn period, 37 Taiping Rebellion and, 31, 192 Tang dynasty, 27–29 White Lotus Rebellion, 30 China proper, Qing dynasty and, 59 chō (traditional unit of area), 81 Church of England, 24, 39, 189–90, 195, 196, 204–206 citizen’s rights, in Tudor/Stuart England, 42–43 civil society, 14, 245, 249–50 Cixi (Empress Dowager), 237 claim-making, 9, 245–46, 248 collective actions, active rights and, 6–7 common good. See also public good definition of, 4 public interest and, 4 in Tudor/Stuart England, 39, 40 common law traditions, in Tudor/Stuart England, 42 “commonweal,” 19 in Tudor/Stuart England, 40 subsistence crisis and, 76 commonwealth, 19 in Tokugawa regime, 51 in Tudor/Stuart England, 40, 42, 45 conflicts of interests, 47, 53, 60, 67, 77, 146, 169 consent, state autonomy and, 18

Index constitutional monarchy, 195, 216–18, 222–23, 239, 240 constitutionalist regimes, 13 continental radicalism, 7 Counter-Reformation era, wars during, 6 customs duties, 194, 208–209 daimyo, 26–27, 47–52, 55 infrastructure financing and, 117–27 redress of grievances and, 158–69 subsistence crisis and, 81–89 Declaration of Rights (England) (1688), 205 Defoe, Daniel, 205 despotic states, 13 dikes. See minnian domain state, Tokugawa regime as, 55, 56 domestic welfare capacity for warfare compared to, 1–2 in early modern state, 188 in Meiji Restoration government, 214 during Qing dynasty, 59–60 in Tokugawa regime, 53–54 in Tudor/Stuart England, 7–8, 41, 76–77 Dover harbor, 114–15, 202 drainage projects, 156–58 dredging projects in Qing dynasty, 130–31, 135, 139, 178 in Tokugawa regime, 17, 85–86, 93, 120 in Tudor England, 113 Dutch Learning, 57 early modern state. See also China; England; Japan analysis of, 240–42 domestic welfare in, 188 popular sovereignty in, 187 public interest in, 185–88 Elizabeth (Queen), 149 Elton, G. R., 24–25 Elyot, Thomas (Sir), 40 enclosure anti-enclosures, 44, 148, 150–51 Commons bill on, 200–203 dikes, 135 disputes over, 148, 150, 154–55 in Edo Castle, 125, 126 England. See also Stuart England; Tudor England Declaration of Rights (1688), 205 formation of modern state in, 25, 30–31

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Index Glorious Revolution in, 31, 193, 204–205 political instability after, 198 infrastructural facilities in, 1 Nine Years War, 204–205 nonmaterial public good in, 32 petitions in, 10, 189–90, 196–97, 200–202, 210–11 political context in, from 1640–1780, 196–211 Association movement and, 210–11 Charles II and, 197–98 food riots and, 198–200 after Glorious Revolution, 198 parliamentary responses, 201–203, 210 over Protestant movements, 196, 204–205 rise of patriotism and, 208–209 Septennial Act, 206 state legitimacy in, 195 tax burden in, 1 before Thirty Years War, 188–90 Triennial Act, 206 Whigs, 206–208 English Civil War, 30, 41 Ertman, Thomas, 13 ever-normal granaries (changpingcang), 88–89, 95–97, 99, 103–106, 232–33 debates over, 62 excises, 193–94, 206 anti-excises, 208–209 Department of Excises, 207 famine relief in China, 232–33 during Qing dynasty, 94, 103–104 state-society relationships and, 105–106 during Tokugawa regime, 83, 84, 87, 89–90 during Kan’ei famine, 83, 84 during Tempō famine, 92–94, 126 during Tenmei famine, 88–89, 94 in Tokugawa regime, during Kan’ei famine, 49–51 First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), 33, 195, 227, 237 food riots, 78, 151–53 in England, 198–200 forced loans, 163, 189 foreign warfare, capacity for domestic welfare and, 1–2

