Tributary Labour Relations in China During the Ming-Qing Transition (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries)

Abstract

AbstractThis study analyses the shifts in labour relations due to state intervention, first during the conquest of the Ming empire between 1600 and 1644 by its Manchurian contenders, and thereafter until about 1780, as the Manchurian Qing dynasty established itself and drove the Chinese empire to its greatest expansion. The main focus lies on the socio-military formation of the Eight Banners, the institution that, for about 200 years, epitomized the domination of the Chinese empire by a small elite group of about two per cent of the population. These findings will be contextualized in the larger setting of labour relations of the early and mid-Qing, when state intervention occurred in the form of arbitration in labour conflicts, but also, in a much more aggressive manner, in the decimation of the Qing rulers’ Dzungharian rivals. In the framework of Charles Tilly’s paradigm of capital versus coercion, while both are present in the Chinese case, the capital-oriented path seems more distinct.