Pandemics and statecraft : epidemiological crisis, and governance in the late-Ming Dynasty

Pandemics are often seen in terms of first-order-effects, such as their biological impact on human health and their fiscal strain on a state. Similarly, this paper breaks down this explanation by demonstrating that pandemics, driven by the simultaneous cooling of global temperatures during the Little Ice Age and the state's simplification of agriculture, served as a collective shock to the institutional framework of the late-Ming Dynasty, thereby creating a critical juncture where institutional authority shifted from the state to the localized gentry. I show that, as the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, simultaneous cooling temperatures, famine, locust outbreaks, flooding, and pandemics eroded state capacity, the emerging gentry seized the opportunity to supplant the state as the dominant institutional actor in the Ming. Driven by a goal to protect the Ming from corruption and moral decline, these gentry established, by taking over county politics, private order institutions to combat plague, famine, and environmental shock in the state's place. Though not transforming the purpose of these institutions, they shifted institutional responsibility. This argument is demonstrated by triangulating a mixed-method approach by first, analyzing various descriptive and statistical tests on locust and temperature data as proxies for the Little Ice Age; second, process-tracing Ming-era primary sources; and finally, drawing on Harvard political scientist Yuhua Wang's data to examine elite social terrain. Overall, this study helps deepen our understanding of institutional path dependence, state capacity, and the relationship between environmental history and state development.