International Studies Quarterly (2016) 60, 766–777
Measuring War in Early Modern East Asia, 1368–1841: Introducing
Chinese and Korean Language Sources
RESEARCH NOTE
D A V I D C. K A N G , M E R E D I T H S H A W , A N D R O N A N T S E - M I N F U
University of Southern California
How much war was there in early modern East Asia? This article empirically corroborates characterizations of relations
between Sinic East Asian polities as being unusually peaceful and stable, which we attribute to the participants’ shared subscription to a common and accepted hierarchy framed by a Confucian worldview. More broadly, we provide direct empirical evidence that international hierarchies derive their stability from cultural consensus rather than simply asymmetries in
material power. We make these claims by addressing the extent, range, and patterns of war in early modern East Asia by
introducing and describing an extensive dataset of over 1,100 entries that measures war and other violence in early modern
East Asia from 1368 to 1841 and relies principally on both Chinese and Korean language sources. The combination of
these two Asian language sources forms the basis of a unique dataset that will substantially widen and complement the
largely Chinese or English language sources that are generally used in debating war in early modern East Asia. Asia was
composed of much more than simply China, and bringing in scholarship from other areas of early modern East Asia reflects a trend of moving past national studies to research the region more holistically.
Japan’s nineteenth-century choice (Korea’s and
China’s, too) was not between a Western international system and no system but between a
Western system predicated on the sovereign
equality of nations but seeking to subordinate
Japan, Korea, and China and an East Asian international system of centuries’ longevity predicated
on the sovereign hierarchies of the Middle
Kingdom but affording nearly complete autonomy to Japan and Korea. It is amazing to see how
even the experts on late-nineteenth-century East
Asia take the Western theory as the norm and cannot get it through their heads that there was an
international system (and therefore a norm) in
David C. Kang is Professor of International Relations and Business at the
University of Southern California, where he also directs the USC Korean
Studies Institute and the USC Center for International Studies. His latest book
is East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (Columbia University
Press, 2010).
Meredith Shaw is a PhD candidate in Political Science and International
Relations at the University of Southern California. She has been published in
the International Journal of Korean Unification Studies and The National Interest.
Ronan Tse-min Fu is a PhD candidate in Political Science and International
Relations at the University of Southern California. His work has been published
in International Security.
Authors’ note: The authors thank Andrew Coe, Bridget Coggins, Benjamin
Graham, Chris Hanscom, Chin-hao Huang, Peter Katzenstein, Robert Kelly,
Dave Leheny, Alex Yu-ting Lin, Xinru Ma, Jonathan Markowitz, Inyoung Min,
Saeyoung Park, Andrew Scobell, Kenneth Swope, Christopher Twomey, Jeffrey
Wasserstrom, Brantly Womack, R. Bin Wong, Feng Zhang, and three anonymous referees for their comments on previous drafts of this article. A previous version of this article was presented at the USC Center for International Studies
Working Paper Series. Thanks in particular to Yujean Seo for her research assistance and Amy Dost for editing assistance. This research was supported by the
Laboratory Program for Korean Studies through the Ministry of Education of
Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service of the Academy of
Korean Studies (AKS-2015-LAB-2250002).
East Asia, that it had lasted for centuries, and that
China, Japan, and Korea knew each other, crossfertilized each other, and traded with each other,
whereas in the mid-nineteenth century it was the
Western system that was utterly new, deeply
threatening, and entirely untried and unproved
in East Asia.
—Bruce Cumings (1999, 7), Parallax Visions
Introduction
An important debate has emerged about the nature and
extent of war in historical East Asia and, more generally,
about the dynamics of systems characterized by interstate
hierarchy and unlike units (Zhang 2015; Lee 2016a,b
MacKay 2016; Phillips and Sharman 2015a; Park 2013;
Kang 2013, 2010a,b; Scobell 2003; Womack 2006; Swope
2009; Kwan 2016). Scholars cannot agree on either the extent of warfare in early modern East Asia or whether the
East Asian pattern of warfare differed significantly from
that seen in Europe. Arguments surrounding the historical East Asian tributary system of international relations,
the premodern balance of power, and the stability of hierarchical international orders in general all center on this
disagreement (Lake 2009; Phillips and Sharman 2015a;
Khong 2013; Wohlforth et al. 2007).
In a series of publications, most notably East Asia Before
the West, one of the co-authors made one key empirical
claim about the hierarchic tributary system of international relations of early modern East Asia:
China’s relations with the Central Asian peoples
on its northern and western frontiers were characterized by war and instability, whereas relations
Kang, David C. et al. (2016) Measuring War in Early Modern East Asia, 1368–1841: Introducing Chinese and Korean Language Sources. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1093/
isq/sqw032
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D AVI D C. K ANG , M EREDITH S H AW ,
with the Sinicized states on its eastern and southern borders were characterized by peace and stability. Unipolarity—Chinese military and economic
predominance—cannot account for both of these
simultaneous outcomes. (Kang 2010a, 10)
Kang’s description of patterns of war and the stabilizing
impact of the tribute system has caused a fair amount of
scholarly debate. For example, Peter Perdue (2015, 3)
writes that “it is surprising to see today’s commentators
reviving many of the same illusions about China. David
Kang, for example, who thinks that tribute relations
exerted benevolent pressures, makes truly ludicrous
claims about warfare in Asia.” William Callahan (2013, 35)
accuses Kang of engaging in a “new orientalist discourse”
that is “inconsequential for academic debates.” Victoria
Hui (2008) claims that China fought more than one war
every year over the past two thousand years: “Chinese
sources. . .amply demonstrate that Chinese history is a litany of military conflicts.”
But how much war was there in early modern East Asia?
This article empirically corroborates the characterization of relations between Sinic East Asian polities as unusually peaceful and stable. We attribute this pattern to
the participants’ shared subscription to a common and accepted hierarchy framed by a Confucian worldview. We
provide direct empirical evidence supporting the argument that international hierarchies derive their stability
from cultural consensus rather than simply asymmetries
in material power.
We make these claims by addressing questions of the
extent, range, and patterns of war in early modern East
Asia by introducing and describing an extensive dataset of
over 1,100 entries that measures war and other violence in
early modern East Asia from 1368 to 1841. This dataset
builds on Kang (2010a, 82–106) but moves well beyond it
by relying principally on two important sources. The first
is a Chinese language source (Fu 2003),
(Chronology of Wars in China Through Successive Dynasties).
More significantly, however, our dataset is truly comparative, as we introduce a key Korean language source, the
(Chronology of Wars of the Korean People;
Institute of Military History 1996).
