This chapter explores the military structures in China between 1650 and 1900 from the perspective of labour history as devised by the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500-2000. It will first present the basic structures of the Qing armies. There follows a discussion of the state of the art in research and the major issues and debates in this field. Finally, the authors assess trends and tendencies in the framework of the matrix of hypotheses developed within the research group Fighting for a Living.

The Qing armies, 1600-1911: a short overview

The Manchu Qing dynasty ruled China between 1644 and 1911. It originated from semi-nomadic groups of the Jurchen confederation who lived scattered across the today's north-eastern Chinese provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang. These groups defined themselves as ethnically and culturally distinct from their mighty, numerous, and affluent neighbours in the south-west, the Chinese or “Han”, and began to refer to themselves as “Man” or “Manchus”. After 1600, their unifier, Nurhaci (1559-1626), organized his followers into socio-military units or companies. Family members and dependants were also registered in the military households. As far as our knowledge goes, “followers” implies the entire population that had pledged allegiance to Nurhaci, voluntarily or by force. In 1615, these companies were officially divided into the so-called Eight Banners. Not only the Manchus were grouped into these formations, but also Mongols, Koreans, and Chinese who had either lived in the areas north of the Great Wall or had submitted to the Manchus before they started their conquest of China proper in 1644. In 1635, Nurhaci's son and successor Hong Taiji (r. 1626-1643) divided the Banners along ethnic lines, with a Manchu, a Mongol, and a Chinese (the latter also called the “Chinese-martial”) Banner assigned to each of the eight, resulting in an actual number of twenty-four Banners. The Banners were assigned different colours, according to the flags and uniforms they carried into and wore during battle. Their organization was dissolved only after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912.

Precise and factual figures are unavailable and are subject to much recent debate. Roughly speaking, the estimates for the entire Banner population, including men, women, children, elderly, and dependants (bondservants and slaves) range between 1.3 million and 2.4 million in 1648, and 2.6 million to 4.9 million in 1720.