In this engaging book, John Dardess accurately assesses the difficulty of his object: “To analyze a collapse is a fairly straightforward challenge. To explain how a system such as the Ming survived for close to three centuries is not so easy” (p. 61). Indeed, the more that is written about the Ming dynasty's many flaws, the harder it is to explain its longevity. “There is no hiding the fact,” Dardess acknowledges, “that there was a crazed and bloody edge to Ming politics. But that is not the whole story” (p. 74). Dardess's achievement is that he has condensed the whole story into a neat book under 150 pages long.
Dardess's five chapters deal with the Ming's frontiers, emperors, governance, literati, and outlaws. Unsurprisingly, it is the second chapter that provides most of the “crazed and bloody edge.” Dardess presents Ming autocracy itself as nearly the only stable element of a...