The combination of these two Asian language sources
forms the basis of a new dataset that will substantially
widen and complement the qualitative—and largely
Chinese or English language—source that are generally
used in the debate over war in early modern East Asia.
Sinologists dominate much of the discussion. However,
early modern Asia was composed of much more than simply China, and bringing in scholarship from other areas
of early modern East Asia reflects a trend of moving past
national studies to research the region more holistically.
The data summarized in this essay adds an unprecedented degree of robustness to earlier scholarship characterizing the hierarchy between Sinic states as being unusually peaceful relative to the West. It simultaneously
highlights this contrast of peace among similarity compared to the far greater violence of China and Korea’s relations with their dissimilar, steppe-dwelling neighbors.
We thus directly address continuing debates about the
relative peacefulness of East Asian hierarchy versus
Western sovereign anarchy. The dataset’s key contribution
is establishing in a rigorous way the durable and distinct
bifurcation of violence characteristic of an expanded conception of the East Asian international system, particularly
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encompassing steppe polities alongside China’s Sinic
neighbors. In short: war along frontiers, peace along
borders.
Why this bifurcation existed and was so durable presents
a key scholarly question. Our dataset allows for a more
definitive characterization of early modern East Asia as a
diverse international system, incorporating both relations
between like and unlike units (Sinic states versus steppe
polities). This article clearly demonstrates that in this
diverse system, the patterns of violence resembled neither
the routine bellicosity of an ideal-typical billiard ball system
of like units, nor the particular patterns of violent transnational contention that characterized a historical Europe
of “composite monarchies.” Neither does it resemble the
universally peaceful pattern of inter-polity relations favored
by those scholars who would reduce East Asia to solely the
Chinese tribute system by relying on an outdated Fairbankcentric (1968) historiography of the region.
Early Modern East Asia is only one case of a hierarchic
order, so it is wise for us to be cautious about the generalizability of our findings. However, the early modern East
Asian tributary system is also one of the primary cases discussed in international relations literature, and our database allows for granular analysis of the functioning of the
system over a 473-year period.
The article proceeds as follows. In Section 2, we briefly
describe and provide an overview of the early modern
East Asian international system and its units. In Section 3,
we discuss measurement issues in creating our database.
Section 4 describes the database and its findings, while
Section 5 sketches out explanations for the observed patterns. A final section concludes with areas for further
research.
An Overview of Early Modern East Asia, 1368–1841
As Buzan and Little (2000, 79) write about international
systems, “Every pattern provides evidence of a process that
is a product of the dynamics of the interactions among
the units of the system and the use made of the existing
interaction capacity of these units . . . [such as] fighting,
political recognition, trade, and identity formation.” The
East Asian tribute system from 1368 to 1841 provides an
important contrast to the Westphalian system, as it comprised an enduring, stable, and hierarchic system with
China clearly the hegemon, in which cultural achievement
was as important as economic or military prowess.
Particularly when defining international systems and
measuring patterns of violence, a key task is to be explicit
about scope and boundary conditions. It may seem selfevident that 2,500 years of East Asian history is not simply
one case and that East Asian history is not simply the history of China. The tribute system developed over many
centuries. There were numerous eras and epochs, and
many other significant political units have existed in the
region for almost as long as China. However, there is also
almost no scholarship that puts East Asian states and
Central Asian peoples of the Steppe region in a comparative context, leading to a view of China as an “empire without neighbors.” (Elisseef 1963, 60).
Chronologically, we consciously use the term early modern era to contrast with the more general term premodern.
Premodern implies that everything that came before the last
two centuries was basically the same. In contrast, early modern is intended to signal that East Asian history experienced different eras, and that each era had different empirical patterns and fundamental issues. Thus, we follow
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Measuring War in Early Modern East Asia, 1368–1841: Introducing Chinese and Korean Language Sources
much of the more recent literature (Zhang 2015; Lee
2016a; Kang 2010a,b) and focus on the era of the Ming
and Qing Chinese dynasties. Specifically, we define early
modern East Asia as the period from 1368 (the founding
of the Ming dynasty) through 1841, when the first Opium
War between the UK and China marked the beginning of
the end of the East Asian tribute system and the arrival of
Western powers in force. During this time, China stood at
the top of the hierarchy, and there was no intellectual alternative to the institutions, norms, and rules of the tribute system until the arrival of the Western imperial powers
in the nineteenth century.
The greatest contrast to this early modern era was the
era of Mongol conquests from China to Turkey (1206–
1368). Indeed, what was true in the seventeenth century
was almost certainly not true several hundred years earlier.
This point is worth highlighting: the East Asian region is
as old and varied as the European region. When studying
East Asia, it is sometimes seductive to claim that behavior
is immutable, permanent, and unchanging from the ancient mists of time up to the present era. Yet East Asia has
changed as much as any other part of the world. Some
traits have historical roots, others do not, and all are constantly evolving depending on the circumstances, institutional constraints, political and economic exigencies, and
a host of other factors.
The tribute system itself was an international order
composed of both institutional and normative features.
Built on a mix of material power and legitimate authority,
the China-derived tribute system provided a normative
and institutional social order that also contained credible
commitments by China not to exploit secondary states
that accepted its authority (Swope 2015). Among the institutions and norms were the exchange of missions, explicit
hierarchic ranking of polities, and differential rights and
trade privileges based on ranking. James Anderson’s
(2013, 261) research about China–Vietnam relations in
the fifteenth century concludes that “tribute missions
were important opportunities to negotiate the balance of
status and authority existing between the Chinese and
Vietnamese rulers,” while Lee (2016a) shows that “the ritual of investiture communicated China’s authority, including its potential for coercion on a regular basis, and importantly, in a symbolic manner that was acceptable to
Korea’s identity as a Confucian society.”
In this early modern international system of East Asia,
there were two main types of political units that were consequential for war and conflict: states that participated in the
tribute system, and the polities and peoples of the Central
Asian steppes that generally chose not to participate in this
system. These early East Asian states were not so-called
composite states as found in early modern Europe, but the
system was also not solely or primarily a system of identical
billiard ball states, either. As Nexon (2009, 6–7) describes
them, European composite states were
composed of numerous subordinate political
communities linked to central authorities
through distinctive contracts. . .these subordinate
political communities often had their own social
organizations, identities, languages, and institutions. . ..and experienced comparatively weak coercive and extractive capacity, and relied largely
on indirect rule.
