Institutions, Families, Communities: Towards a social history of the Ming military in southeast China

University of Pennsylvania's Center for East Asian Studies presents a talk by Michael Szonyi on the social history of Ming institutions.

Michael Szonyi, Harvard University

This paper is about the social history of Ming institutions. The Ming military rested in principle on two institutions: permanent garrisons ( weisuo ), staffed by members of hereditary military households ( junhu ). Using case studies from Fujian , this paper explores the impact of these institutions on the people who comprised them. What were the strategies that military households developed to deal with their obligation to provide an adult male for military service? As soldiers were transferred to garrisons far from their homes, how did households deal with separation? As their relations with their distant kin became attenuated, soldiers and their descendants developed new strategies to integrate into the garrison and the local society that surrounded it. In other words, they sought to become localized. A similar process took place at the higher level of the garrisons, as these evolved from government entities often created ex nihilo to organic communities embedded in their surroundings. The project thus seeks to shed light on the interaction between state policies and everyday life in Ming, as well as on the legacies of Ming institutions for the Qing and beyond. More broadly, it argues for the importance of considering the manifold roles of military institutions in late imperial China .