Ritual in the Early Modern World: Proliferation, State-Formation, and the Work of the Manchu Surrender Ceremony

Abstract: Ritual permeated the early modern world. While historians have explored ritual in regional and national contexts, little work has made sense of it as a global phenomenon. As a consequence, scholars continue to give primacy to bureaucracies and militaries in accounts of premodern state-formation. This article examines ritual in relation to early modern social and political developments, especially territorial expansion and increasing interactions. It argues that as polities contracted and empires expanded rulers relied on ritual just as much as institutional and administrative measures. Ritual was a key mechanism to do the work of inclusion and social organization in governance and territorial expansion. In order to begin to theorize what ritual did and how it did it, the article turns to an empirical case study of the Manchu surrender ceremony in the mid-seventeenth century. Through a close examination of the rite and its political and social background the article shows how ritual did the work of constructing and reconstructing social and political orders in the context of expanding empires in a quickly changing world. Ritual, it is argued, constructed social orders and created subjunctives that helped political actors navigate fraught political and social relations.