East Asia was clearly different, and from the perspective of
China or Korea, making clear inter-, intra-, and extra-state
distinctions is relatively straightforward. Compared to
early modern European composite states, early modern
East Asian states were more centralized, powerful, institutionalized, and enduring. By almost any measure, these
early modern East Asian states had immense extractive, logistical, organizational, and institutional capacity. More
importantly for our purpose of measuring war, these states
were defined over clear borders and territory and saw
each other as distinct from one another. Alexander
Woodside (2006, 1), in fact, argues that modernity is first
located in eighth-century Tang China:
The eighth century, indeed, would make a good
choice as the first century in world history of the
politically “early modern.” It was in this century
that the Chinese court first gained what it thought
was a capacity to impose massive, consolidating,
central tax reforms from the top down, which few
European monarchies would have thought possible before the French revolution, given their privileged towns, provinces, nobles, and clergy.
In short, China, Vietnam, Korea, the Ryukyu kingdom—
and to a lesser extent Japan—were territorially defined,
centrally administered bureaucratic political systems. They
developed complex bureaucratic structures and bore striking similarities in their organization, cultures, and outlooks. This form of government, including the calendar,
language and writing system, bureaucratic system, and
educational system, was derived from the Chinese experience, and the civil service examinations in these countries
emphasized knowledge of Chinese political philosophy,
classics, and culture. There was, however, little pressure
on subordinate states to conform to Chinese ways. In fact,
emulation of Chinese civilization was intertwined with the
continuing importance and influence of indigenous institutions and traditions—Sinicization was never complete or
thorough.
These states can be distinguished from the peoples of
the Central Asian steppes (Wright 2002; Di Cosmo 2002,
1999; Perdue 2005; Crossley 2006; Barfield 1989; Jagchid
and Symons 1989; Khazanov 1984; Elliot 2001). China,
Korea, and the steppe peoples existed along a vast frontier
zone, and the disparate cultural and political ecology of
the various nomads and China itself led to a relationship
that, although mostly symbiotic, never resulted in a legitimate cultural or authoritative relationship between the
two. Robinson (1992, 94–95) notes that the early Korean
Chosŏn government had similar frontier issues as the
Chinese, and it used the tributary system in similar ways:
As it constructed its foreign policies the Chosŏn
court modified the Chinese system of tributary relations to meet its own needs. . ..The fundamental
feature of court policies toward the Japanese and
the Jurchen, however, was the effort to control
the country’s border areas after nearly half a century of incessant foreign incursions and battles.
These peoples of the steppes had vastly different worldviews and political structures than the Sinicized states;
they rejected Chinese ideas of civilization that even predated Confucianism, such as written texts or settled
D AVI D C. K ANG , M EREDITH S H AW ,
agriculture. What centralization did exist was mainly due
to the personal charisma and strength of the ruler, and
Perdue (2005, 520) writes that “tribal rivalries and fragmentation were common.” It is difficult to generalize the
various ethnicities, languages, and social structures of the
peoples inhabiting the vast northern steppes ranging
from the Pacific Ocean over to India and Turkey. Not all
were nomads, and not all of them were politically organized based on tribes. Manchuria was home to many disparate peoples, languages, and cultures. Crossley (1997, 17)
notes that “the result was not the refinement of a homogenous people and culture from heterogeneous sources,
but the settlement of the uneven terrain of the region by
culturally diverse groups who on occasion wove their lineages and federations together.”
The major exception was the Manchu state that
emerged in the early seventeenth century (Crossley 2006).
Descended from Jurchens, for long stretches of time the
Manchu economic agenda was comparable to that of
Chosŏn, Ming China, and other, more settled societies.
Indeed, the Manchu conquest of the Ming was more by
opportunism than design; and while ruling China and absorbing some of the traditional Han institutions, the
Manchus retained unique Manchu elements as well (Elliot
2001). Although Manchu worldviews and identity were
never completely Sinicized, the Manchus used many of
the institutional forms and discursive style of traditional
Chinese dynasties in dealing with neighboring states.
In sum, there were two main types of political units in
early modern East Asia: those states that participated in
the institutions and norms of the tributary system of international relations and those polities and peoples of the
vast central Asian steppe that generally did not.
Measuring Patterns of Conflict in Early Modern East
Asia, 1368–1841
The new data described in this article highlights that a
great deal of the disagreement over patterns of war in
early modern East Asia resides in ambiguous or unclear
scope and boundary conditions regarding geographic or
temporal area studied, clarity in what constitutes an international system, and difficulties in coding “warfare” in a
system composed of unlike political units. For both historians and political scientists, being transparent about definitions and codings permits a more forthright dialogue
than talking past one another. This article not only introduces international relations scholars to a new and
important dataset, but it also helpfully illuminates the
limitations of existing Western-centric datasets on armed
conflict. By linking the literature on measuring contemporary war with the literature on early modern East Asia
in new and fruitful ways, this article significantly advances
the debate about early modern East Asian international
relations while introducing more systematic and transparent scholarly standards. Yet the international relations
literature itself has not yet grappled with many of the conceptual issues that arise in studying the pre-Westphalian
era. Attempting to apply many of the ideas, definitions,
and measures from contemporary war back into early
modern East Asia brings up a number of theoretical issues
for contemporary international relations scholars.
Although it is common to bemoan the lack of quality
data on early modern times, that issue is somewhat attenuated in the case of historical East Asia, for which there
exist extensive historical records from Korea, Vietnam,
Japan, and China. The most impressive of these sources
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are historical records kept by the scholar-officials in the
courts of the various leaders, often on a daily basis. These
records often covered all aspects of the kingdom’s rule—
including tax collections, palace appointments, regulations, the police and military, and other aspects of ruling.
Based in part on these records and also on canonical histories from the period such as the “Twenty-Four Histories”
(the final version of which was published in 1775), the
Chronology of Wars in China Through Successive Dynasties
(CWC) and Chronology of Wars of the Korean People (WKP)
represent the most comprehensive records of Chinese
and Korean use of force, respectively.1
Both of these datasets count incidents by year, not individual wars themselves; often, wars lasted over a number
of years.2 For example, the CWC lists China’s support of
Korea during the Japanese invasion of 1592–1598 as four
separate incidents. This means at a minimum that a coding decision must be made about whether to list wars or
to simply count incidents. We have endeavored to go
beyond clarifying the CWC and introduced an important
Korean source, which complements and extends the use
of Chinese sources. This is a key step forward in widening
the scope to more of East Asia, not simply China. Indeed,
Ian Lustick (1996) and Davenport and Ball (2002) both
argue that triangulation, or using multiple perspectives,
can help avoid the problem of selection bias. In this case,
the use of Korean data is a helpful first step away from
relying solely on a Chinese history and perspective.
