Ming China 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire by John Dardess (review)

John Dardess is a senior and respected scholar of Ming history who has produced many widely read works that cover a wide spectrum of issues. From important discussions on the founding of the dynasty to one of the last major political struggles toward the end of the empire, from taking a macro view on the founding professional elites to using a micro lens on literati from a single county — Dardess has almost done it all.

With years of research and an in-depth understanding of the Ming, he is well suited to write a concise history on the subject. It would be easier, although as important, to write extensively and broadly on the Ming, such as the endeavor of the Cambridge History series. It is much more difficult, however, to write briefly on a big subject. The first daunting question to ask is, What questions ought to be asked? How does one answer these questions in less than 200 pages? How should one write so that the targeted readers stay interested?

Different historians would have approached the subject differently and taken up different themes, as Dardess honestly points out. Dardess approaches it by beginning with the outer edges of the Ming realm, thus providing us with a lively description of the Ming’s frontiers. This first chapter helps readers situate the Ming in its own neighborhood. It was very diverse, including small autonomous tribes who wanted the Ming to leave them alone and countries that wanted to rule China. The frontiers posed many different threats, from small-scale raiders to a large East Asian crisis whereby the Ming had to deploy massive land and marine troops to fight an expansive war on a foreign peninsula. The chapter is also a useful map for readers to understand the many challenges the dynasty faced, and where and why state resources were drained. In Dardess own words, the frontier management’s “mounting fiscal and human costs could not be sustained forever” (p. 24).

Dardess arranges his five approaches in a cascade beginning with the frontiers; he then proceeds inward and arranges the remaining four themes in a topdown manner based on the power hierarchy in each chapter. He starts with the emperors and continues with the officials responsible for Ming governance and the closely connected literati. He leaves the outlaws that disturbed the social order for last. Dardess provides a sketch of the sixteen Ming emperors with varying levels of contributions to the dynasty, from as complex as founding the dynasty to as simple as being a mere presence on the throne. Most of these men would probably have had a hard time making a decent living with their own intellect and skills. However, according to Dardess, it really did not matter who ruled from the Forbidden City after the first half century from the dynasty’s founding. Dardess argues that other factors kept the dynasty intact, and its final collapse was inevitable since “not even a long succession of wise and competent rulers would have sufficed to steer Ming China over the shoals of the seventeenth century” (p. 59).

The Ming lasted for almost three hundred years, and it was not sheer force that kept it together. To Dardess, “some sort of national consensus about appropriate and legitimate power relations” was also at work (p. 62). Beyond these, the structure of the Ming government also contributed to the resilience of the empire. In the Ming, powers overlapped and were divided among three major components: military officers, civil officials, and palace eunuchs. Most important among the three is the civil bureaucracy. Dardess first provides a summary of how civil officials were recruited and sketches the structure of the various offices. They played an important role that the other two groups could not because they were directly charged with the ruling of the populace, adjudicating their disputes...