ABSTRACT
Military labor markets have a long history in China. In fact, as Mark Lewis has shown, policy debates over such issues as conscription, professional standing armies, recruitment, and rewards predated the emergence of the first imperial dynasty, the Qin, in 221 BC. 1 Given this background, modern scholars’ relative indifference to this cluster of issues is striking. This chapter briefly reviews a few key works and debates related to military labor in China c. 1500, most especially recruitment, then moves to consideration of the Chinese example in the light of our common comparative axes and taxonomies, and finally concludes with an effort to assess the causal factors that accounted for the particular forms of military labor in China c. 1500.