The Koreans kept records just like the Chinese did, and
these records are an invaluable source for scholars interested in studying war and diplomacy in early modern East
Asia. Both the CWC and WKP are particularly useful because they provide a year-by-year count of both internal
and external wars in China and Korea, based on the historical annals that were kept by the various dynasties over
time. Using the CWC and WKP allows for a granular analysis of events that involved the use of force. The WKP
brings the number of entries to 1,180 in the database we
created that lists such events in historical East Asia from
1368 to 1841.
The Correlates of War (COW) project has defined war
as “sustained combat between/among military contingents involving substantial casualties (with the criterion
being a minimum of 1,000 battle deaths) over a twelvemonth period” (Sarkees, Wayman, and Singer 2003, 58).
The COW also counts a state as a participant in a war if it
commits at least 1,000 armed combatants or suffers at
least 100 casualties in the event. Both of these definitions
are somewhat arbitrary, and although the “1,000 deaths”
metric has become widely used in scholarship about international relations, it is not unproblematic—particularly
for datasets that span multiple epochs in which both
human population and technological capacity for killing
have increased dramatically.
We have attempted to bring our dataset into conformity
with the COW and other standard datasets used by scholars of contemporary war. For example, when possible, we
coded for which party initiated the war. Often what matters more to researchers is not whether a country is
involved in a war, but why the war started and what a
country’s intentions are. However, we found it difficult in
many cases to establish a clear instigator–target
1
Extended discussion of coding, sources, and measurement appears in the
Codebook that accompanies our dataset.
2
The CWC proceeds chronologically by year, listing each incident or event
under a separate heading with the specific date and a detailed description.
770
Measuring War in Early Modern East Asia, 1368–1841: Introducing Chinese and Korean Language Sources
dichotomy, since the contemporary accounts may contain
significant bias and, unlike COW, our data deals with such
dissimilar political units as nomadic groups, pirates, and
local bandits. We also provide—where possible—a measure of battle deaths and cross-reference our database with
other standard records of war, such as Dupuy and Dupuy
(1993), Kohn (2006), and Davis (1996), which allows for
evaluation of incident-level data as well as larger wars, and
which allows for better comparison of different measures
for war across time and from multiple sources.
We coded both the CWC and the WKP in two key categories: participants and interaction type. For participants,
we coded six types of political units:
1. Nomads, which included all the societies in the vast
Central Asian steppe—including Tibetan polities as
well as the range of Mongol, Khitan, and other peoples on the Steppe
), or pirates (Korean: waegu, Chinese:
2. Wako ( ,
wokou, pirates, but literally “bandits from Japan”)
3. Nascent national states of Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and
China
4. Internal revolt (peasants, rebellions)
5. Other dynasty/dynastic change
6. Intra-elite faction
We also coded six types of interactions:
1. Border skirmishes (that resulted in fewer than 1,000
battle deaths or were not intended as conquest)
2. Interstate wars (wars of conquest or major
mobilizations)
3. Pirate raids
4. Non-Chinese conflicts that did not involve Chinese
dynasties, or Chinese diplomacy
5. Internal conflict (farmers’ riots, rebellions, mutinous
provincial officials, etc.)
6. Regime consolidation, where one dynasty was establishing control
Following the standards and coding rules of the COW
project, the conflicts we coded as border skirmishes had
fewer than 1,000 battle deaths, or the conflict was a result
of local conditions not aimed at major territorial expansion. Sometimes the data contained an actual casualty
count, but often there was none. In that case, a qualitative
judgment was made based on the evidence at hand. As
Reiter, Stam, and Horowitz (2014) note, there are often
long-running simmering hostilities that exist before war
breaks out. How to differentiate when violence is simply
low-level skirmishing or when it has become full-scale war
is not always self-evident or an easy coding decision.
Examples of entries coded as “internal or domestic”
include:
•
•
•
•
•
Ming officials chased and captured 12 officials from
the former Yuan dynasty (1374, vol. 2, 220)
Yongle wins a “struggle for power” over a “rebellious
prince” in 1402
Mine workers in the south riot in 1475
Taiwanese rebel against the Dutch in 1652
After the defeat of Wu Sungwei, demobilized troops
without a job riot in the south in 1688
Examples of entries coded as either “border skirmishes”
or “pirate raids” include:
Table 1. Summary of CWC dataset: China’s opponents, 1368–1841
Incidents
% external
subtotal
% total entries
Nomad (steppe peoples)
Pirate/wako
Country or state
External subtotal
242
60
34
336
72.02
17.8
10.1
100.0
29.5
7.3
4.1
40.9
Internal (peasants, rebels, etc.)
Other dynasty
Intra-elite faction
401
67
14
49.0
8.1
1.7
Total incidents
822
100.0
•
•
•
•
•
An attack by wako pirates resulted in the Chinese capture of 12 boats and 130 people in 1372
Ming troops rescued Chinese envoys to Burma detained by a local chieftain on the border in 1405
A Chinese attack on Tatars resulted in 27 Tatar deaths
in 1546
Chinese repulsed a Tatar raid on Liaoyang in southern
Manchuria (Dongbei) with a loss of 75 Tatar lives and
the capture of 50 horses in 1563
Wako pirates looted several villages in Huangyan
county and escaped before Chinese troops could retaliate in 1552
These incidents clearly do not rise to the level of war.
Yet in contrast to our codings, Perdue, Callahan, and Hui
all make the identical claim that the CWC documents
3,756 wars throughout Chinese history. Peter Perdue
(2015, 1005) writes: “The Chinese Academy of Military
Science estimates that Chinese states fought 3,756 wars
from 770 BC to 1912 AD, for an average of 1.4 wars per
year,” while Callahan (2013, 48) cites the CWC, writing:
“In its long imperial history (770 BC to 1912 AD) China
engaged in 3,756 wars, for an average of 1.4 wars per
year,” and Hui (2008) writes: “The Chronology of Wars in
China’s Successive Dynasties—published by the People’s
Liberation Army Press in 2006 and compiled from dynastic records—lists 3,756 campaigns from 770 BCE to the
end of the Qing dynasty in 1911.” However, these scholars
simply counted the total number of entries in the CWC
without coding them by type, and thus they greatly overestimate the number of wars in Chinese history.
A Comparative Dataset of China and Korea
Both the CWC and the WKP identify largely similar patterns of conflict. For the CWC, we find that only 34 out of
822 conflicts of any type (4.1 percent of the total incidents) involved China, Korea, Vietnam, or Japan (Table 1).
