Legal Justice in Eighteenth-Century Mongolia: Gender, Ethnicity, and Politics in the Manchu-Mongol Marriage Alliance

Abstract

The rule of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) over its “outer territories” in East and Inner Asia (Mongolia, Manchuria, Xinjiang, and Tibet) has received considerable scholarly attention since the 1990s. Historians have suggested that in Mongolia, as well as in Xinjiang and Tibet, the Qing managed to establish and maintain an efficient administration that played a more crucial role than military power, at least since the second half of the eighteenth century. The Qing eventually transformed the jimi, or “loose reign” system, an indirect form of central control over “barbarian” client states along the imperial borders in the traditional Chinese tributary system, to a more direct administrative structure accompanied by military occupation.1 With regard to legal order in Mongolia under Qing rule, previous scholarship has proposed that, unlike their counterparts in colonies controlled by European powers, Mongolian local banner princes (jasags) held a recognized position in the official hierarchy of Qing judicial-administration in Mongolia. They served as judicial authorities on a local level, but they were incorporated into the Qing imperial judicial-administrative system rather than