Ever since the first volume in the series was published in 1979, The Cambridge History of China has become a standard reference in the field of Chinese history. Chapters from the volumes published in the 1980s and 1990s are standard reading in upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminars and the hefty yellow volumes figure prominently in the reference sections of East Asian Studies libraries. The gestation period of the series has been long, however, so long that new authors and editors have had to step in to take over the unfinished work of an earlier generation. The long gestation period also underlies the oft-repeated criticism that many of the chapters are outdated by the time they appear in print and thus only poorly fulfil their role as an authoritative reference.
Volume 5 as well has been long in the making. According to John Chaffee's preface the first plans took shape in “the first half of the 1970s” (xv), but the first part only appeared in 2009. The latter was the first comprehensive political narrative of the Song Dynasty and its tenth-century precursors in English and it has generally received a warm welcome among Song historians and those working on other periods. Following the standard format for the series, this second Song volume, hereafter Part 2, is a topical history covering social, economic, trade, intellectual, legal, military and fiscal history as well as an overview of Song governmental and educational institutions. In this review I will mainly focus on the question to what extent this volume succeeds as a summation of the current state of the field of Song history.
The authors of each of the chapters are well-established senior historians who have published extensively on the topics assigned to them. This strategy of working with senior historians has had a dual effect. Some have taken this an opportunity to write a capstone piece, offering both a broad and up-to-date overview of their field and an innovative framework within which to understand Song developments (Hartman on government and politics, McDermott and Shiba on economic change, and Hymes on society and social change). Others have written summaries of past research. The former are in my view the strongest chapters—they are coincidentally also the longest chapters, ranging between 120 and 140 pages each and qualifying as short monographs. My comments will focus on these three chapters and highlight why I consider these important reading for all who research and teach Chinese history.
Outside of East Asia Song socio-economic developments have drawn the attention of Chinese and world historians since the publication of Mark Elvin's The Pattern of the Chinese Past in 1973 and Eric Jones' The European Miracle in 1981, albeit that this attention usually amounts to a sense of admiration that quickly dissipates under the impact of divergence debates in which pre-sixteenth-century developments appear irrelevant. McDermott and Shiba make a strong case for why Song economic history matters and they do so in ways that move the debate about the role of the state in economic development (and recession) as well as the literature on regional disparity in the history of Chinese economic growth forward.
Their chapter proceeds chronologically, discussing demographic changes, agricultural output, handicraft production, and commerce in three distinct periods: late Tang to early Song (742–1080), middle Song (1080–1162), and late Song (1163–1276). Their work moves beyond the more conventional narratives of demographic growth and commercialization, which are mainly based on the more richly documented economic history of the Jiangnan region, and analyses how different regions, north and south, performed in different sectors of the economy over time.
Based on a critical review of scarce primary sources, especially those offering reliable quantitative data, the authors caution against the rhetoric of an “agricultural revolution” (344). They also do not consider technological developments, another basic staple in standard accounts such as Mark Elvin's, central in the expansion of rice production. Instead, they document regional discrepancies in agricultural growth through a discussion of land-tenure practices and contemporary observations about land expansion and regional output. The discussion about the variation in and flexibility of the organization of agricultural labour is particularly noteworthy, suggesting that differences in patron-client obligations correlated with regional differences in per capita arable land and agricultural output.
Even more significantly, McDermott and Shiba also recount the flip side of land expansion and Song agricultural policy. They describe the environmental and economic impact of both government-led and local re-engineering of the land. The larger indictment made about the Northern Song regime in particular is grave (“Rare is it, even in Chinese history, to find a government so intent on destroying its physical environment and its traditional fiscal base as during the Sung” [356–57]), but, at a minimum, the authors have here thrown down the gauntlet for later historians to follow up with more longue-durée environmental histories.
On the whole, the economic history chapter confirms previous explanations of Song economic change (many of which rely on the pioneering work of co-author Shiba Yoshinobu): the centrality of the cultivation of Champa rice and expanding land use in the southeast in explaining the population growth centered in the south; the unprecedented commercialization of handicrafts across Chinese territories; and state support for and reliance on commercial activity both domestic and foreign. More so than previous literature in English, however, this chapter provides a systematic and variegated overview of diverging regional economic histories, explaining the reasons behind imbalanced growth and the devastating shortages that affected the north, the Huai River region, as well as other parts of the Chinese territories.
The chapter by Shiba and McDermott should be read alongside Angela Schottenhammer's on maritime trade—unfortunately, the continuation of overland trade with Inner and Central Asia is not taken up here or in other chapters. The latter chapter is a well-documented synthesis of recent work on maritime trade between the Tang and Song dynasties, reviewing primary sources, shipbuilding, commodities exchanged, and the supervision of foreign trade by both government agencies and the dynastic house. This and other chapters, however, rarely build on each other and could have been more closely knit together through an engagement with shared topics (e.g., the impact of maritime trade on the state budget, on cash flow, on regional economies, and on local social organization). Possibly because of the editorial policy at CUP, these chapters have few maps and are entirely lacking in illustrations that could have rendered explanations of farming equipment, ship design, or commodities more intelligible.