Even among those incidents that were coded “external,”
wars with another state or country accounted for only 10.1
percent of entries. When counting wars and not incidents,
China and Japan fought one war during this time, and
Vietnam and China also fought only one war. In contrast,
242 conflicts of all types occurred between China and peoples of the Central Asian steppe (72 percent of all external
conflicts). Finally, pirate raids (60 cases) were twice as frequent as conflicts between the Sinic states.3
3
Kirk Larsen (2012, 11) writes that Ming China had “critical moments in
which the Chinese dynasty possessed both the capability and the momentum
necessary to complete aggressive expansionistic designs [against Chosŏn] but
decided not to do so.”
D AVI D C. K ANG , M EREDITH S H AW ,
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Table 2. Summary of CWC dataset: Type of Chinese conflict, 1368–1841
Incidents
% external
subtotal
% total
entries
Border skirmish
Interstate war
Pirate/wako raid
External subtotal
210
34
60
304
69.0
11.1
19.7
100.0
25.5
4.1
7.3
37.1
Event does not involve China/other
Internal revolt or conflict
Regime transition between dynasties
24
411
84
2.9
49.9
10.2
Total incidents
823
100.0
Table 3. CWC incidents with battle deaths by opponent type
Figure 1. Pirate raids, China and Korea, 1368–1841
Battles
Deaths
Nomads
Pirate
Country/state
Internal/rebels
Other
dynasty
Total
<1000
1000þ
Total
39
21
60
10
8
18
2
3
5
0
4
4
0
2
2
51
38
89
Table 2 summarizes the number of incidents from the
CWC coded by type of conflict. The number of total incidents is greater than the number of Chinese conflicts, because the CWC contains a number of incidents that did
not involve China, such as Dutch skirmishing with pirates
on the island of Taiwan. The clearest finding in the data
is that wars, or even border skirmishes, between China
and other Sinicized states were rare over the 473-year
period in question. This stands in stark contrast to the
situation along China’s long western and northern frontier, which experienced endemic conflict and occasional
wars over the same period.
Using the explicit COW definition (that a war comprises 1,000 battle deaths within a calendar year), the data
reveals similar patterns. There were a total of 89 instances
in the CWC in which a battle death count was included
(Table 3). Of those 89 incidents, 51 had battle deaths
below 1,000, and 21 had battle deaths over 1,000. Of those
that included any count of battle deaths at all, nomads
comprised by far the largest share (60), while only five
such incidents involved another country or state. Of those
rising to the level of COW’s classification of war (more
than 1,000 battle deaths), 21 were against nomads, eight
against pirates, three against states, and six were internal.
It should be noted that this measure is not comprehensive; many CWC entries did not include a count of battle
deaths, so we cannot be sure how many deaths there actually were in those entries. However, it is an interesting
table that largely corresponds to and is consistent with the
larger tone of the CWC, which shows that wars against the
nomads were far more likely and consequential than wars
with other countries.
Patterns of warfare in the WKP
Including the WKP in the database allows for a confirmation and cross-verification of the CWC, at least as far as
China–Korea relations are concerned. It also illustrates
how both Korea and China experienced their relations
with the peoples of the Central Asian steppe. The patterns
of warfare revealed in the WKP are consistent with, and
similar to, the patterns of conflict identified in the CWC.
Although the percentage of war-related incidents in the
WKP appears high, these incidents actually amount to
only two distinct wars, as will be discussed later.
As with both the Ming and, to a lesser extent, the Qing,
a major and continual foreign policy issue for Chosŏn
kings was border control. The government was constantly
preoccupied dealing with pirate/waegu raids along the
coasts and with peoples of the steppe along Korea’s long
northern border. Pirate raids and border skirmishes with
the Jurchens and other northern peoples accounted for
84 incidents over the time period under study. In fact,
both the CWC and WKP show that pirate raids were a particular problem in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Wak
o are often considered Japanese pirates, but in reality
they were as likely to be Korean or Chinese. Indeed, the
Mingshi (History of the Ming Dynasty) has a section on
), which says that
,
Japan (
(“Roughly speaking, only 30 percent of the members of
the pirate groups were Japanese. 70 percent of them were
actually followers [Chinese]”) (Zhang 1974, 8353). Yet the
pirates often found safety in the Japanese islands, launching raids and trading across East Asia. When trade was
legal, they were commercial traders; when trade was outlawed, they became pirates. Japan itself was important as a
base and source for the wak
o, and attempts to have them
brought under control form a significant part of this triangular diplomatic relationship of the late fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. As the Japanese central government
extended its control to its borders, the issue of piracy was
brought under control.
As Figure 1 reveals, the last recorded incident of pirate
attacks in the WKP occurred in 1587, but the frequency of
pirate raids had already diminished greatly by 1500. Only
a small portion of the 51 pirate raids on Korea occurred
in the sixteenth century, the rest occurring earlier. This is
similar to the Chinese experience—the last recorded pirate raid occurred in 1616, but the frequency of raids had
diminished significantly by that time as well. Indeed, the
1616 raid and the preceding wak
o raid in 1601 were actually Ming attempts to extend institutional control over
Taiwan, rather than raids from Taiwan itself.
The wak
o problem is actually the story of increasing
state control over borders and increasing attempts by all
governments in the region to control and tax legal trade
while reducing illegal trade. The wak
o had two major periods of activity—the mid-fourteenth century and the early
seventeenth century—which coincide with the Ming and
772
Measuring War in Early Modern East Asia, 1368–1841: Introducing Chinese and Korean Language Sources
Figure 3. Interstate wars, China and Korea, 1368–1841
Figure 2. Border skirmishes with Central Asian peoples,
Korea and China, 1368–1841
Table 4. Summary of WKP, 1392–1841
Type of incident
Number of
incidents
% total
Border
skirmishes
Interstate war
33
11.0
135
45.2
51
17.1
7
2.3
Palace intrigue, etc.
73
24.4
Mostly Ming–Qing
interactions, or
Ming–nomad
Waegu pirate
raids
Internal
incident
Non-Korea
Comment
From two wars only: Imjin
Waeran (1592–1598): 88
incidents; Qing pacification of
Chosŏn (1618–1637): 47
incidents
Qing maritime restrictions on trade. The so-called pirates
were never a political threat to the survival of Japan,
Korea, or China, but rather their illegal trading reflected
the increased effects of state control. When trading became illegal, merchants’ business became smuggling
(Zhao 2007, 46). Ultimately, as the central governments
of East Asia exerted increasingly greater control over their
territories and borders, the wak
o essentially disappeared.