301

Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, 221–26 French Revolution, 7 general welfare. See domestic welfare George III (King), 209 Glorious Revolution, 31, 193, 204–205 gongzhi tianxia, 28 goods. See common good; public good gōso (crowd petitions), 161, 163 Gramsci, Antonio, 18 Grand Canal, 61, 127, 130–31, 174–78 Grand Council (Junjichu), 61–62 Great Domestic Peace, in Tokugawa regime, 25, 48–49, 52 Great Yarmouth, 202 grievances, state’s redress of conceptual approach to, 145–46 through petitions in Qing dynasty, 169–71, 177–79 during Tokugawa regime, 159–60, 164–69 in Tudor/Stuart England, 153–55 as public interest, 180–82 in Tudor/Stuart England, 147, 155–56 in Qing dynasty, 169–80 benevolent rule ideology, 169 for hydraulic projects, 173–77 through petitions, 169–71, 177–79 statute against rogues, 169–70 during subsistence crisis, 171–73 during Tokugawa regime, 158–69 benevolent rule ideology and, 160, 162 daimyo authority and, 158–69 increased literacy as influence on, 159 peasant resistance and, 164 through petitions, 164–60 rice riots, 160–61 shogunate system and, 158–69 in Tudor/Stuart England, 146–58 under Act for the Punishment of Unlawful Assemblies, 149 food riots, 151–53 through petitions, 153–55 protests and rebellions, 147–51 as public interest, 147, 155–56 role of Privy Council, 155–56 gunchū gijō (regulations made by representatives from assemblies of village headmen), 166–67

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302

Index

gunchū sōdai (representatives selected from among the village headmen), 166–67 guojia (the state) (China), 26–28 Qing dynasty, 59 Habermas, Jürgen, 21 Heavenly Mandate, Qing dynasty and, 58–60 Henry VIII (King), 24–25, 39 Hintze, Otto, 13 Hobbes, Thomas, 19 Hoshina Masayuki, 83–84 Hubu. See Board of Revenue humanism Christian, 37 civic, 40, 71 Confucian, 37 Hundred Days’ Reform, 238 Hung Ho-Fung, 68 hyakkajō. See One Hundred Articles ikki (popular protests), 53, 165–66 imperial state, Tokugawa regime as, 57 inclusive institutions, 14 inclusive state, 14 incorporated towns and boroughs, 41–43, 72 inflation in England, 39–40, 43, 44 in Japan, 220–21, 223–24 infrastructural power, 12 in China, 1 creation of, 15 in England, 1 in Japan, 1 management of, 15 infrastructure, financing of conceptual approach to, 107–108 state legitimacy and, 142–44 in Tokugawa regime, 115–27 daimyo authority, 117–27 kuniyaku-fushin, 118, 120–24 through rice tax, 116–17 shogunate coordination of, 117–27 water control projects, 17, 85–86, 93, 117, 120–24 in Tudor/Stuart England, 108–15 Act for Relief of the Poor (1596), 110–11 drainage projects, 156–58 dredging projects, 113

Privy Council and, 109–15 under statute of Parliament (1531), 108–109 interest of the people. See mineki inter/intraregional grain trade, during Qing dynasty, 100–101, 106 irrigation in China, 116, 129–31, 139, 173, 175–76, 178–79 in Japan, 50, 54, 80–81, 83–84, 166 Itagaki Taisuke, 219–20 James I (King), 60 James II (King), 193, 203–204 Japan. See also Meiji Restoration government; Tokugawa regime First Sino-Japanese War, 33, 195, 227, 237 infrastructural facilities in, 1 kōgi yoron, 211 Meiji Restoration, 31–32, 211–28 Nativist Learning, 57, 190–91 nonmaterial public good in, 32 after Perry arrival, 190–91 political systems in, 211–28 Russo-Japanese War, 227–28, 239 tax burden between 1890–1895, 1 Jessop, Bob, 18 Junjichu. See Grand Council Justices of the Peace (JPs), in Tudor/Stuart England, 43–45, 75–76 Kan’ei famine, 49–51 Kang Youwei, 237 Kataoka Kenkichi, 223 Kawamura Zuiken, 117 kōgi (public authority), 51 kōgi yoron (public deliberation/discussion), 211 kokka (the state) (Japan), 26–27 koku (measure of dry capacity), 15, 81, 84 kokueki (the state interest), 56, 165 kokugaku. See Nativist Learning kokuso (province-wide petitions), 165 Kōno Hironaka, 223 Kubota Jirō, 217 Kuhn, Philip, 29 kuniyaku-fushin (public works based on province-wide levy), 118, 120–24 land taxes during Qing dynasty, 96

