Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds

Abstract

elites), and reinventing social traditions to evade taxes such as in the case of the god Guandi who was made into an ancestor for this reason. Szonyi sums up the types of strategies military households used in the Ming and thereafter: strategies of optimization, strategies of proximity, strategies of regulatory arbitrage, strategies of precedent (p. 216), all of which he postulates were a means to optimize the difference between rules and social reality. In effect, what this means, Szonyi adds, is that the state and its agents were forced to accept the informal institutions and procedures that families and communities created to meet the demands made on them by the state. The Art of Being Governed is a book full of meaningful stories as well as thoughtful arguments, supported by maps, kinship charts, and a list of dramatis familiae which guide the reader’s journey into this “thick description” of military households in the Ming dynasty — it is a major contribution to Chinese social history and will prove a useful source for comparative history of other regimes. Unfortunately, as Szonyi admits, there is little said about women except a brief mention about the matter of marriage strategies, and the episode of the pirate’s sister. Szonyi has validated the efficacy of using the genealogy as a tool of historical documentation, but it is basically a recording of patrilineal history, and thus one would like to know more about the role of women in junhu and gender relations within these families in general. Szonyi does not underestimate the significance of marriage strategies in the re-territorialization of military households, and thus this is a topic which needs further research and attention — as he writes, “this role for women may have been even more important than for civilian households” (pp. 116–17). One final observation, in an age of global history, The Art of Being Governed seems to blend in with the wider trend of de-emphasizing the centrality of the state. In its place has come a greater appreciation of the web of local institutions supporting polity, and the complex threads of political actors and ordinary people both in confluence and at variance with each other. With this book, Szonyi has added new insights into this intricate and complicated relationship, and thus made a major contribution to the study of Chinese history as well as historical scholarship in general.