Chapter Two lays out the history of the Donggu Revolutionary Base Area. It emphasizes some of the unique characteristics of this place – its relative isolation nestled in the mountainous countryside of eastern Ji’an county, the close ties among a number of classmates, and the ties of kinship that made their alliance with local bandits possible. This core leadership group was able to stay together even after their original leader, Lai Jingbang, was killed. Lai was replaced by Li Wenlin, a graduate of Whampoa Military Academy, who led the Donggu Revolutionary Base area to expand to cover some 24 townships in the area.

This chapter develops a theory of how local political exclusion drives ethnic riots in multiethnic countries during political transition. I discuss existing accounts of the onset of ethnic riots and their limitations in explaining why ethnic rioting rises and subsequently declines during political transitions in multiethnic countries. I argue that ethnic riots in democratizing countries are driven by local elites’ demands for inclusion in local politics. This deployment of ethnic riots as a form of political engagement is particularly prevalent in weakly institutionalized multiethnic settings, where institutions are less reliable and where available local networks tend to be ethnic-based. Once a group’s demands for inclusion have been met and violence has served its purpose, rioting will decline. I derive a set of observable implications and hypotheses I will examine in the subsequent empirical chapters.

Political transitions in a multiethnic setting are often marred with violence between groups. Why does ethnocommunal violence during a country’s democratic transition erupt in some places, and not others? Why does it subsequently decline? Existing explanations typically focus on the weakness of state capacity, the power struggle between political candidates around elections, or the structural factors such as economic inequality between groups. However, in many countries in transition, administrative units with similar characteristics have varying levels of violence. In this book, I build on Albert O. Hirschman’s framework of exit, voice, and loyalty, and I argue that excluded local elites mobilize violence to leverage their demands for greater inclusion in local politics during democratic transition. When these demands are accommodated, violence will decline. This chapter provides an overview of my theory, contributions to related literature, methodological approaches, key findings, and plan of the book.

This chapter compares forms of political co-operation between the king, the Greek (or Hellenized) elites at the center and those at the peripheries during two wars of Antiochus III (222–187 BCE). The authors argue that these elites were a destabilizing factor in the structure of Ptolemaic and Seleucid imperial power. Their networks of communication were strong, becoming even more valuable, but also more fragile when war was threatening. Gerardin shows how the communication with the ruler could be compromised, especially in the case of the young Ptolemy V, and how Antiochus gained the support of elite and civic members, using some of the same strategies the Ptolemies had developed. Dreyer demonstrates that the political elites on all levels gained influence during the rivalry between Antiochus and Rome in Asia Minor because both based their influence on the rhetoric of the “freedom of the Greeks.” But the Romans did so more effectively by altering the rules of this diplomatic game. In both cases, the influence of civic and supra-civic elite network of communication was far more detrimental to the territorial power of both empires than so–called “ethnic” or “nationalist” revolts.

The Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires are usually studied separately, or otherwise included in broader examinations of the Hellenistic World. This book proposes a more dynamic comparison, with a particular, though not exclusive focus on the interaction of the royal centers with local populations and elites. Both political entities are approached as multiethnic empires whose resemblance and entanglement are sufficient to make comparisons meaningful. In the process of comparing them, differences and connections become more salient and better explained. We aim to explore the different structural capacities for, and levels of, integration that were either aspired to or achieved by the kings and populations of each empire.

This chapter investigates the dynamics of material and symbolic exchange between Roman emperors and Greek cities, and the role of the emperor in the ideology and practice of civic euergetism in the Greek East, in the middle Roman empire (c. 98–180 CE). It begins by documenting the absence of demonstrable correlations between (1) an imperial visit and an imperial benefaction to a city and (2) an imperial visit and the erection of an honorific statue for the reigning emperor. On this basis it is argued that an imperial visit was not the critical moment for generating reciprocal exchanges between emperor and city, as is normally thought, and that local honours for the emperor were not usually triggered by the provision or even the prospect of specific imperial benefactions to the city. The bulk of the chapter then draws out the implications – both ideological and practical – of this peculiar form of ‘abstract reciprocity’ between Roman emperors and Greek cities, arguing that this type of idealized benefaction and local honorific practice defines this phase in the long history of civic euergetism in the Greek polis.

