Chapter 4 examines institutional and intellectual trends in the early Qing, up to the end of Kangxi’s reign. It focuses on the intellectual and political response to the Ming collapse, which spurred a large wave of arguments, both scholarly and political, in favor of light taxes and a noninterventionist state. In contrast to the heavily moralistic tone of Ming fiscal conservatism, the trauma of the Ming-Qing transition drove early Qing elites toward a fiscal worldview that was both more “realist,” but also far more hostile toward state taxation. This hostility stemmed directly from a mainstream historical interpretation of Ming collapse that placed much of the blame on late Ming tax increases, which, in turn, seemed to have cognitive roots in Qing elites’ deep-rooted moral skepticism of state extraction. Mindful of this “history lesson,” and of ethnic tensions between Manchu and Han populations, the Qing political elite committed itself, both rhetorically and institutionally, to very low agricultural tax quotas. At the same time, however, no such commitment was made towards nonagricultural taxes due to the specific circumstances of the Ming collapse.

Chapter 5 discusses the entrenchment of fiscal conservatism in mid-Qing politics, covering the Yongzheng to Daoguang eras (1722-1850). A spirited attempt by the Yongzheng Emperor to expand formal agricultural tax quotas and rationalize fiscal institutions had some success, but quickly encountered widespread opposition. By the late 1730s, the Qing Court settled into a set of fiscal institutions that would remain largely unchanged for the next 170 years. Formal agricultural tax quotas were, with the exception of the grain tribute, fixed in absolute values of silver, and could no longer be increased.Furthermore, provincial and local land surveying was made illegal by imperial decree, depriving political elites of their primary, and perhaps only, source of reliable macroeconomic information. Soon after - and arguably as a direct result - a “Malthusian” worldview began to gain popularity among political elites, arguing that, because the population was rapidly growing while total agricultural output remained unchanged, the amount of taxable surplus that the state could safely extract before rural incomes fell below subsistence level was actually shrinking. Driven by this deepening sense of insecurity, the Qing Court came to view nearly any proposal to raise agricultural taxes with deep suspicion.By the late eighteenth century, such proposals met with almost automatic rejection, and often carried serious political consequences for their sponsors. Meanwhile, nonagricultural taxes continued their slow upward trend, and became the focal point for fiscal reform efforts in the early nineteenth century.

Chapter six sets a counterpoint to this argument, exploring cases in which the Muslim population proved uncooperative with, or openly resisted, state institutions, including the judiciary, police, and local administration. Most of these cases were related to land issues and the fear of forced conversion in the Volga region. In Crimea, where forced conversion was less of a threat and where land had been surveyed and demarcated earlier, most remaining disputes could be fought out in court by the 1870s.