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Index during Tokugawa regime, 80–81 legitimacy, of the state analysis of, 68 in classical Marxist scholarship, 17–18 conceptual approach to, 37–39 in England, 195 infrastructure financing and, 142–44 procedure-based, 16–17 public interest and, 4 during Qing dynasty, 58–68 source-based, 16 state autonomy and, 18 during Tokugawa regime, 47–58 in Tudor/Stuart England, 39–47 legitimation, 16 public interest and, 19, 21 of the state, public interest and, 4 Liang Qichao, 237 liberal democracies. See specific topics Lijin duties, 194, 228–32, 235–36 Lincolnshire Uprising, 147 literacy rates during Qing dynasty, 66 in Tokugawa regime, 53 redress of grievances influenced by, 159 Lower Yangzi Delta, 228–29, 233–34 nonofficial granaries in, 105 rice trading to, 99–101, 103–104 machi kaisho. See block association Mann, Michael, 12 Matsukata Masayoshi, 223–24 measure of dry capacity. See koku Meiji Restoration government, in Japan, 31–32, 211–28 benevolent rule ideology in, 213, 227 Charter Oath in 1868, 223 commercial power of, 227 domestic governance challenges for, 212–13 domestic welfare policies, 214 establishment of, 211–12 expansion of public sphere and, 218 foreign policy approaches, 215–16 Freedom and People’s Rights Movement, 221–26 peasant riots and, 224 penal laws, 247 petitions and, 213–14, 223, 226–27 public finance in, 220–21 public interest and, 14, 217–18

303

tax structures in, 214, 220–21 memorial system, in Qing dynasty, 62–63 Midland Rising, 150–51 Milbrand, Ralph, 18 military mobilization, of Tokugawa regime, 47–49 military-fiscal state, 14 mineki (interest of the people), 56 Ming dynasty, 49–50 minkai (people’s assemblies), 214 minnian (people’s dike), 129–35 minxiu (people’s projects), 129 Mongols, invasion of China, 29 Moore, Barrington, 252 Napoleonic War, 7 Nativist Learning (kokugaku), 57, 190–91 natural active rights, 6–7 natural experiment, 33, 238–39, 242 Neo-Confucianism, 57 neo-liberalism, public interest and, 5 Nine Years War, 204–205 nonmaterial public good, 32 Northern Song dynasty, 28–29 Ōkuma Shigenobu, 220–23 One Hundred Articles (hyakkajō), 159 Opium War, 191–92 oriental despotism, 128–29 Ōshio rebellion, 93 osso (non-procedural petition), 159–60 osukui (benevolent governance), 49–50, 81 parliamentary systems public interest and, 7–8 reform of, 7–8 participation, political. See specific topics passive resistance, 21, 81 passive rights, 6–11 academic scholarship on, 8–11 from obligation, 6 public interest and, 4, 32 paternalism, 43, 67–68, 146, 151, 158–59, 240–41 patriotism, in England, 208–209 peasant riots, 224 people’s dike. See minnian people’s projects. See minxiu Perry, Matthew C. (Admiral), 190–91 petitions capacity of state and, 247–49 in China, 31, 237

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009334525.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

304

Index

petitions (cont.) in England, 10, 189–90, 196–97, 200–202, 210–11 Meiji Restoration government and, 213–14, 223, 226–27 during Qing dynasty, 67–68 to redress grievances in Qing dynasty, 169–71, 177–79 during Tokugawa regime, 159–60, 164–69 in Tudor/Stuart England, 153–55 Pilgrimage of Grace, 147 Pincus, Steven, 14 Polanyi, Karl, 21 political instability, in early modern states, conceptual approach to, 193–95 Poor Laws (England), 74 poor relief interventions during Tokugawa regime, 93 in Tudor/Stuart England, 72–75 popular monarchism, 68, 147 popular protests. See ikki poverty programs, in Tudor/Stuart England, 71–72 Powell, Edward, 147 power. See infrastructural power private interest, Qing dynasty and, 60 Privy Council, in England, 109–15 procedure-based legitimacy, 16–17 property smashing. See uchikowashi Protestant movements, in England, 196, 204–205 protests, as active right, 6–7 public discussion/deliberation. See kōgi yoron public good definition of, 4 nonmaterial, 32 provision by the state, 2–3 public interest and, 4, 18–19 Qing dynasty and, 60–61 state capacity and, 245 state provision of, 2–3 in Tudor/Stuart England, 39, 42 public granaries during Qing dynasty, 70, 95–100, 104–105 in Tokugawa regime, 70, 83–84, 88–92 block association, 88, 90–91, 93 in Tudor/Stuart England, 70 public interest. See also mineki benevolent rule and, 50–51