This chart is significant because it reveals that border
control was a major issue for many countries in the region. As will be discussed, China, Korea, Vietnam, and
even Japan were territorially defined, centrally administered countries. When piracy was an issue, Korea and
China looked to Japan to solve the problem.
Figure 2 reveals that Korea and China consistently skirmished with the Central Asian steppe peoples along their
northern frontiers. With the rise of the Qing, Korea was
able to create a stable northern border. China, however,
continued its westward expansion under the Qing.
Stable relations between the Ming/Qing and Chosŏn
Of particular importance for debates about the tributary
system and the stability of hierarchic orders in general is
the centuries-long stability between Korea and China.
While fighting occurred along their northern frontiers,
what is often overlooked is the remarkable peacefulness
between the major Sinic countries in East Asia, including
Vietnam. The WKP largely confirms the CWC (Table 4)
and the intersubjective views of both China and Korea regarding their historic relations to each other. Most importantly, the WKP shows that Chosŏn views of the Ming
and Qing are largely symmetric to Chinese views of
Korean Chosŏn—neither viewed the other as a threat,
and neither viewed the other as a source of war or conflict. Significantly, the WKP lists 135 incidents of interstate
war in which Korea engaged, but they arise from only two
wars: the Imjin Waeran (Japanese invasion) from 1592 to
1598 (88 incidents over seven years), and 47 incidents resulting from the Qing pacification—but not conquest—of
Chosŏn from 1618 to 1637 (47 incidents over 20 years).
The WKP contains similar incidents as the CWC, essentially confirming that Chosŏn Korea had no wars with the
Ming or Qing on its borders once the dynasties had consolidated their control. What is also clear from both the
WKP and the CWC is the immense stability of the Korea–
China relationship. Over the 473-year era covered in this
database, there are no instances of overt warfare between
China and Korea (Figure 3).
It may be instructive to look specifically at the number
of years in which a particular type of conflict occurred, rather than simply counting events (Table 5). Measured this
way, between 1368 and 1841 there were 43 years in which
China experienced a pirate raid, 166 years in which it
experienced a border skirmish, but only 28 years in which
China experienced a war. Similarly, Korea experienced
pirate raids in 19 years, border skirmishes in 25 years, and
wars in 16 years. In short, no matter what measure is used,
early modern Korea and China faced far more instances
of border skirmishes and raiding along borders than they
did instances of war.
The WKP also includes other, related incidents that do
not include Chosŏn Korea itself, such as “Nurhaci attacks
Ming cities” in 1618 and “Kado raids and robs the Uljoo
region” in 1628. Indeed, the real and pressing diplomatic
issue for Chosŏn in the seventeenth century, as is well
documented, arose from attempting to avoid the fighting
between the Ming and the Qing and the precarious decision of which one to support.
A final interesting finding from the dataset that includes the WKP indicates that internal violence may have
been far more prevalent in early modern China than in
early modern Korea. This may be a result of different coding by the two institutes, or it may actually be a result of
the extraordinary stability of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–
1910). Indeed, in China it appears that intrastate violence
was more worrisome and prevalent than interstate or
extra-state violence. During a time when the Ming rose
and fell, the Qing rose and fell, and the Qing doubled the
D AVI D C. K ANG , M EREDITH S H AW ,
AN D
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773
Table 5. Years in which conflicts occurred, 1368–1841
China
Korea
Total
Border skirmish
Interstate war
Pirate/wako raid
Diplomatic/other
Internal revolt
Regime transition
166
25
168
28
16
28
43
19
43
22
17
22
227
4
227
53
–
53
size of China’s territory through conquest, the Korean
Chosŏn dynasty remained the same, both politically and
geographically. In sum, the revised dataset emphasizes
that stability was easier among like units than between different types of units with different preferences.
Furthermore, the stability among like units does not fit
easily into any category of balancing or bandwagoning;
nor does the violence conform to existing theories.
Explaining Enduring Patterns of Conflict in Early
Modern East Asia
The data summarized in this essay provides a granular degree of specificity to earlier characterizations of hierarchy
between Sinic states as being unusually peaceful relative
to the experience of historical Europe and the contemporary Westphalian system, while also emphasizing the
contrast between the relatively peaceful relations among
similar Sinic polities and the far greater violence of China
and Korea’s relations with dissimilar steppe-dwelling
neighbors. Why did war follow these clear patterns? The
interesting puzzle about patterns of early modern East
Asian violence is that they don’t always explain endemic
violence between China and peoples of the steppe, but rather how China and other Sinic states developed enduringly stable relations. Different regions in early modern
East Asia experienced different patterns of violence, and
explaining why there was fighting along frontiers but
peace along borders is a key question.
A number of scholars have made complementary arguments explaining patterns of China–Steppe relations. For
example, Hirshleifer (1991) argues that societies on the
Central Asian steppe responded to the growth of a rich,
advanced state nearby with increased raiding, border skirmishes, development of strong warrior cultures, and occasional conquest when some exogenous factor temporarily
weakened the richer state. Barfield (1989) argues that
when trade was more advantageous, the steppe peoples
traded with China; when trade was difficult or restricted,
they raided China’s frontier towns to get the goods they
needed. The Chinese weighed the costs of warring with
the nomads against the problems of trading with them.
Jagchid and Symons (1989, 1) write, “When the nomads
felt they were getting too little or the Chinese felt they
were giving too much compared to the relative power of
each participant, war broke out.”
Identity and deeply held cultural beliefs were just as important as material factors in causing endemic frontier
skirmishes (MacKay 2016). Peoples of the steppe were willing to trade with the Chinese and Koreans, but they had
no intention of truly taking on Chinese norms and cultures the way Korea, Vietnam, and Japan did. As David
Wright (2002, 76) argues, “Many statements in historical
records strongly suggest that the Chinese and the Nomads
had clear ideas of their differences and were committed
to preserving them against whatever threats the other side
posed.” Kwan (2015, 19) argues that “China and the
nomads formed an international society for much of their
history, one based not on a common Confucian heritage
or China’s immutable centrality, but on the principle of
an adaptable hierarchy based on common diplomatic
norms and practices that allowed its members to affirm
and contest their status within this hierarchy.” In short,
explaining endemic warfare between a rich, powerful, territorial state and smaller, mobile polities is relatively
straightforward.
