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Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China

when a woman had no recourse to her natal family and had alienated the community around her. The eighth chapter, in which Sommer describes fraudulent and explicitly coercive practices, pivots toward the illegal nature of these arrangements. In the final third of the book, chapters 9–11, Sommer flips his perspective, demonstrating diverging patterns in judicial decision making and law enforcement at the local, provincial, and central government levels. As he characterizes his methodology, in the first two-thirds of the book he is reading the archive as a historical anthropologist, and then he returns to his more traditional work as a legal historian. The resulting structure folds two books in one productively into a dialogue about the tensions that shaped the experiences of the poor and how those experiences often confounded the Qing state. The legal discussion in the latter third of the book shows the Qing state debating whether poverty ought to be a mitigating factor when prosecuting wife sales. Sommer’s exposure of patterns and inconsistencies in local, provincial, and central government cases opens larger questions about the priorities and capacity of the Qing state with regard to criminal prosecution in general. He modifies arguments from his first book, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China. In that book we saw a Qing state investing deeply in control over its subjects’ intimate lives in its laws on illicit sex. Here we see the limits of that control. Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China is the most important book on Chinese marriage in a long time. Sommer’s revelations about how men and women creatively strategized to use women’s sexual and reproductive labor in order to survive transform how we understand marriage among the poor in Qing China. The book will command attention from China scholars, as well as speak compellingly to scholars of other regions interested in gender relations, diverse forms of exploitation, sex work, and sexuality.