Creating a Dynastic Order
Hongwu's efforts to escape the Mongol Empire's shadow were not limited to trumpeting the Yuan's demise. He labored tirelessly to create a dynasty after decades of tumultuous civil war, economic destruction, and widespread human suffering.
He secured firm political control, revived the agrarian economy, bent military men to his will, legislated a new social order, and regulated ritual life, although his successes were neither absolute or permanent.[1389] Throughout his three decades on the throne, he experimented repeatedly with ways to recruit educated men into his government, reviving the venerable civil service examination that the Mongols had used only irregularly, establishing state academies, and soliciting personal recommendations. Incorporating local elites into the imperial state was a foundational strategy to bind regional and dynastic interests by linking political power, social status, and economic advantage to loyal service on the empire's behalf. However much they might scheme to avoid taxes, ignore unpalatable prohibitions, contest the loci of sovereignty, or question the emperor's qualifications for rule, elites remained tied to the imperial state.[1390] The dynasty's collapse in the seventeenth century owed much to deterioration of the modus vivendi of the state and gentry.[1391] Hongwu repeatedly revised his mandate for county officials, envisioning them first as distant moral exemplars that oversaw largely self-regulating local communities and then later as hands-on administrators responsible for collecting taxes and delivering them to higher levels of government. He fundamentally changed the structure of central government, abolishing in 1380 the Central Secretariat and dividing command of the dynasty's military into five component parts, increasing the emperor's personal role in daily governance and policy formulation. Hongwu's frequent recourse to brutal, degrading violence against his civil officials and military commanders, coupled with his obsession with control, has done much to cement the Ming dynasty's reputation as despotic or autocratic.[1392] Hongwu's charisma as founding emperor meant that many of his policies and objectives remained official dynastic practice; however, as recent scholarship has made clear, shifting socioeconomic conditions and political imperatives spurred considerable reform and adaptation in later reigns at both the national and local level.[1393] Ming rulers and the capital bureaucracy understood that ultimately the state's power was limited, and to maintain control they needed to take into account local concerns and perspectives.[1394] To describe the relation differently, villagers, local elites, county officials, capital bureaucrats, and even the imperial family saw the “Ming state... [as] a field on which private interests could compete.”[1395]
More on the topic Creating a Dynastic Order:
- THE DYNASTIC PROPHECY
- Violence and Dynastic Loyalty
- The Creation of the Frankish Empire: Territorial Expansion and Dynastic Succession
- Guinea pigs (Cavia porcellus) belong to the order Roden- tia, suborder Hystricomorpha, superfamily Cavioidea, and family Caviidae. For a brief period, taxonomists proposed that guinea pigs were not within the order Rodentia, but that classification has lost favor.
- Creating national identity
- DARUL ARQAM: CREATING AN ISLAMIC ECONOMIC SYSTEM
- Creating Conflict of Interest Rules
- B CREATING A FARM BUSINESS TENANCY
- Cox Robert E.. Creating the Soul Body: The Sacred Science of Immortality. Inner Traditions,2008. — 288 p., 2008
- Two Akkadian texts from the late periods, namely the Uruk Prophecy and the Dynastic Prophecy, employ phraseology that positively invites comparison with the Book of Daniel.[137] [138]
- Marples David R.. Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine. udapest—New York: Central European University Press,2007. — 363 p., 2007
- As we have seen, the legal structure of Roman marriage was fragile, in the sense that it was far from creating the family as a real partnership with respect to property; the wife appears, at times, almost as an intruder within a household structure still centered on the paterfamilias.
- Commitments and the Problem of Order in International Relations
-
Conflictology -
Ecology -
Economy -
Finance -
History -
Law -
Medicine -
Philosophy -
Religious studies -