Rather, the more theoretically interesting puzzle arises
in asking why there could exist a rich, powerful, territorially defined political unit, small, semi-nomadic political
units, and also a number of smaller, relatively wealthy, territorially defined political units that could stably coexist
with both the larger territorial unit and the smaller seminomadic units (Adamson and Demetriou 2007; EilstrupSangiovanni 2009). Put differently, it is harder to explain
why a larger political unit would fight some units and not
others. This is especially interesting because it would appear that the smaller territorial units were far richer and
hence more valuable, and they were also far easier to conquer—or, at a minimum, to exploit—than were the peoples of the steppe.
In this more complex situation, the basic dynamic between the larger territorial units and smaller seminomadic units remains the same. The puzzle is how these
smaller, territorially defined political units crafted such
deeply stable relations with each other, despite the smaller
states being more vulnerable to exploitation by the dominant power and not having defensive advantages such as
mobility. Yet so stable were China–Korea relations during
the Ming and Qing dynasties that the military—and military preparedness—gradually withered away in Chosŏn
Korea. Eugene Park (2006, 6) observes that “the late
Chosŏn state maintained an army no bigger than what
was dictated by internal security,” estimating that the
Korean military in the eighteenth century comprised only
10,000 “battle-worthy men.”
This makes sense when viewed through the lens of a
tributary system that provided a set of institutions and
norms for stabilizing relations between unlike units of
vastly different material power. Indeed, a key theoretical
argument about hierarchy is that if two states mutually
agree on their relative ranking and statuses, then the
relationship will be stable even if there are substantial differences of material capabilities (Kang 2013, 184). The
interesting question thus becomes how did actors of unequal power and status negotiate their relations? What sustained such relations?
When restricting our attention to only the Sinicized
states that utilized the institutions and norms of the tribute system, it is clear that these units did not view each
other as equals or as identical. Rather, even state-like units
saw far more differentiation than similarity. For example,
China was able to create long-lasting and stable borders
with political units that it (literally) recognized: these
were the states that sought to be legitimate within a Sinic
universe. Both Korea and Vietnam demarcated a clear
border with China by the eleventh century (Ledyard 1994,
290; Anderson 2007, 145). Both Vietnamese and Korean
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Measuring War in Early Modern East Asia, 1368–1841: Introducing Chinese and Korean Language Sources
borders have also remained essentially unchanged for
nine centuries.
These Sinic states used the tribute system as the basis
for managing their relations with each other. Kelley’s
(2005, 2) conclusion from his comprehensive study of
Vietnamese scholar-officials could easily apply to Korea as
well: “Vietnamese envoys passionately believed that they
participated in what we would now call the Sinitic or East
Asian cultural world, and that they accepted their kingdom’s vassal status in that world.” These similar states had
different goals and identities—they didn’t view themselves
as a substitute for China, but rather imagined themselves
in relationship with China. Womack (2010, 155) observes:
To say China was “among equals” would be missing a key element of the regional situation. Even
to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japan’s second “great
unifier,” the (unachieved) ultimate glory would
have been to rule China. China was at the center
of a set of regional relationships that it could not
force, but were not transposable.
In short, the dataset reveals clearly that the hierarchic
order among the Sinicized states was stable. The units inside the hierarchic order, which actively worked within
the tributary system, experienced a very low level of violence and conflict with each other. In contrast, they skirmished consistently with those units that were peripheral
to—or actively rejected—the tributary system. Even those
units that rejected explicit or enduring relations within
the hierarchic system, however, still understood the rank
order. As Womack (2010, 154) writes, “the Mongols and
the Manchus conquered China, but Mongolia and
Manchuria did not become the new centers of Asia, nor
did they obliterate the old one.”
Even the founding of the Qing empire was not clearly
about conquest or rejection of the order. As Pamela
Crossley (1997, 69–74) writes of the creation of the
Manchu state and declaration of war against the Ming in
the early seventeenth century:
It is probable that Nurhaci’s declaration of war
against the Ming was motivated less by the prospect of a dramatic increase in distributable
wealth than by fears that the current levels would
be constricted. . ..The conquest of Liaodong prepared the way for the creation of the Qing empire, so we are often inclined to associate it with
the unlimited energies, hopes, and ambitions that
“birth” implies. . ..Yet there is no point at which either the shape of his campaigns or his proclaimed
reasons for them departs much from the consistent goal of protecting and enhancing the economic basis of the wealth his lineage had
nurtured. . ..he achieved those ends, but there is
no evidence that he was determined to do much
more.
In contrast to the Sinicized states that did accept Chinese
civilization, peoples of the steppe accepted the larger
rules of the game but not Chinese notions of cultural
achievement. What this database clearly demonstrates is
that China’s relations with the steppe peoples were characterized by war and instability, whereas relations with the
Sinicized states were characterized by peace and stability.
Unipolarity cannot account for both of these outcomes.
Steppe peoples and the East Asian states both operated
within a unipolar system, but whereas the states accepted
Chinese authority, the steppe-dwellers did not. However,
there was a hierarchical relationship in place in the context of China and the East Asian states that was generated
by a common culture defined by a Confucian worldview.
These Sinic states possessed a shared sense of legitimacy
that presupposes, in the context of Confucianism, that relations operate within an accepted hierarchy.
Conclusion: Future Research and the Path Forward
Early modern East Asia comprised an enduring international system composed primarily of states of varying roles
and statuses coexisting alongside the peoples of the
Central Asian steppe. It was not a state system of identical
billiard balls, as the contemporary Westphalian system aspires to be; nor was it a composite amalgamation of overlapping political and social ties as existed in early modern
Europe. Furthermore, we find identifiable and systematic
patterns of conflict and war during this era: endemic conflict between states and nomads along their frontiers;
waves of piracy challenging the maritime status quo; and
relative peace along the borders between the territorial
states.
Perhaps the most important contribution this article
makes is to provide systematic evidence that certain types
of hierarchic orders can be stable, and that this stability is
as much a function of shared cultural values as it is of
power asymmetries (Mattern and Zarakol 2016; AdlerNissen 2014). The early modern East Asian tributary order
was only one system, but it was a system that endured for
centuries and incorporated some of the most powerful
political actors on the planet at the time. In that sense,
exploring whether and in what ways patterns of violence
vary according to different international systems is a key
theoretical task for scholars (Johnston 2012; Lake 2009;
Khong 2013).
The dataset described here is the first of its kind. It provides for international relations scholars the capability to
check, test, and replicate social-scientific claims about eras
other than the contemporary one. The triumph of the
Westphalian order has made it clear that the nation-state
is the primary unit of analysis. But what about other eras?
How does one code when there exists a diversity of units,
with none primary over the others? The phenomenon we
are interested in—war—predates the modern nation-state
and warfare system.
Indeed, researching eras before the nineteenth century
also raises many questions about the definition of war.
