After Mo Jiu’s death in 1735, his son Mo Tianci succeeded him as head of The Port. He established the Pavilion for Summoning Worthies to serve as an informal advisory body and literary society. Besides his trusted inner circle, he built upon his father’s earlier connections with Cochinchina and Qing gentry to jointly produce and publish anthologies of poetry and prose. The collaborations largely took place remotely, relying upon the same junks that circulated goods and labor throughout maritime East Asia. Tianci’s main goal was to build consensus among these translocal elites as being part of the same world order, while spreading word of his realm across the Sinosphere. Besides facilitating cultural exchange, anthologies such as “Idle Fishing at Sea Perch Creek” and the “Ten Verses of Hà Tiên” could lower transaction costs and enhance The Port’s importance as a commercial hub. Tianci’s focus on literature also conformed to the Heart-Mind school of Wang Yangming. This variant of neo-Confucanism promoted business and individual initiative.

The constitution of any state, whether written or unwritten, is the set of political, governmental and legal structures and shared values within which the business of everyday politics and governance operate. In fourteenth-century England there occurred the first two depositions in post-Conquest English history, which were precipitated by ‘unconstitutional’ behaviour by the monarchs in question and were effected by ‘unconstitutional’ legal devices on the part of the community of the realm. It was a century of cataclysmic demographic transformation brought about by the Black Death, of almost constant warfare with Scotland and France and of spectacular governmental growth and legal change. It is therefore ironic that, when English constitutional history was at its height, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourteenth century, parliamentary developments apart, was regarded as a sorry backwater. It was useful only to reflect on how a wrong turning had been taken. ‘We pass’, Bishop Stubbs lamented, ‘from an age of heroism to the age of chivalry, from a century ennobled by devotion and self-sacrifice to one in which the gloss of superficial refinement fails to hide the reality of heartless selfishness and moral degradation’.1

This chapter situates Lev Tolstoy’s life and work in relation to the social and political context of the estates (meaning, soslovie) system in imperial Russia. Although the Russian nobility was a social estate distinguished by a high degree of heterogeneity when it came to such matters as scope of property (including income and debt), modes of sociability, access to power, relationship to the provinces, and connection to the cultural and political centers (e.g., Moscow, St. Petersburg), the nobility remained a corporate body of subject-citizens united through a necessarily uneven but reciprocal relationship with the autocratic state, a relationship that was articulated as a set of privileges and obligations. In addition to offering a brief historical survey of the noble estate in Russia, this chapter explores a selection of moments in Tolstoy’s life and career in relation to the meanings that accrued to noble status as a demographic designation, a political experience, and a social performance. At times, I turn (briefly) to Tolstoy’s major works of fiction (notably, War and Peace and Anna Karenina) to illustrate how the period’s definitions of nobility found expression in the novelist’s artistic imagination.

Chapter 3 argues that agricultural books should be understood as a tool to appropriate the practical art of husbandry by learned culture, enabling a ‘bottom-up’ transfer of knowledge as much as a ‘top-down’ diffusion of knowledge from expert to practitioner. It argues that there was a shift around mid-seventeenth century England as the gentry became more directly engaged in farm management. It shows how the customary art of husbandry was re-imagined for gentlemen, by elevating it to science of agriculture and undermining the authority of common husbandmen and housewives. It discusses how educated men collected into writing the knowledge of husbandry stored in customary practice and oral tradition. In particular, it highlights a hidden gendered dimension, in which women’s knowledge was transferred to male authors, contributing to the increased marginalisation of women’s farm work. Finally, it draws attention to how common farmworkers resisted the extraction of their knowledge by their social superiors.