The Military Collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty, 1618–44 by Kenneth M. Swope (review)

Over the last few decades, scholarly interest in the interaction of military conflict with society and politics has steadily increased. Military historians have introduced the term “new military history,” an approach wherein they are more sensitive than traditional military historians to the wider social, economic, and institutional contexts that spawn military campaigns. Not confined to stories of weapons and military operations, writing military history under this new methodological approach can be a grueling endeavor because scholars have to investigate the complete circumstances of military campaigns. This includes studying not only their strategies but all the implications of these campaigns for politics and society. Kenneth Swope has presented a book of this sort. He draws upon impressive archival research and rich published sources to explore the military collapse of the Ming dynasty, resulting in a welcome contribution to existing historical literature on the fall of the Ming and the Manchu conquest. While not precluding the traditional “drum and trumpet” paradigm to analyze the actual strategy and battle, Swope also emphasizes the relationship between the Ming political system and military conflict. In so doing, Swope has convincingly explained the reasons behind the strategies employed by the Ming commanders that led to military failure.

The consensus among historians is that the Ming’s despotic political system functioned well only under a competent monarch with excellent strategic foresight who was capable both of maintaining the balance between his civil officials and military commanders and of selecting officials with military expertise and the competence to cope with military threats. There was no lack of competent field commanders and military strategists in the late Ming dynasty. Swope’s early study on the Three Great Campaigns of the Wanli emperor (1592–1598) details the important ways in which the Wanli emperor employed his talent for military affairs to conduct campaigns that successfully suppressed the Mongols, Japanese invaders, and civil rebels. As demonstrated in his A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail, the Ming government in fact maintained its military prowess and remained strong enough to stabilize its borderlands and crush peasant uprisings at least before 1600. If this was so, how do we understand the eclipse of the Ming’s strong military performance in the 1630s and 1640s, given that many skillful commanders of Wanli’s era still served his successors?

In the book under review, Swope tries to answer this question, continuing his interest in the military history of the late Ming. In so doing, he provides the reader with a vivid and finely detailed account of the Ming’s military collapse. Swope is by no means the first historian to take up the fall of the Ming as an issue of scholarly concern. The classical study on this topic is Frederic Wakeman Jr.’s The Great Enterprise. Wakeman highlights Manchu military ambitions, but, in the words of Swope, “devotes far too little attention to what the Ming did wrong” (p. 6). Distinguished from previous research, Swope primarily adopts a “court-centered approach,” by focusing on how and why certain military strategies and tactics were developed in the Ming court, together with their direct impact on the battlefield. He shows that the late Ming’s inability to respond to the Manchu conquest and peasant rebellions stemmed largely from poor leadership of notable individuals, including the emperors and core military commanders, who became increasingly autocratic and failed to make sound military decisions, leaving the dynasty more vulnerable to both foreign and domestic foes.

The book is divided into eight chronologically organized chapters, covering the period from Nurhaci’s attack on the trading city of Fushun in 1618 to the Manchu army’s entrance into Beijing in 1644. The brief introduction maps out the historical context of the decline of the Ming and situates the present study within a broader historiographical scope. Swope engages with existing literature on the political and social dynamics of the Ming...