MILITIA, MARKET AND LINEAGE
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British at Canton, and second, the Taiping Rebellion. Imperial resources were now strained to the limit and the paramilitary associations of the Kwangtung hinterland became an essential if volatile and unpredictable adjunct to government strategy. Contingents of gentry-organized militia contributed, with government encouragement and varying degrees of success, to the defence of Canton on several occasions and were largely responsible for the suppression of the mid-century Red Turban revolt.?
The existence of such composite militia forces raises many interesting problems. For the moment they may be subsumed under two general questions. How were these militia forces organized? Can they be related to what is known of other, enduring aspects of social organization in rural Kwangtung? These questions are central to this article, as they are to Wakeman's study of the militia movement in Kwangtung province between 1839–1861. His analysis will be discussed in conjunction with the smaller, but in some respects similar, resistance movement which sought to prevent the British occupation of Hong Kong's New Territories in 1899. However, before turning to these events, it is necessary to consider two other recent contributions to the study of Chinese society.
Theoretical Considerations
Skinner has suggested that "anthropological work on Chinese society, by focussing attention almost exclusively on the village, has with few exceptions distorted the reality of the rural social structure. Insofar as the Chinese peasant can be said to live in a self-contained world, that world is not the village but the standard marketing community. The effective social field of the peasant... is delimited not by the narrow horizons of his village but rather by the boundaries of his standard marketing area.”
For present purposes the central elements of Skinner's thesis are: (i) that the patterned economic activities of a predominantly peasant and agrarian society are discernible in the spatial distribution of its markets; (ii) that the markets, in terms of their different functions, can be conceptually ordered in a hierarchy; and (iii) that the overall system of differentiated marketing activities is integrated by a series of co-ordinated periodic market schedules. The resulting typology is: minor market, standard market, intermediate