State making, political sustainability, and critical crisis: a historical and theoretical perspective from Qing China

Abstract This article aims to strengthen the link between history and theory by contributing to the scholarly conversation on “an integrated historical social science.” By examining the case of Qing China, it introduces a historically oriented and theoretically informed research agenda and toolkit for studying state making through the interactive lens of political sustainability and critical crisis. Using two historical upheavals as a prism, this article shows how destructive crises can have the unintended consequence of facilitating empire building and fostering political sustainability. Furthermore, it draws on theoretical insights from political science and sociology to construct a general framework for measuring the sustainability of political development and explaining the complex role of great crisis. This interdisciplinary model not only sheds new lights on the causative role of event, conjuncture, and structure but also enriches existing approaches to comparative historical analysis in general and state making in particular.