What is a war? Was war the same in early modern East
Asia as it is today? How do we differentiate between a war
that might result in the elimination of a political unit, and
a war that is simply a border skirmish? Does a pirate raid
on a coastal town count as a war? What evidence is available to help us measure and code various types of conflicts? How do we measure, differentiate, and categorize
different types of violence in early modern times?
The revised database described in this article and the
accompanying discussion reveal that much of the contemporary international relations literature is far more
Eurocentric and modernist than is generally admitted.
The literature on measurement of wars has focused almost
exclusively on the contemporary era. As Phillips and
Sharman (2015b, 437) argue: “IR is neither a European
area studies nor contemporary history, but rather a social
D AVI D C. K ANG , M EREDITH S H AW ,
science. Its practitioners frequently generate claims that
are said to be transferable across different historical and
geographical domains.” The linking and juxtaposition of
measures of war in the contemporary era and early modern East Asia reveal that most datasets of war are more
bounded in time and space than is often recognized.
David Armitage’s (2015, 1829) observation about civil war
is surely appropriate for the study of war in general:
Social scientists who study civil war have generally
relied on large collections of data such as the
Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s Armed Conflict
Dataset, which begins in 1946, or the Correlates
of War Project at the University of Michigan,
whose baseline is 1816. Yet any truly historical
study of civil war—its genealogy, its morphology,
its durability, or its terminability—must stretch
ten times further than the horizon of these
analyses.
Perhaps the most interesting theoretical issue that arises
when measuring war in early modern East Asia is that we
find two main units of analysis—states and nomads. East
Asia enjoyed an international system that endured centuries—a “durably diverse international order,” in Phillips
and Sharman’s (2015b) words. These units developed
norms and institutions for interacting with each other,
despite significant differentiation (Park 2016). As Nexon
(2009, 13) argues, the boundaries and relations between
polities need to be explained, rather than simply
assumed—“Contemporary realist theory simply cannot
make sense of the power-political dimensions of nonstate
movements, let alone of how their dynamics might interface with different forms of state organization.” Buzan
and Little (2000, 5) point out that “the image of the international system as an interstate system is now so deeply ingrained that the two concepts are treated as synonymous.”
War, the phenomenon we are interested in, predates the
modern nation-state and warfare system, and many of the
most influential theories of contemporary scholars of
international relations will require significant modification to apply them to times before the primacy of the nation-state.
We want to emphasize that we are not arguing that contemporary theories cannot work when applied anachronistically—rather, we are arguing that applying many theories will take considerable modification. Of course in
premodern times actors were strategic, they had interests,
and they had preferences they pursued. These actors
operated within strategic environments composed of
norms and institutions, as well. So we are not arguing that
theories are incapable, but rather that many of our most
basic concepts are more historically bound and contingent than we may realize (Milner 1991; Park 2016). As
Buzan and Little pointed out, we reflexively refer to
“states” in international relations. The question becomes,
do theories work the same way when not all the units are
states?
Here we focus on two elements of that presentist bias
that—although they could be dealt with—have not yet
received sufficient attention from scholars who imply, or
believe, that our theories are universal across both time
and space: the concept of balancing, and the difficulty of
modeling unlike units.
One of the most common and influential concepts in
the international relations pantheon is that of balancing
AN D
R ON AN T SE -M IN F U
775
or bandwagoning. The idea that states balance against or
bandwagon with other states, particularly in its structuralrealist variant (Waltz 1979), informs wide swaths of the
contemporary international relations literature. Yet this
idea is more difficult to apply in premodern times, and
among unlike units, than one expects. After all, is it possible in any meaningful sense to argue that the mobile
and nomadic Mongol or Jurchen tribes “balanced”
Chinese power? Did these political units “bandwagon”
with China? While these mobile pastoral polities clearly
interacted and episodically skirmished with China, it is difficult to characterize their interactions as either balancing
or bandwagoning.
The utility of the balancing concept is not limited to
the vast central Asian steppe. As Paul Schroeder (1994,
1997) famously pointed out over two decades ago, even in
Renaissance Europe there were a wide variety of strategies
polities might employ in their foreign relations—hiding,
in particular. Schroeder directly challenged the notion
that balancing is the default strategy in international relations. Even today the concept has come under increasing
criticism as states have not behaved in either obviously balancing or bandwagoning strategies. Indeed, scholars have
introduced myriad terms: “soft,” “pre-,” and “under-balancing,” in addition to “hedging” (Goh 2008; Lieber and
Alexander 2005; Schweller 2010). In short, while in early
modern East Asia political units clearly chose strategies
designed to further their goals, it remains unclear if the
most common and widely used contemporary international relations scholarly categories can adequately describe and explain that behavior.
In addition, patterns of conquest and defense in early
modern Asia can offer new insights into how notions of
territoriality formed outside early modern Europe. By
more precisely documenting patterns of conflict in Asia at
a time when borders were relatively more ill defined and
less exclusionary, we may even detect clues to how Asian
states are likely to manage their disputes in modern-day
zones of ill-defined, non-exclusionary borders—namely,
the East and South China Seas.
It should not come as a surprise that some theories and
concepts of state behavior derived within—and from—a
Westphalian context are difficult to apply anachronistically. The triumph of the nation-state system has led,
unsurprisingly, to theories that assume all units are essentially the same in form, intention, and function. Thus,
many of the common approaches today—realism, rationalism, and even constructivism—take for granted a stable
unit of analysis that endures over time and is essentially
functionally undifferentiated. Although this is an explicit
assumption of Waltzian realism, it is also implicit in much
rationalist theory that posits two identical actors. Thus, we
can assume a territorial, sovereign order with easily identified units that have transposable and identical preference
orderings and goals. In fact, even in cases where contemporary theory deals with civil war, we assume that the goal
of rebel groups is to control a territorial state or to create
one of their own.
However, as was the case in early modern Southeast
Asia, perhaps political leaders were less concerned with
defining and controlling territory than with their relationships to super- and subordinate political leaders and units.
In this case, it is harder to theorize about a division of the
pie in many premodern and early modern contexts.
Bargaining between two functionally dissimilar units or
actors—rather than two identical actors—likely exacerbates a commitment problem. After all, they might possess
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Measuring War in Early Modern East Asia, 1368–1841: Introducing Chinese and Korean Language Sources
very different beliefs about what makes for credible signals
and institutions. Thus, we close by reiterating that such
theories and models can apply across different eras and
international systems—but using them will require more
modification and adaptation than the scholarly literature
often appreciates.
Supplemental Information
Supplementary information can be found at ISA Online.
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