Asian Journal of Social Science 36 (2008) 681–693 www.brill.nl/ajss

Book Reviews

Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton (eds) (2006) Empire at the Mar- gins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China. Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press. ISBN: 0520230159.

Th is collection of essays attempts a synthesis of several themes in the field of Chinese his- tory, namely the frontier, ethnicity, and culture. In grappling with these conceptual themes in the history of early modern China, they offer a critique of a fundamental theme underly- ing Chinese historiography, namely the sinicisation process. In ways somewhat similar to Prasenjit Duara’s deconstruction of the concept of the Chinese “nation” and its underlying assumptions about Han ‘Chinese-ness’ in twentieth century Chinese history, this volume, by looking at negotiations and contestations between state and society in the constructions and definitions of ethnic identity at the frontiers of the Ming and Qing Empires in Chinese history, attempts to contest a fundamental assumption in Chinese historiography, that of ‘sinification’. Rather than seeing the history of China as the gradual spread of Han Chinese culture with imperial expansion, the essays focus on how non-Han ethnicities or religious identities were constructed through the negotiations and interactions between state and society on the frontiers of different Chinese empires. Th e volume’s focus on the Ming and the Qing is also significant in this regard. Th e Ming and the Qing have commonly been seen as a Chinese (Han) and a foreign dynasty respec- tively. Th ey provide an interesting contrast, while allowing a study of the historical transi- tion between two different states with rather different elite perceptions of themselves and the empire they sought to rule. Th e change in regimes was tempered by continuities, espe- cially in the rhetoric of ‘civilization’; although this discourse was used more comprehen- sively by the Ming than the Qing and for rather different purposes, the first for justifying military action within and outside its borders, with the second using it for justifying pro- grams of “coerced assimilation within Pacific regions”. Th e focus on the Qing was also significant in another way. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Rawski-Ho debate epitomised the growing divergence in the historiography of the Qing dynasty. While earlier historians attributed Qing success to its adoption of a policy of ‘sini- cisation’, the works of Evelyn Rawski, Pamela Crossley (one of the editors of this volume), and other historians in the 1990s argued, instead, that the Qing imperial family, rather than becoming sinicised, actively maintained its Manchu identity, and the distinctive eth- nic identities of the conquest elite (namely the members of the eight banners, which encompassed a “motley throng”, to borrow Pat Giersch’s phrase, of Manchus, Mongols, Chinese and Korean) despite the retention of Han political institutions. Th ey attributed their success in holding and extending the frontiers of Qing rule (especially westwards and northwards) to the adept use of both Han and non-Han ethnic identities, such as the Man- chu, Mongol and Hanjun (constituting the Eight Banners), in different parts of their

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156853108X327164 682 Book Reviews / Asian Journal of Social Science 36 (2008) 681–693 empire, as it suited them. It was not sinicisation per se, but the Manchu royal family’s ability to maintain its apartness while bridging and mediating between different identities, ethnici- ties, and their respective cosmologies, which accounted for their success. Instead of their domestication by the Han civilisational, cultural and bureaucratic structures, they incorpo- rated it within their multi-cultural repertoire of imperial rule. Th is collection of essays can be seen as extending the parameters of the debate beyond the conquest elite and the imperial center to the frontier regions of the Qing and Ming Empires, to compare the ways in which Han definitions of ‘civilisation’ and non-Han identities, cosmologies and signs of power were utilised in the respective systems of rule and conquest on the frontiers of Qing and Ming rule. While frontiers were important sites of such identity politics, the Qing Empire presents an interesting case in this respect. Its political frontiers were not necessarily the cultural peripheries, as the Qing conquest elite was itself foreign and the first few emperors came to emphasise these distinctive identities vis-à-vis the Han. Th e cultural ties of the Qing elite were closer with the peripheries than with the centre, in the case of Mongol and Manchu regions. Nevertheless, in areas where the cultural and ethnic identities were ‘foreign’ to the Qing conquest elite, as in the case of Yunnan or the Muslim regions, it was the Han dis- courses that were employed, as several of the essays demonstrate (see Millward and Newby, Herman, and Faure in this volume). It was the ability to balance and mediate between these discourses and cosmologies that came to be central to Qing survival (see Elliott and Cross- ley in this volume). Th e concept of the ‘frontier’ encapsulated in the essays did not neces- sarily denote the political borders on the edge of these empires, but included “social, economic, or cultural fissures internal to a political order”, as the essays on Mongol identity, the Eight banners, and regional identities such as the Miao, the She, and the Dan in this volume suggest. Th e construction and use of ethnic identities and Han civilisational discourse in the frontiers were important dimensions of Qing imperialism in the seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries. Th ese essays represent an attempt by these historians of early modern China to historically contextualise the concept of ethnicity, and its uses in Chinese histori- ography. Ethnic identities and identifications form an important dimension of the state’s cultural policies in these frontier regions and local responses to state rule. Th e essays all emphasise the concept of ‘structuring’ in these processes of identity formation, namely that “. . . out of complex social dynamics involving the complicity of human agency, structural constraints and [essentialised] images emerge to create significant meaning and impact at crucial historical moments”. Th e state, itself, might emphasise non-Han Chinese identities in different frontier situations for certain groups, or in certain periods of the Qing state, for the royal elite themselves, or Han and other identities might become signifiers for local or regional lines of political and economic competition or rivalry in ways autonomous of state policies and perspectives. Ethnicity, the editors remind us, is “relative in the deepest sense”, and can only be understood in terms of the interaction between state policies and local agencies and structures. Th is book, as the introduction tells us, reflects the “. . . continuum of overt, [organised] state exertion in the construction and enforcement of identities”. Adopting James Scott’s concept of ‘legibility’, identity formation and discourses and policies surrounding ethnic identities and their respective populations were seen as state processes of “. . . objectification of peoples and cultures through historical narrative”. Th e studies move from groups at the