Slaves of the Emperor

The China Studies Centre supports research on China at The University of Sydney by bringing together researchers on China from across faculties and disciplines, enabling international academic collaboration with researchers from China and other countries, and being an informed voice in Australia's public China discourse.

China Studies Centre

Exploring the Qing approach to one of the fundamental challenges of early modern state-building

Talks in Chinese Humanities

"Talks in Chinese Humanities" is co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Discipline of Chinese Studies and the Australian Society for Asian Humanities at the University of Sydney and the Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture at UNSW.

Talks in Chinese HumanitiesSlaves of the Emperor: Service, Privilege, and Status in the Qing Eight BannersThis talk introduces David Porter's new book, Slaves of the Emperor (Columbia, 2024). In it, David explores the Qing approach to one of the fundamental challenges of early modern state-building: how to develop an effective bureaucracy with increasing administrative capacity to govern a growing polity while retaining the loyalty of the ruling family’s most important supporters. Banner people were bound to the court by an exchange of loyal service for institutionalized privilege, a relationship symbolically conceptualized as one of slave to master. The book traces how the banner system created a “service elite” through its processes of incorporating new members, its employment of bannermen as technical specialists, its imposition of service obligations on women as well as men, and its response to fiscal and ideological challenges. Placing Qing practices in comparative perspective, David describes parallels to similar institutions in Tokugawa Japan, imperial Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.About the SpeakerDavid Porter is Faculty Lecturer in the Department of History and Classical Studies and the Department of East Asian Studies at McGill University. He holds a PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. He is a historian of the Qing empire and early Republican China, whose research focuses on questions of empire, identity, and state-making in a global early modern comparative context. In addition, he has been active in helping scholars and students across the world study the Manchu language via online teaching and the dissemination of Manchu language-learning resources."Talks in Chinese Humanities" is co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Discipline of Chinese Studies and the Australian Society for Asian Humanities at the University of Sydney and the Faculty of Art, Design &amp; Architecture at UNSW.

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