Towards a Comparative Understanding of Rulership: Discourses, Practices, Patterns

The preceding chapters have focused on connections between centres and peripheries, rulers and populations. Notwithstanding the routines of government-by-paper, particularly developed in China, these connections necessarily also took shape in two characteristic forms: agents representing the ruler and direct interactions between rulers and their populations. High-profile trouble-shooters personally representing the ruler operated in distant territories or carried special responsibilities for solving crises; routine administrators administered core lands, where standard patterns of governance prevailed. Agents could rise through steady and competent loyal service or be catapulted into power because of their lineage and the ruler’s favour. The career patterns systematically examined