評Robert J. Antony Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China

In Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China, Robert J. Antony has made an important contribution to our understanding of the relation between state, society, crime, law, and banditry in South China during the turmoil-filled decades before the Opium War. Antony moves beyond a traditional view of Chinese banditry as a primitive stage of development of revolt by incorporating new theories on criminal behavior and stage regulation developed in Western social history. His starting point is the lack of studies by scholars of both Chinese law and Chinese banditry who research everyday crime and crime suppression. Bandits, Antony finds, were of the working poor, and in this, he joins with many other scholars of crime who acknowledge that laws against crimes were often associated with expanding inequality and shifting economic realities. Antony shows that the rise of banditry had much to do with population pressure, a weakening state, and an expanding commercial environment that created targets for criminals. As he has showed in his earlier study on Chinese piracy, Antony reveals bandits as connected to local society in complex ways, difficult to repress, and a threat to both local society and the state. As a result, the efforts to suppress banditry in South China created new and evolving relations between the state and society.