Disclosed is a system and method for resolving conflicts that arise in changes made to data by multiple client devices. A data manipulation operation is represented as a changeset, which has instructions for performing an operation on the data. When two client devices perform operations that change the state of a data object, a changeset is generated at each of the two client devices. These changesets are merged at each of the two client devices based on merging rules that resolve any conflict between the operations. The rules ensure that the data at each of the multiple client devices will eventually be consistent.