common good and, 4 definition of, 4 discourse of state legitimation for, 4 in early modern state, 185–88 extension of suffrage and, 8 legitimation and, 19, 21 Meiji Restoration government and, 14, 217–18 in modern states, 5–6 neoliberalism and, 5 parliamentary reform and, 7–8 passive rights and, 4, 32 public goods and, 4, 18–19 Qing dynasty and, 60–61, 65 scope of, 19–20 state redress of grievances as, 180–82 in Tudor/Stuart England, 147, 155–56 state society relationship and, 244 in Tudor/Stuart England, 38, 42 through government statutes, 43–44 implementation of social policies, 46 justifications of, 45–46 public sphere in Tudor/Stuart England, 32, 65–66, 201, 207 public sphere, in England, 65–66 “public weal,” in Tudor/Stuart England, 40 public welfare. See domestic welfare public works based on province-wide levy. See kuniyaku-fushin Qing dynasty, 10, 29–30 benevolent rule during, 59 redress of grievances and, 169 Boxer Incident, 33, 195, 242 centralized bureaucracy of, 61, 63–64 fiscal system in, 63–64 China proper and, 59 ever-normal granaries, 88–89, 95–97, 99, 103–106, 232–33 debates over, 62 First Sino-Japanese War, 33 fiscal capacity of, 33 guojia and, 59 Heavenly Mandate and, 58–60 infrastructure financing during, 127–42 centralized bureaucracy for, 127, 129, 135 financial arrears as result of, 140–42 local management of, 136–39 minnian (dikes), 129–35

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009334525.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index minxiu, 129 oriental despotism and, 128–29 quota-based system, 132 water control projects, 127–42, 178 legitimacy of state, 58–68 Lijin duties, 194, 228–32, 235–36 literacy rates during, 66 market economy during, 64–65 memorial system in, 62–63 Opium War and, 191–92 petitions and, 67–68 private interest in, 60 public good and, 60–61 public interest and, 60–61, 65 public sphere in, 65–66 redress of grievances in, 169–80 benevolent rule ideology, 169 for hydraulic projects, 173–77 through petitions, 169–71, 177–79 Statute against Rogues, 169–70, 247 during subsistence crisis, 171–73 resilience of state during, 58–68 social elites during, 64–66 social welfare protection in, 59–60 state-society relationship during, 65 subsistence crisis during, 94–105 famine relief programs, 94, 103–104 grain distribution and, 103 inter/intraregional grain trade, 100–101, 106 land taxes and, 96 after natural disasters, 97 public granaries and, 70, 95–100, 104–105 redress of grievances during, 171–73 rice prices, 102–103 silver treasury systems and, 96, 99–100 radicalism. See Continental radicalism; republican radicalism Rawski, Evelyn, 66 Reformation era, wars during, 6 regulations made by representatives from assemblies of village headmen. See gunchū gijō representatives selected from among the village headmen. See gunchū sōdai republican radicalism, 7 resilience, of the state during Qing dynasty, 58–68 Tokugawa regime, 47–58

305

for Tudor/Stuart England, 39–47 resistance against conscription, 213 by grain merchants, 98 passive, 21, 81 by peasants, 164 tax, 170 revenue systems, in Tudor/Stuart England, 40–41 rice prices, during Qing dynasty, 102–103 rice riots, 160–61 rice taxes, in Tokugawa regime, 116–17 rights active, 6–11 collective actions and, 6–7 individual entitlement and, 6 natural, 6–7 protests and, 6–7 of citizens, in Tudor/Stuart England, 42–43 passive, 6–11 academic scholarship on, 8–11 from obligation, 6 public interest and, 4, 32 Riot Act (1715), 247 riots. See specific riots Robinson, James, 3, 14 rule. See benevolent rule Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), 227–28, 239 Saigō Takamori, 219–20 sankin kōtai, 48 Scott, James, 17 self-governance, 13–14, 42, 45, 74, 143, 166 Septennial Act, England, 206 Shimabara Rebellion, 25, 48 Shintō, 215 ship money, 189, 190 shirozume-mai (shogunal military granaries), 16–17, 85 shogunal military granaries. See shirozume-mai shogunate system, in Tokugawa regime, 47–52 infrastructure financing and, 117–27 redress of grievances, 158–69 Skinner, Quentin, 24 Skocpol, Theda, 17, 253 Slack, Paul, 71 social elites, during Qing dynasty, 65–66

