Acknowledgments

So many people and institutions have made this work possible. In the summer of 2009, I visited the Komaba Campus of the University of Tokyo. Mitani Hiroshi was my host. On the first day I went to his office, he took me to an izakaya (a sort of Japanese pub) near the campus. We talked about how to understand the political implications of the indigenous practice of “public deliberation” in Tokugawa Japan and Qing China. Mitani Hiroshi introduced me to the research of Japanese historians such as Kurushima Hiroshi and Hirakawa Arata, which prompted me to move away from the Meiji era and enter into the world of Tokugawa Japan. At the same time, Paul Slack’s work on social policy in Tudor and early Stuart England was a constant source of inspiration. The scholarship on social policies in Tokugawa Japan and early modern England resonated with my own research into the central–provincial debates in Qing China over welfare policies related to currency, famine relief, and financing of water control projects.

In 2011 I began this journey of comparative historical analysis to explore state formation from the perspective of safeguarding domestic welfare rather than fighting foreign wars. The passion I felt in the early stage of research was soon overwhelmed by the huge difficulties of studying diverse issues – famine and poverty relief, infrastructural facilities, and popular petitions over welfare grievances – in three quite different early modern states. I struggled to digest the immense literature on legitimacy and early modern political thought. Although I managed to write several papers by utilizing Qing archival materials, I found it very hard to come up with a coherent framework to integrate the case of Qing China with those of early modern England and Tokugawa Japan. At points, I felt like I was drowning in the deep sea of historical materials. Without the kind help and encouragement of institutions and numerous individuals, I would never have been able to finish this book.

I am deeply grateful to the generous support from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University in 2016–2017. The Radcliffe/Yenching fellowship gave me a remarkable opportunity: access to the extremely rich English, Japanese, and Chinese collections held in the Harvard libraries, and particularly the Harvard-Yenching library; as well as an excellent working environment that allowed me to concentrate on writing and to complete a draft of the majority of this manuscript. The intellectual atmosphere of the Radcliffe Institute was highly stimulating. I particularly enjoyed discussions with Alex Gourevitch and Jal Mehta. Steven Epstein challenged me to include the concept of citizenship in my explanatory framework; I finally offer an answer in this book. Daniel Ziblatt gave me invaluable comments and suggestions. At the time, I was focusing on Tudor and early Stuart England (1533–1640); I found it difficult to respond to his questions about radicalism during the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I. These queries forced me to pay more attention to the political and social developments in England after 1640. I hope that this book can now answer some of his questions. Encouragement from Lizabeth Cohen and the late Judith Vichniac accompanied my writing at Radcliffe. Daniel Carpenter showed me many fascinating aspects of petitions in North America. Johannes Lindvall kindly read a very rough draft of the Introduction and gave me detailed comments. I am grateful for his enthusiasm and feedback throughout the process of writing. Liz Perry, who has always been my role model of integrating historical research with social science, shared with me her insights into contentious politics in China. David Howell and Andy Gordon were always available when I had questions about Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. I benefited from discussing my project with Peter Hall, Suzanne Berger, Mark Elliott, Michael Szonyi, Peter Perdue, and Richard Samuels. I thank Theo Serlin, my research assistant at the Radcliffe Institute, for looking up some primary documents related to public works in early modern England.

I had finished writing most of the chapters by the time I left the Radcliffe Institute. But I was not satisfied at only demonstrating some similar patterns of state–society collaboration in public goods provision. I wanted to explore their variation by further comparing England between 1640 and 1780, Japan between 1853 and 1895, and China between 1840 and 1911. For this purpose, I visited the Department of History at the University of Warwick in the fall semester of 2018. Mark Knights kindly hosted my visit even though he had not met me before. I was very lucky to benefit from his expertise on early modern English history on almost a daily basis. He often generously gave me a ride between Leamington Spa and the campus; for me, it was a mobile seminar in early modern English history. This was an unforgettable learning experience and I am deeply grateful to him. I likewise can hardly express my thankfulness to Joanna Innes, who kindly read the whole manuscript and gave me chapter-by-chapter comments, critiques, and suggestions. These were tremendously helpful. I am not certain whether my revision meets her standard, but I have tried my best. I particularly thank Brodie Waddell who graciously read the chapters related to petitions before their final submission to the Press. His comments and suggestions corrected some inaccuracy in my understanding of the relationship between the Crown and Parliament after 1688 and alerted me to the importance of active rights in petitions of public grievances in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ken Pomeranz read most of the manuscript and I am always grateful for his wise comments and suggestions. Suzanne Berger read the revised manuscript, and her sharp and insightful comments helped me to focus on its core argument as I prepared the final version. It reminded me of the good old days of writing my dissertation under her guidance at MIT.

