Slaves of the Emperor - by David C Porter (Paperback)

About the Book

David C. Porter traces how the hereditary Eight Banner system created a service elite, exploring the Qing approach to one of the fundamental challenges of early modern state-building.

Book Synopsis

Shortlisted, 2024 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association

China's last imperial dynasty governed a vast and culturally diverse territory, encompassing a wide range of local political systems and regional elites. But the Qing empire was built and held together by a single imperial elite: the more than two million members of the hereditary Eight Banner system who were at the core of both the military and the bureaucracy. The banner population was multiethnic, linked by shared membership in a clearly demarcated status group defined in law and administrative practice. Banner people were bound to the court by an exchange of loyal service for institutionalized privilege, a relationship symbolically conceptualized as one of slave to master.

Slaves of the Emperor explores the Qing approach to one of the fundamental challenges of early modern state-building: how to develop an effective bureaucracy with increasing administrative capacity to govern a growing polity while retaining the loyalty of the ruling family's most important supporters. David C. Porter traces how the banner system created a service elite through its processes of incorporating new members, its employment of bannermen as technical specialists, its imposition of service obligations on women as well as men, and its response to fiscal and ideological challenges. Placing Qing practices in comparative perspective, he uncovers crucial parallels to similar institutions in Tokugawa Japan, imperial Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Slaves of the Emperor provides a new framework for understanding the structure and function of elites both in China and across Eurasia in the early modern period.

Review Quotes

As soldiers, administrators, and advisors, Chinese members of the Eight Banners--the Hanjun--were a keystone of Qing control over China. In this pathbreaking study, Porter shows that the shifting fortunes of the Hanjun hold the key not only to understanding Qing conceptions of identity, ethnicity, and service but also to placing the empire's statecraft in comparative Eurasian perspective.--Matthew W. Mosca, author of From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China

Porter effectively develops an analytic framework to understand the importance of "service elites" in empires. His analysis of how the Qing empire promoted the banner system to create a loyal elite, a status group that was inclusive of diversity to extend the empire's military, social, and political administration, is brilliant. His work adds to the best of the scholarship on China.--Karen Barkey, author of Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective

Porter's far-reaching book has many virtues. Perhaps most important is that features that have sometimes been portrayed as opaquely "ethnic" in character are illuminated here as imperial--that is, as produced by processes of conquest, occupation, and responses to fiscal challenges. This rescues the idea of empire and the history of the Qing empire in particular from the ahistorical and occasional romanticized encumbrances of primary and fixed cultural orientations and provides a platform for comparison to similar phenomena across early modern Eurasia.--Pamela Kyle Crossley, author of A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology

About the Author

David C. Porter is faculty lecturer in history and East Asian studies at McGill University.