Asia
comparison highlights the achievement of the Qing
rulers in keeping their military elite thoroughly under
control, neither branching out into sideline occupations nor contributing to political disorder in the
capital. The key to this control, Elliott shows, was a
remarkably dense and thorough bureaucratic system
with a great deal of "micromanagement" (p. 135), far
more dense than that by which the general Chinese
population was controlled. Banner households had a
remarkable degree of economic security until 1800 or
later and had highly privileged access to many official
positions. In a fascinating chapter (pp. 89-132), Elliott
shows how the spatial segregation of the banner
garrisons was achieved by giving them most of Beijing
and large pieces of Xi'an, Nanjing, and other major
cities. Management of the career advancement of
banner officers had little to do with the vaunted
examination system and was very thorough and personal. Much attention was devoted to maintaining the
military skills and readiness of banner units.
There is a great deal of testimony by Chinese and
foreign writers about the eventual "Sinicization" of the
Bannermen, who are seen as becoming by 1850 lazy,
poor, proud city dwellers who could not pull a bow or
speak Manchu and spent most of their time raising
caged birds or crickets and going to the Beijing opera.
The Qing rulers were keenly aware of this trend and
devoted a great deal of effort to struggling against it.
Elliott's intelligent revision of the "Sinicization" perspective shows how the formidable organizational control and net of segregation and privilege of the Banner
system became the means by which Bannermen maintained a strong sense of identity and cohesion as they
lost such obvious markers as military skills and fluency
in the Manchu language.
Elliott makes it clear that his work focuses on the
Banner system, not on the participation of its members
in the provincial bureaucracy, where some of them
made crucial contributions, or the Qing conquest and
administration of Central Asia, which was entirely the
work of Banner troops and Banner officials. These
topics promise to look quite different in the light of his
work as others learn from his insights and follow the
path he has blazed into the Manchu-language archival
sources. I wonder if its makes any difference to my
understanding of some of the dodgy political entrepreneurs I follow up and down the south China coast in
the early Qing that they were enrolled in the Chinese
Banners.
The academic reviewer is duty bound to find errors
or gaps in the work reviewed. Elliott's intelligence and
scholarship make this very hard. One brief lapse of
interpretation occurs when he notes (p. 138) the
diffusion of control over the Banners, with nothing like
the creation of a single Banner "board"; surely no
emperor would have wanted to cede the kind of power
that the head of such a board would have had.
JOHN E. WILLS, JR.
University of Southern California
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
857
LAURA HOSTETLER. Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. 2001. Pp. xx, 257. $35.00.
For over a decade, scholars of late imperial China have
been arguing over the use of the term "early modern"
to describe the Qing empire in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. At the heart of this debate lies
the question of whether the term can be abstracted
from its usual European context to describe similar
patterns of change in China without assuming a Eurocentric, or Western-driven, trajectory of historical
development. In her examination of the colonizing
aspirations of the Qing dynasty, Laura Hostetler
moves this debate to center stage. Her central argument is that the independent yet parallel political
application of emerging cartographic and ethnographic technologies in both China and Europe reveals
sufficient continuity in historical development to validate the identification of an early modern world
reaching across various societies and civilizations.
As Hostetler describes it, the use of scientific cartography under Qing emperors in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries was driven above all by the state's
need for more precise delineation of territory in
relation to neighboring states. As an expansive colonial empire, moreover, the Qing shared this interest
with the emerging nation-states of Europe, where
similar concerns with colonial political boundaries had
already contributed to a separation of cartography and
ethnography into distinct disciplines. Hence, while
premodern maps in both Europe and China combined
ethnographic descriptions with impressionistic representations of land, those of the early modern period
show a greater use of scaled projections, with ethnographic information increasingly left out.
Hostetler does not deny that this technology originated in Europe. She does maintain, however, that at
the time of its adoption by Qing mapmakers, the use of
such technology had yet to pervade Europe and thus
cannot be seen as specifically European. As she puts it,
reliance on the graticule internationalized the pursuit
of geographic knowledge in such a way as to transcend
political and cultural boundaries. The fact that this
technology and its divorce from ethnography occurred
earlier and more completely in Europe than in China
does not imply that this development belonged to any
specific region, culture, or nation but must be seen as
part of a global process of early modern state formation. The relevant divide is thus not between Eastern
and Western cultures but between pre- and early
modern modes of apprehending the world.
Hostetler devotes the second half of her book to the
development of ethnography and its relationship to the
colonial aspirations of the Qing state. As with cartography, she finds here an epistemological shift suggesting the ways in which scientific knowledge was being
harnessed to the goals of the state. Although she draws
from both Ming and Qing dynasty gazetteers, the core
of this section is in her examination of eighteenth-
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2002
Reviews of Books
858
century Miao albums, illustrated manuscripts describing various non-Han peoples in southern and southwest China. By tracing the evolution of these albums,
Hostetler identifies an increasing rationalization to the
presentation of material. According to Hostetler, by
supplying officials with accurate information as to their
location, customs, livelihood, and even character,
Miao albums provided a basis upon which to administer these indigenous peoples as well as to better serve
the colonial project of civilizing them.
