### id263995767 Qin China was very militarized > Qin and to a lesser extent other states in the Warring States qualify as trying to "minmax military power". The end result looks nothing like Sparta, real or imagined, though. > > They aren't "military and nothing else" or even close to "military and agriculture and nothing else" even if the more misanthropic parts of the Book of Lord Shang might like them to be, and absolutely weren't a popular image warrior cult or whatever, and don't militarize culture in like a modern totalitarian sense. > > When increasingly large and destructive wars leads leaders and ministers to put the state on a total war footing and reorient a large part of society to support total war in very explicitly mechanical terms, I feel kinda counts as creating a militarized society. For example, the agricultural reforms, attempting to standardize land holdings, forcing extended families in to nuclear or stem families, then registering households just effects everyone, and when you're doing it to increase state penetration and military power... even when that doesn't subsume everything else, and I totally agree with you here, it's still something, you are militarizing the basic structures of society or at least reorienting them towards military goals, whatever you want to call it. > Lord Shang and various other reformers absolutely are attempting to minmax state power and stability, they are very clear in this. The legalist reformers were explicitly creating a society that maximized military power, The Book of Lord Shang has large parts that are just "how do we structure society to create as strong a military as possible", and are strikingly mechanical about it. They were absolutely led to it by the exigencies of total war, which they were also quite explicit about. And it makes sense, in total war states try to increase military power and ministers try to take the most effective means to do so. The legalists are just very upfront about it, and a "people hate fighting, therefore structure society so they are willing to fight" is very different from a "Spartan" warrior culture thing, in the end legalists feel much more minmaxy to me in a very unspartan way lol. > > If stuff like this and the system of rewards and punishments it led to isn't minmaxing a states war capabilities, I don't know what is. The sheer scale of Qin forced labor as punishments and just how much of the population excavated records show have some merit rank show just how far in reorienting society they would go towards this maximization (with a caveat quite a bit of the excavations were post unification, and it's a little unclear on if or how this changed) . > > It's further notable to the degree that Qin was unwilling or unable to leave this footing even after they won. There was further military conquests, and labor was redirected to massive monuments and projects, but even at a local level post conquest documents at Liye show them imposing large scale conscription, forced labor, and also extending rewards and ranks to the conquered population. In both Pines and Korolkov it seems like this just became part of Qin society to an and wasn't one off military mobilization. There were simultaneously quite a few changes, especially in the bureaucracy and systems of commerce as they struggled to integrate the empire, and the Han view of "evil Qin couldn't adjust and drove the peasants to rebellion" seems to just be wrong, but a lot of it remained. > > I guess in the end I'd still agree with you that this this definitional. The structure of society was remade for total war and the state that did the totalist war won, but there was plenty that wasn't militarized, and religion and whatever existed, they weren't klingons or Spartans, so it depends on what you want to call that. - [View Highlight](https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/q3bowq/sparta_wasnt_that_effective_in_war_were_there_any?__readwiseLocation=0%2F14%2F0%2F4%2F2%2F1%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F5%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F5%2F1%2F0%2F3%2F1%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F3%2F1%2F0%2F3%3A0%2C0%2F15%2F0%2F4%2F2%2F1%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F5%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F5%2F1%2F0%2F3%2F1%2F0%2F0%2F0%2F3%2F1%2F0%2F3%3A329#:~:text=It's%20further%20notable%20to%20the%2Cyou%20want%20to%20call%20that.) - [[hypermilitarized groups in history#id263995767 Qin China was very militarized|View in Vault]]