MILITIA, MARKET AND LINEAGE
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How were such composite forces recruited? Wakeman stresses three factors: gentry leadership, the she-hsüeh (local school) as an organisational node, and agnatic kinship. Let us consider them in turn. "Usually a gentry organizer would form a cohesive t'uan-lien around one town
When he had assembled his men, he persuaded the elders of neighbouring villages to enroll their banners under his . . . From such integral nuclei, other, less tightly organized 'banners' could be extended: but gentry leadership was the essential factor."29
She-hsüeh were often resurrected or founded to serve as headquarters for militia forces: "in 1836 . . . village leaders near Whampoa had become alarmed by secret society activity. Twenty-four of the villages built a common hall under the guise of a 'local school' at a market town on the south side of Honam island. There the elders met to try miscreants and bind them over to the district magistrate."30 During the period discussed by Wakeman (1839-61), the she-hsüeh served as "recruiting depots, treasuries, meeting halls, posting places, and drill grounds."
Kinship was also significant in the formation of militia: "clan and t'uan-lien were mutually intermingled in Kwangtung during the 1840's and '50's. The militia of a uniclan village was nothing more than a clan organization."32 Kinship ties might constitute an important organizational element even in the case of more widely based militia. Wakeman has shown that, of the twenty-five leaders of the Tung-p'ing militia, 60 percent shared surnames.33
The possible relationship between these factors and Skinner's analysis of marketing systems is striking. The most obvious instance is that of the twenty-four villages which combined to establish a she-hsüeh at a market town on Honam island. Skinner says of this association that it "can only be interpreted as a formalization of structure within a standard marketing community.”34 To take another example, Wakeman reports that one of the leaders of militia in the San-yuan-li area combined the "twelve local schools" of his region (En-chou) into a defence command.35 En-chou lies within the area classified by Skinner as the central region of Kwangtung province. In the 1890's the average number of villages per market town in this region was 17.9.36 Could this also have been a “formalization of structure within a standard marketing community"?