Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State

In the decade after the First Opium War, Thomas Francis Wade, then an assistant secretary at the British Foreign Office in Hong Kong, carefully studied the public documents of the Qing state. Reading a file of court gazettes, he noted that officials could be removed for infractions including “corruption; defalcation; concealment of crime; erroneous decisions; remissness in not preventing, or tardiness in repairing, evil; incapacity, mediocrity; inexperience; informality; litigation; malingering; contumacity; presumption; and unpopularity.” He found in this vivid litany evidence of the empire's inexorable descent into corruption and decay.¹ The list reflects the preoccupations of a British imperial agent, but it also accurately suggests the intense pressure on bureaucrats to produce documents testifying to their own exemplary behavior. Documents and rules were thus instruments of official discipline and self-preservation. Maura Dykstra's Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine suggests an additional, alternative reading of the Qing state's voluminous...