Seaborne Polity and Wartime State Formation in Seventeenth-Century Northeast Asia

Zoudan Ma, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

This paper examines the maritime military regime established by Mao Wenlong in the early seventeenth century to contribute to ongoing efforts to decenter dominant narratives of early modern modernity and state formation. Social science traditions have long treated processes such as administrative rationalization, military coordination, and the consolidation of sovereign authority as developments rooted primarily in the territorial evolution of European polities. By contrast, this study situates Mao’s organization within the highly interconnected maritime conflict zone of the Bohai Rim and northern Yellow Sea, where Ming, Choson, and emerging Manchu forces competed for control over coastal populations, commercial flows, and strategic sea routes. Rather than governing through stable territorial institutions, Mao Wenlong’s regime operated as a seaborne polity structured by mobility, logistical capacity, and negotiated authority. It developed mechanisms of taxation, provisioning, intelligence gathering, and population management among dispersed communities of soldiers, merchants, refugees, and local elites inhabiting islands, ports, and littoral settlements. These institutional practices were embedded in regional political cultures of patronage, loyalty, and frontier brokerage, while also responding to broader transformations characteristic of the early modern Eurasian world, including intensified commercial integration, demographic displacement, and escalating military competition. By foregrounding wartime governance in a maritime environment, this paper demonstrates that political formations outside Europe’s territorial core generated locally distinctive yet globally connected trajectories of institutional development. The case highlights processes of convergence, divergence, and hybridization across early modern polities and underscores the importance of transregional interaction in shaping the conditions later associated with imperial expansion. Situating Northeast Asian maritime regimes within wider patterns of global reconfiguration, the study offers a historically grounded perspective on decentering modernity that also resonates with contemporary shifts in the spatial organization of political and economic power.

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 Presented in Session 23. Power, Order, and Institutional Change in Premodern China and Korea