The tumultuous Ming-Qing dynastic transition was one of the bloodiest and most protracted in China’s long history. Encompassing parts of eight decades and spanning the entire territory of the empire as well as the coast and neighboring lands, it affected people from all walks of life. Famine, banditry and epidemics were widespread and entire provinces devolved into armed camps as various contenders for power at all levels of the political and administrative hierarchy used and abused locals and manipulated symbols and loyalty for their own ends. Traumatic as these events were for those who experienced them, they also generated a spate of literature from official reports to diaries to memoirs that was unprecedented in Chinese history. This allows modern scholars to get a much better sense of how war was experienced and understood (or not) by both those directly affected by events and by their children and grandchildren. Focusing specifically on events associated with the Ming-Qing transition in southwest China from the 1640s-1660s, this talk will examine how people experienced war in early modern China, highlighting particular cultural responses and considering the Chinese experience in comparison with other times and places.

Kenneth Swope earned his B.A. at the College of Wooster (OH) and his M.A. in Chinese Studies and Ph.D. in History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592-1598 (Oklahoma 2009); The Military Collapse of China’s Ming Dynasty, 1618-1644 (Routledge 2014) and numerous other articles and book chapters. He is currently the General Buford Blount Professor of Military History at the University of Southern Mississippi, and in residency at the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton where he is researching and writing his new book, On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger: War, Trauma, and Social Dislocation in Southwest China During the Ming-Qing Transition.