Spending the summer of 2019 at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo was a wonderful experience. Nakamura Naofumi has been an unfailing source of help and reference throughout this journey. Tanimoto Masayuki kindly gave me detailed comments and suggestions, which were very helpful to my revision. I have pleasant memories of discussing early modern English history in Tokyo with Yamamoto Koji. This book benefits greatly from his excellent research on the discourse of public interest in various domestic welfare-related projects in early modern England. Iokibe Kaoru’s enthusiasm for this project was a great encouragement.

The road toward this book has indeed been long and winding. I benefited greatly from discussing with Sidney Tarrow how to connect Charles Tilly’s work on state formation with his later research on contentious collective action. I thank Philip Hoffman and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal for their input when I visited the Division of Social Science at the California Institute of Technology in the spring term of 2015. During that time, I was fortunate to meet John Brewer and Steve Hindle and to get feedback from them on my project. Steve Hindle kindly spent a lot of time answering my questions. Xiong Yuanbao hosted me at Waseda University in the summer of 2012 and Yoshida Seiichiro arranged my visit to the University of Tokyo in the summer of 2014; these trips allowed me to intensively explore the Japanese scholarship on Tokugawa history. Kishimoto Mio gave me many suggestions on how to understand popular contention in the Qing dynasty. During my visit to Taiwan to use the microfilms of Qing archives preserved in the Academia Sinica, I had the great pleasure to discuss historical research with Ho Hon-wai and Wu Jen-shu, who pushed me to view archival materials in a broader historical context.

The archival research for this project in 2011–2013 was funded by the General Research Fund in Hong Kong (Project No. 642011). The section on financing water control in Qing China was presented at the 2013 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in San Diego. I am grateful for the comments of Pierre-Étienne Will and feedback from Philip Brown and Patricia Sippel. Parts of this manuscript were presented at the 2012 World Economic History Congress in Stellenbosch, South Africa; the fourth European Congress on World and Global History in Paris in 2014; the 2015 World Economic History Congress in Kyoto; and the Hague Workshop on Evolutions and Revolutions in Water Management in 2015; as well as at workshops at the History Department of Sheffield University, the History Department at the University of Warwick (Early Modern History Workshop), the Department of Sociology at Harvard University (History, Culture, and Society Workshop), the Harvard Asia Center, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Radcliffe Institute, the Department of Sociology at Tsinghua University, the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, the Group of Japanese History in the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, the Department of Political Science at Lund University (the STANCE Workshop), the Department of Political Science at City University of Hong Kong, the Department of History at Shanghai Jiaotong University, and the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. I thank Marjolein ’t Hart, Maarten Prak, Michael Braddick, Phil Withington, Mark Philp, R. Bin Wong, Mark Metzler, Luke Roberts, Steven Ericson, Gregory Noble, Kiri Paramore, Orlando Paterson, David Zaret, Jan Teorell, Kim Sungmoon, Luo Xin, Shen Yuan, Peng Kaixiang, Peng Gang, Peter Zarrow, Chiu Peng-sheng, Yeang Chen-pang, Li Cho-ying, Feng Xiaocai, Ma Jianxiong, Zhang Dong, Wang Liping, Tian Geng, Yan Fei, Yang Songtao, Dong Yige, and Xu Xiaohong for their valuable comments and feedback.

James Lee and Kellee Tsai of HKUST offered unflagging support and trust even when the project was not progressing smoothly; I am very grateful. Two anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press gave me detailed and stimulating comments. Their careful and engaged reading, and their sharp and helpful critiques, forced me to think seriously about how to integrate two components of the manuscript that had been written in different periods into one coherent framework. To revise the manuscript to address their reviews has been a great intellectual pleasure. I also thank Anthony S. Chen and Stephanie Mudge, co-editors of Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology, for their enthusiasm and support. Their comments and suggestions were extremely helpful in considering how to convey my argument to a broader audience. I want to express my gratitude to the CUP editors, Sara Doskow for her enthusiasm even when the manuscript was still rough and John Haslam for his patience and help through the long process of revision. Parts of Chapter 3 were published in Social Science History (Vol. 39, No. 3, 2015) and Environment and History (Vol. 23, No. 3, 2017). I thank the two journals for permission to include the material in this book. Zhuang Ying of the Palace Museum in Beijing gave me excellent suggestions on finding images for the front cover design.

My wife Ellen McGill has put tremendous effort into this book. In addition to thorough editing and citation checking, she raised many great points on how to present the argument. Her understanding and trust helped me pass the darkest moment in this long intellectual journey. My son James Yuanping He and daughter Mairead Yuanqing He grew along with this manuscript. Just as the book is now independent of me, they too are going out into the world as autonomous individuals. My mom, Xu Xiaohua, and my brother, He Yong, take care of my father, He Yongshou, who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. When my father was taken into the intensive care unit in August of 2019, I stopped my research in Tokyo and returned to Kunming. He was deep in a coma, but I kept talking to him about the progress of my work and asked him not to give up; he must see the publication of this book. And he made it! It is to my family, who have supported me throughout my life in both big and small ways, that I dedicate this work.