Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs

Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs is a tightly-focused collection of studies that explores how Qing governing institutions and strategies worked in actual practice to address the practical problems and needs of a regionally diverse and culturally complex empire from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It highlights the Qing regime's ability to accommodate an astonishing variety of local governing environments in the management of short-term contingent crises and long-term evolutionary problems caused by changes in the social-economic fabric of Greater China during the Qing period. It argues that the Qing state should be viewed as a system of indirect rule because of its accommodative strategies of governance and its reliance on sub- and extra-bureaucratic power groups at the local level. Dragons, Tigers, and Dogs makes an important contribution to our understanding of the practical operation of Qing government, and its readability, thematic coherence, and inclusion of professionally-drawn maps and enhanced Chinese woodblock illustrations make this work attractive and accessible to students of late imperial China as well as Qing specialists.

Robert J. Antony is Associate Professor of History at Western Kentucky University. He is the author of Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China, Institute for East Asian Studies Monograph Series, University of California, Berkeley, 2003.
Jane Kate Leonard is Professor of History at the University of Akron. Her previous publications include To Achieve Security and Wealth: The Qing Imperial State and the Economy, 1644-1911 (CEAS No. 56).