This chapter examines famine and poverty relief in Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. Relief in subsistence crisis was the most basic obligation of the state to the public interest. The same platform of a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation led to two different directions in state–society interactions in famine relief. Tudor and early Stuart England and Tokugawa Japan had decentralized fiscal systems, and municipal and rural granaries managed by local authorities and social elites were dominant. Yet when a major subsistence crisis occurred, the royal government and shogunate as the highest political authority in each realm had to intervene to protect the welfare of wider regions or even the entire country. In contrast, the Qing state in China had a centrally managed fiscal system that played a significant role in transferring funds and grain across regions in times of major subsistence crisis. The technical difficulties in managing state granaries across the country, however, led the Qing state to encourage local elites' participation in building and managing nonofficial granaries to benefit local inhabitants and to make up for the inadequacies of the state system.

Public infrastructural facilities such as dikes, highways, bridges, and seawalls were vital to domestic welfare. Financing their building and maintenance required extensive and sustained state–society collaboration, which was grounded in the shared public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. In fiscally decentralized Tudor and early Stuart England and Tokugawa Japan to 1853, self-governed communities were active in building and managing small- and medium-scale public works. But for large-scale infrastructural facilities, the royal government and shogunate had to become involved through ad hoc financing measures to cover the otherwise insupportable costs. The reverse was true in Qing China prior to 1840. The Qing state could reply upon a centrally managed fiscal system to directly fund the building and maintenance of major public works. For small-scale public works that mainly benefited local residents, it encouraged investment and involvement by local communities and gentry. It also advanced official funds to repair important local water control projects and let the benefited communities return the funds to the state over time without interest.