Chapter 8 - Sung society and social change

Summary

This chapter examines several important areas of striking change in the Sung and offers a general framework to help in understanding them, identifying three intertwined processes that pervasively underlie otherwise distinct phenomena of Sung social change. The three are the rise of the commercial economy and money; a shift in the role of the state across the dynasty, tending to diffuse former state powers and projects to private actors, to the market, and to society at large; and the spread of printing, making texts more available and literacy more attainable. To find market relations and book printing at the root of a wide range of social and cultural changes in middle imperial China suggests obvious parallels to processes of change in other times and places, most obviously in what has come to be called early modern Europe.