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306

Index

social movements, 6–7, 12, 251 social order, in Tudor/Stuart England, 41 social policies. See also domestic welfare in Tudor/Stuart England, 46 society. See state-society relationship Society of Patriots. See Aikokusha Somers, Margaret, 8–9, 251–52 source-based legitimacy, 16 sovereignty, 187, 193, 196–97, 210, 223, 251–52 Spring and Autumn period, in China, 37 Star Chamber, 146–47, 154, 190 the state. See also autonomy; early modern state; legitimacy; specific states; specific topics bargaining power of society over, 12–14 capacity, 1–2 measurement of, 20 formation of, 10 bellicist approach, 11–14 comparative historical analysis of, 243–55 methodological analysis of, 22–24 role of violence in, 12 guojia (China), 26–28 kokka (Japan), 26–27 legitimation of public interest and, 4 origins of, 12 power of, 12 public goods provision by, 2–3 the state (in Chinese). See guojia the state (in Japanese). See kokka state interest. See kokueki state-society relationship. See also Qing dynasty; Stuart England; Tokugawa regime; Tudor England in China, 229 famine relief programs and, 105–106 public interest and, 244 during Qing dynasty, 65 subsistence crisis and conceptual approach to, 69–70 politics of provision and, 69 Statute against Rogues, in Qing dynasty, 169–70, 247 Statute of Artificers (Tudor England), 8–9 statute of Parliament, England (1531), 108–109 Stuart England autonomous self-government in incorporated towns, 42–43 citizen’s rights in, 42–43

common good in, 39, 40 common law traditions in, 42 “commonweal” in, 40 commonwealth in, 40, 42, 45 domestic welfare in, 41 governance issues in, 9–40 as hierarchical society, 46–47 infrastructure financing in, 108–15 Act for Relief of the Poor (1596), 110–11 for drainage projects, 156–58 Privy Council and, 109–15 under statute of Parliament (1531), 108–109 Justices of the Peace in, 43–45 during subsistence crisis, 75–76 legitimacy of state in, 39–47 public good in, 39, 42 public interest in, 38, 42 through government statutes, 43–44 implementation of social policies, 46 justifications of, 45–46 “public weal” in, 40 redress of grievances in, 146–58 under Act for the Punishment of Unlawful Assemblies, 149 food riots, 151–53 through petitions, 153–55 protests and rebellions, 147–51 as public interest, 147, 155–56 role of Privy Council, 155–56 resilience of state in, 39–47 revenue system in, 40–41 social order in, 41 subsistence crisis during, 70–80 commercialization of farming, 71 “commonweal,” 76 domestic welfare interventions, 7–8, 76–77 houses of correction and, 75–76 Justices of the Peace in, 75–76 parliamentary act of 1556, 73–74 poor relief, 72–75 poverty programs, 71–72 price revolution and, 69–70 public granaries and, 70 royal government responses to, 78–79 statute of 1552, 73–74 subsistence crises. See Qing dynasty; Stuart England; Tokugawa regime; Tudor England suffrage, public interest and, 8

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009334525.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Taiping Rebellion, 31, 192 Tang dynasty, 27–29 tashidaka method, in Tokugawa regime, 55 tax resistance, 170 taxation in England, 1 land taxes during Qing dynasty, 96 during Tokugawa regime, 80–81 Meiji Restoration government, 214, 220–21 resistance movements against, 170 rice taxes, 116–17 Tempō famine, 92–94, 126 tenka, 50 Tenmei famine, 88–89, 94 tetsudai-fushin (assistance-based public works), 118–19, 123–26 Thirty Years’ War, 188–90 tianxia, 50. See also gongzhi tianxia Tilly, Charles, 9–11, 250–53 Tokugawa regime, in Japan, 10. See also public granaries administrative structure of, 55–57 benevolent rule in, 49 public interest as core of, 50–51 redress of grievances under, 160, 162 subsistence crisis under, 81 commonwealth in, 51 daimyo, 26–27, 47–52, 55 infrastructure financing and, 117–27 redress of grievances and, 158–69 subsistence crisis and, 81–89 domestic welfare in, 53–54 economic development in, 52–53 formation of modern state in, 25–27 as composite state, 27 as domain state, 55, 56 as social hierarchy, 53–54 Great Domestic Peace in, 25, 48–49, 52 as imperial state, 57 infrastructure financing in, 115–27 daimyo authority, 117–27 kuniyaku-fushin, 118, 120–21, 121–24 through rice tax, 116–17 shogunate coordination of, 117–27 water control projects, 17, 85–86, 93, 117, 120–24 Kan’ei famine, 49–51 subsistence crisis and, 83 kokka in, 26–27