This chapter analyzes the expansion of the Qing Empire between 1583 and 1800, paying particular attention to the factors determining the ultimate boundaries of the realm. It argues that imperial expansion can most convincingly be explained as a Manchu effort to dominate both China and the territory of the Mongols and Oirats. While the conquest of China was completed relatively quickly, the absorption of Mongol territories was protracted, fitful, and ultimately involved expansion elsewhere in Inner Asia, notably Tibet and the Tarim Basin (southern Xinjiang). Qing rulers adopted distinct political strategies for different zones of their empire: China was ruled chiefly via bureaucratic practices adapted from the preceding Ming regime, while much of Inner Asia was ruled by indigenous leaders kept under close Manchu oversight. Efforts to divide the empire into segments governed by distinct political and ideological norms began to break down by 1800.

The practice in provincial towns of raising statues to emperors is often interpreted as a mode of communication between emperors and subjects, whether as top-down distribution of imperial ideology or as from-below declarations of loyalty to the regime. This chapter explores ways in which imperial statues communicated vertically, on the initiative of locals and with local aims. Using inscribed statue bases from Roman North Africa, it describes how imperial honorific monuments were exploited for the career purposes of local elites, and accompanied significant advancements by both individuals and communities. Imperial monuments and priesthoods became indispensable tokens of local standing, displaying and confirming the local powers that be. They were consequently much desired, and access to them could be opened or closed as it suited the aims of the imperial administration. Both locals and emperors could thus exploit the imperial image – the one for their potency, the other for how demand for them fuelled local peer-to-peer competition – but without communicating directly through them.

This chapter reveals the great level of control that local elites accumulated over both local and royal institutions in Santo Domingo, to expand their influence to other parts of the Spanish Caribbean and acquire a profitable network of associates and introduce contraband goods into the city. Rodrigo Pimentel’s political life provides an illuminating example of the particularities of Santo Domingo’s institutional life, but on a larger scale, it also reveals the profound limitations that the Spanish Monarchy’s bureaucratic apparatus had to govern its own Caribbean territories and, by extension, most of its colonial dominions beyond Mexico City and Lima. Under the Habsburg, colonial centers of royal authority, Audiencias and governors often became extensions of the communities that hosted ministers and royal officials, and not anchors of royal power in remote Spanish possessions, as the crown initially intended. In theirdealings withhigh courts, these local groups of power both made and unmade the Spanish empire: they limited the influence of Madrid, but by using royal institutions for their own ends, they shaped the edges of the empire according to their own interests.

Chapter 1 situates the wenshi ziliao within the context of post-Mao cultural production and ideology in the 1980s. The party-state integrated professionalization and expertise-based specialization with political mobilization, and adopted a flexible experimental approach to reform in the economic and cultural arenas. Whether in the form of special economic zones, news and entertainment media structures, sites of official commemoration, or oral history projects, local elites and officials were given officially sanctioned space to undertake economic and cultural initiatives. This moment of innovation and experimentation involved the historical rehabilitation of entrepreneurs, intellectuals, Guomindang (GMD) affiliates, and other former “counterrevolutionaries.” Historical production by the People’s Political Consultative Conference and wenshi ziliao committees adhered to central guidance and local initiative. Through the PPCC’s mandate of “inspect, consult, and reeducate,” the state applied to the realm of historical investigation a combination of strategies for gauging local conditions, seeking popular legitimacy, and asserting political control. Wenshi ziliao organizers called for “united front” materials and interwove the stories of a wide spectrum of historical actors ranging from Party revolutionaries to former shop owners, gold miners, bandits, and GMD officials.