Given that, almost without exception, “every state must have an army” (p. 1), how did China under the rule of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) manage the daunting tasks of defending its extensive border and maintaining, within that, a semblance of order? The question is important not only for historians drawn to the traditional realm of military history but also for others interested in how the Chinese state actually functioned and how pre-twentieth-century China could be compared with other contemporaneous polities.
But central as this line of inquiries regarding state capacity and administrative efficacy may be, as Michael Szonyi argues in this pathbreaking and elegant book, there is another equally compelling story waiting to be told: how individual households in the Ming dynasty—households that had for various reasons come to be registered as “military”—managed their obligations to the state while pursuing as best as they could their own interests. So though...