Hostetler's work is part of a growing body of literature on the relations between the Qing state and the
various non-Han peoples of the empire's inner frontier. In this regard, her findings are both fascinating
and insightful. Her efforts to reveal parallels between
Chinese and European cartography also demonstrate
an interconnectedness in technological development
that is too often overlooked. Yet her attempt to use
the political application of this technology to identify a
universalized early modern period of world history
remains open to question. The evidentiary basis from
which she draws in support of her argument is often
quite thin, and her assertion as to an epistemological
shift toward a more scientifically based worldview in
China frequently relies on a rather vague equating of
"scientific" with "precise" or "objective." In addition,
she does not adequately explain why the use of scaled
maps and the administrative use of Miao albums fell
off so drastically in the nineteenth century, precisely
when foreign intrusion and internal rebellion might
have motivated greater reliance upon them. Finally,
insofar as Hostetler rejects the Eurocentric notion of a
one-way flow of scientific knowledge from West to
East, one must wonder as to the conceptual utility of a
periodization that is so closely bound to the European
trajectory of historical development.
BRADL Y
W.
REED
University of Virginia
EDWARD J. M. RHOADS. Manchus and Han: Ethnic
Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early
Republican China, 1861-1928. (Studies on Ethnic
Groups in China.) Seattle: University of Washington
Press. 2000. Pp. x, 394. $55.00.
This book by Edward J. M. Rhoads is one of the series
entitled Studies on Ethnic Groups in China, which
Stevan Harrell edits for the University of Washington
Press. The series has already achieved an enviable
reputation for fine and innovative scholarship, and this
book certainly continues that tradition. It is an excellent study of one aspect of ethnicity in modern Chinese
history.
Specifically, the book covers policies and attitudes of
governments and others toward the Manchus, who
dominated the Chinese state and formed the ruling
family of China's last dynasty, called the Qing (16441911), and relations between the Manchus and the
Han majority of China. It makes an important contribution by placing the issue of the Manchus into a wide
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
historical context. Most scholars now consider the
Manchus more or less assimilated with the Han in
China, and very few Manchus still speak their own
language, having adopted Chinese. Rhoads analyzes
the modern transformation of the Manchu role in the
Chinese state and nation and their relations with the
Han Chinese.
The book draws on a wide range of sources in
Chinese and English. The latter include archival material and observations by Westerners contemporary
with the times considered. There are no Manchulanguage sources, but there are plenty written by
Manchus in Chinese. Rhoads is a model of scholarship
in the way he handles his sources carefully and critically.
The conventional wisdom established by authorities
such as the late and distinguished Mary Clabaugh
Wright is that the boundaries between Manchu and
Han loosened from the mid-1860s, and that the two
groups became less unequal. In his extremely detailed
discussion of policies and realities, Rhoads challenges
these conventions. He argues forcefully that ethnic
boundaries remained very tight down to the end of the
Qing period and that the charges the revolutionaries
made against the Manchus as oppressive overlords
were valid and well substantiated, although he also
acknowledges some atrocious behavior by the revolutionaries against the Manchus. Rhoads certainly does
not question the importance of imperialism as a target
of the revolution, but his account does shift the
balance of historical forces toward ethnicity.
Rhoads certainly has a masterly grasp of his material. The scholarly appurtenances of this book-the
bibliography, the glossary of Chinese characters, the
annotation-are all superb. The writing style is interesting and effective, and generally free of that denseness that characterizes some academic work. There are
some very well produced pictures.
I have one misgiving about the author's major
conclusions. Rhoads characterizes the Manchus of the
Qing period down to the end of the nineteenth century
as a hereditary military caste. This is because of the
role they played in the army of the Qing dynasty, which
was vital and powerful. However, most of the book
affirms very clearly and effectively just how strong was
the ethnicity of the Manchus. In addition to economic
aspects, Rhoads is at pains to point out how strongly
Manchu language and culture survived beyond 1928.
He also includes some material about women's issues,
including those relating to culture and ethnicity.
A traditional military caste is hardly an ethnicity. It
is characterized mainly by occupation, not by such
matters as language or culture. Yet there is much
about such matters in this book, and Rhoads deserves
credit for that. The banner people may have been an
occupational caste during the early Qing dynasty. But
the Manchus were surely always more than the bannermen. Rhoads's own material suggests to me that,
while it might be proper to refer to the transformation
of the banner people from an occupational caste to an
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2002