Assessing the Ming Empire

Until the mid-twentieth century, most histories attributed the Ming dynasty's fall to political and moral failure. By the late sixteenth century, went this story, incompetent and/or disaffected emperors were unable or unwilling to fulfill their duties as rulers, a fatal flaw in a system that depended so heavily on a single man, the Son of Heaven.

Decisions were left unmade, key government posts remained unfilled, factional conflict left unchecked, taxes misspent, and corruption and misery ignored. As a result, rebellion exploded, and the dynasty fell.

In more recent decades, several other explanations have gained currency. Among the first scholars with a strong grasp of Ming primary materials to write about the Ming's fiscal administration in English, Ray Huang developed an interpretation that was both elegantly simple and historically informed. At the broadest level, he argued that the Ming dynasty's fiscal and administrative systems were fundamentally flawed, incapable of coping with demographic change, economic transformation, or new geopolitical demands. Basic tax rates were too low, imperial revenue too reliant on agriculture, accounting practices too primitive, and dynastic institutions too hidebound. Although Huang acknowledged change and reform, he consistently highlighted the Ming state's ideological and institutional limitations. In his voluminous writings, Huang offered both detailed discussion that drew on a close reading of a wide range of materials and easily digestible take-away points. His work remains broadly influential today, most especially for scholars who are not Ming specialists but who are interested in the period or the dynasty for comparative purposes. They might well ask, however, if the dynasty was so flawed in so many ways from so early, how did it manage to oversee the world's most populous country for more than two and a half centuries?^[1487]

In addition to older explanations that privileged moral-political failure and Huang's institutional stasis model, some scholars have drawn attention to the importance of silver flows and their interruption to the Ming economy and polity.

They argue that disruption of the flow of New World silver to China exacerbated late Ming economic and monetary problems by reducing silver's circulation.^[1488] The correlation of epidemic disease and climatically induced economic, social, and political dislocations on the Ming's collapse has also been examined.^[1489] Yet others stress flawed military strategy in the suppression of domestic rebellion and the increasingly dangerous threat of the emergent Manchus in the northeast.^[1490] Thus, rather than insist on a mono-causal explanation of a complex historical event (or series of events), we could do worse than to agree with one leading specialist, who concludes that the combination of fiscal insolvency, rebellion, Manchu military might, and the weather conspired to end the Ming dynasty.^[1491]

This chapter has focused on the Ming dynasty largely in the context of continental Asia since that was the focus of its interests and challenges, but maritime dimensions of the story cannot be ignored. Several generations ago it was common to write about the arrival of the Portuguese and Spanish in East Asia during the sixteenth century as the beginning of the end for not only the Ming dynasty but also Chinese imperial power as a whole; it was one episode in a triumphalist narrative of the dynamic West's rise and the moribund East's decline. In more recent decades, scholars have in contrast stressed that such encounters were largely conducted on Chinese (and later Manchu) terms. ^[1492] Rather than remaking East Asia, the Portuguese insinuated themselves into vigorous Asian maritime trade networks, negotiating long-term use of a port (Macao), exploiting commercial opportunities created by tensions among the major regional actors (principally the Ming throne, Chinese coastal interests, and Japanese traders), and seeking accommodation with the Ming state and its local representatives through gifts, offers of military assistance (such as forging cannons), and nominal acceptance of Ming protocol.^[1493] Viewed from Western European history's perspective, one might explain the Portuguese's limited impact as a result of its character as a “trade empire.” However, when considered in a global context, perhaps the more compelling explanation was the Ming Empire's resilience.

When the dynasty fell in 1644, it was not at the hands of a European power but, as Pamela Crossley describes in Chapter 29 of this volume, the Qing, a multiethnic polity from Manchuria that skillfully exploited the Ming government's fiscal straits, climate- induced difficulties, and political turmoil.^[1494]

The Ming Empire was not closed, isolated, or mired in the past. It conducted relations with polities that varied in scale, organization, and objectives. It incorporated large non-Chinese populations through sophisticated military and administrative institutions sensitive to the shifting demands of place and time. Far from all-powerful, the Ming state nonetheless oversaw the world's largest populace; successfully recruited local elites through a civil service examination; extracted taxes, labor, and materials through an empire-wide bureaucracy; responded to natural and man-made crises; and adapted to long-term socioeconomic changes. Despite its lofty rhetoric of compassion for the people, moral rectitude, and adherence to the enduring ways of Heaven and the sages of antiquity, the Ming state and its local representatives did not shrink from the use of brutal military force and intimidation, nor were they were above deception and rank hypocrisy in dealings with dynastic subjects and neighbors who, while part of a larger imperial order, maintained their own perspectives and pursued their own interests. If in its final decades, the Ming state failed to meet new challenges nimbly enough to stave off the Qing dynasty, much of its institutional infrastructure would persist under the Manchus despite their markedly different vision of empire.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

Assessing the Ming Empire

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