Because most states in history have had armies, the military can be a productive site to explore the interaction of states and their subjects comparatively. China’s Ming dynasty (1368-1644) assigned responsibility to provide labor service for the army to hereditary military households. Such households developed elaborate strategies to negotiate their obligations to provide manpower to the army, and these are available to us because they recorded in their printed genealogies. These strategies, lying in the broad middle ground between open resistance and full compliance, were intended to optimize the family’s relationship with the state and its agents. They reshaped existing social relations and created new ones. So they generated a sort of premodern “state effect”. This specific case can illustrate a broader phenomenon, the negotiation of the terms of state membership. Generalizing from the specific context would make it possible to sketch out a broader theory of everyday politics, or in other words the negotiation of the terms of state membership, in premodern states.