307

kokueki in, 56 legitimacy of state in, 47–58 literacy rates in, 53 military mobilization system in, 47–49 Ming dynasty as influence in, 49–50 Nativist Learning and, 57 redress of grievances in, 158–69 benevolent rule ideology and, 160, 162 daimyo authority and, 158–69 increased literacy as influence on, 159 peasant resistance and, 164 through petitions, 159–60, 164–69 rice riots, 160–61 shogunate system and, 158–69 resilience of state in, 47–58 Shimabara Rebellion, 25, 48 shogunate system in, 47–52 infrastructure financing and, 117–27 redress of grievances, 158–69 subsistence crisis during, 80–94 under benevolent rule, 81 block association and, 88, 90–91, 93 chō, 81 commercialization of rice production, 82 daimyo and, 81–89 decentralized political system and, 81 famine relief and, 83, 84, 87–90 during Kan’ei famine, 83, 84 koku, 15, 81, 84 land taxes, 80–81 Ōshio rebellion, 93 poor relief interventions, 93 regulation of rice markets, 92 during Tempō famine, 92–94, 126 during Tenmei famine, 88–89, 94 tashidaka method, 55 Yuan dynasty as influence in, 49–50 traditional unit of area. See chō treasury systems, during Qing dynasty, 96, 99–100 Treaty reform in Meiji Japan, 222, 223 in Qing China, 228 tribute grain, 60–61, 95, 103, 176 Triennial Act, England, 206 Tudor England Act for the Punishment of Unlawful Assemblies, 149 autonomous self-government in incorporated towns, 42–43

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308

Index

Tudor England (cont.) Book of Orders in, 43 during subsistence crisis, 76–77, 79–80 citizen’s rights in, 42–43 common good in, 39, 40 common law traditions in, 42 “commonweal” in, 40 commonwealth in, 40, 42, 45 domestic welfare in, 41 English Civil War, 30, 41 governance issues in, 9–40 Henry VIII and, 39 as hierarchical society, 46–47 infrastructure financing in, 108–15 Act for Relief of the Poor, 110–11 for drainage projects, 156–58 dredging projects, 113 Privy Council and, 109–15 under statute of Parliament (1531), 108–109 Justices of the Peace in, 43–45 during subsistence crisis, 75–76 legitimacy of state in, 39–47 Lincolnshire Uprising, 147 Midland Rising, 150–51 Pilgrimage of Grace, 147 public good in, 39, 42 public interest in, 38, 42 through government statutes, 43–44 implementation of social policies, 46 justifications of, 45–46 “public weal” in, 40 redress of grievances in, 146–58 under Act for the Punishment of Unlawful Assemblies, 149 food riots, 151–53 through petitions, 153–55 protests and rebellions, 147–51 as public interest, 147, 155–56 role of Privy Council, 155–56 resilience of state in, 39–47 revenue system in, 40–41 social order in, 41 Statute of Artificers, 8–9 subsistence crisis during, 70–80 Book of Orders, 76–77, 79–80 commercialization of farming, 71 commissions created during, 74

“commonweal,” 76 domestic welfare interventions, 7–8, 76–77 food riots as response to, 78 houses of correction and, 75–76 Justices of the Peace in, 75–76 local protectionism and, 77–78 Poor Laws and, 74 poor relief, 72–75 poverty programs, 71–72 price revolution and, 69–70 public granaries and, 70 royal government responses to, 78–79 uchikowashi (property smashing), 165–66 Uesugi Yōzan, 87 vagrancy, 71, 73 violence, in state formation, 12 Walter, John, 46–47 War of Spanish Succession, 205–206 water control projects dredging projects in Qing dynasty, 130–31, 135, 139, 178 in Tokugawa regime, 17, 85–86, 93, 120 in Tudor England, 113 during Qing dynasty, 127–42 minnian (dikes), 129–35 in Tokugawa regime, 117, 121–24 dredging projects, 17, 85–86 Weber, Max, source-based legitimacy and, 16 welfare. See domestic welfare Western Learning, 57 Whigs, in England, 206–208 White Lotus Rebellion, 30 Wilkes, John, 209 Wittfogel, Karl, 128 Wong, R. Bin, 30 Yamagata Bantō, 92 Yangzi River, 97, 99–101, 228 Yellow River, conservancy of, 127 Yokoi Shōnan, 191 Yuan dynasty, 49–50

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009334525.012 Published online by Cambridge University Press