The chapter on Song society and social change by Robert Hymes is essential reading for all interested in Chinese history. Hymes proposes that developments in select social arenas including the family, religious life, and elite status can be explained by three intertwined processes that affected them all: the commercialization not only of the economy but also of social practices and mentalities; the retreat of the state or at least the lessening of state penetration; and, more surprisingly, the spread of printing and literacy. In this framework, Hymes reads the rising dowries paid to the families of the bridegrooms as an effect of the market value of bridegrooms and interprets the restrictions on women's ability to dispose of their own family's wealth advocated by Neo-Confucian men as one of the many ways in which these conservative forces sought to contain and restructure behaviour shaped by the market. Song religious life is in this scheme not characterized by the decline of Buddhism and the renaissance of Confucianism or by secularizing trends (as one can still find in the only competing survey history of the Song Dynasty in English, Dieter Kuhn's The Age of Confucian Rule) but rather by pervasive laicization. The laity claimed a bigger role in Buddhist, Daoist, and local religious organization and the clergy and the state by and large accommodated this demand.
Hymes here also revises the hypothesis regarding the localist turn of the Chinese elite in the transition between the Northern and the Southern Song, a hypothesis with which his name has been associated since the publication of Statesmen and Gentlemen in 1986. Taking into account critiques that stressed both the importance of localist strategies amongst elite families before the Southern Song and the continuing interest in official careers at court and attachments to the center of political life, Hymes here proposes that Song elites participated in both “a court-oriented” and “a shih-oriented culture.” Shih-oriented culture is to be understood as the shared practices defined by the shih 士, which Hymes prefers to translate as gentlemen rather than literati. These practices and criteria for elite status emerge within horizontal networks that contrast with the more hierarchical authority structures associated with court and official life. Hymes argues that gentlemanly networks and behaviours were gaining more weight by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially in the southern areas that witnessed the unprecedented demographic and economic changes described by McDermott and Shiba. Even though shih-oriented culture isn't per se local, Hymes ultimately re-establishes the localist turn and proposes that because of growing status anxiety and competition at the local level, the activities and concerns of the shih were also concentrated locally.
The framework proposed here not only is a modification of Hymes' earlier hypothesis of the localization of elites but also entails a further theorization. He proposes that the concentration of elite attention on local resources may have been a southern phenomenon and that reliance on state resources may have continued to hold greater appeal in the north. It remains for others to explore whether the localization of elites in the Song and after amounts to a southernization of power structures, or whether it is part of a history of diverging regional trends in social structure and social change that mimicks the varied economic histories of north and south.
Hymes concludes that we may see these trends as evidence of a broader southernization of power structures across the world, and, especially as a challenge to prevailing models of modernization that focus on the intensification of state penetration. These interpretations should provoke much debate among Chinese and comparative historians. The limited scope they have been given here highlights one of the limitations of the Cambridge History of China project. It has since its beginnings been conceived as a national history divided into dynastic units. This and several of the other chapters in this volume suggest that a cross-dynastic approach that also seeks to connect Chinese history to global trends and/or broader historiographical questions may work better for some types of history.
Hymes' chapter leaves open the question of how localities continued to form part of a functioning larger polity. The model, as is typical of models, still remains vulnerable to the fallacy of dichotomization. Laicization and localization are opposed to state interference and central concerns. Do they need to be? The role of middlemen or intermediaries, whom Hymes rightly singles out as actors deserving more attention, is key in a further analysis of the interface between local and government power—for example, a comparative analysis of the ways in which the state was embedded in how intermediaries operated may provide an answer to the question of why processes of laicization and vernacularization resulted in different outcomes in Chinese and European history.
The question raised in the previous paragraph is directly addressed in Charles Hartman's chapter on Song government and politics. The answer he provides isn't a standard one, however, certainly not in the English literature on Song history. Hartman concludes that the gentlemen-scholars who had established government by peers gave way in the course of the twelfth century to a government run by autocratic councillors and clerks. Hartman's chapter is the best and most accessible overview in English of the Song civil service, the monarchy, and the governmental decision making process. It is, however, heavily focused on the central organization of the state and court actors—and hence also employs a very unusual definition of the term literati. Unlike others, also in this volume, who use the term to refer to cultural or cultured elites broadly defined, literati is in this chapter used in ways comparable to the Italian letterati, in reference to high court officials, the top echelon of the civil administration, the administrative class officials (jingchao guan 京朝官) who served beyond the local level. This is a debatable choice. Even though there certainly was rank differentiation within the broader shih stratum and the administrative class officials occupied a powerful place within it, one very significant and controversial development during Song times, Southern Song times in particular, was the claim to political participation from cultural elites outside this relatively small group and the political thought that incorporated these claims. The conclusion about clerical power, even though supported in the primary sources, also raises questions about the nature and extent of the power of clerks. How come, for example, they never incorporated themselves in ways that the literati did so successfully during Song times?
Beyond Hartman's core chapter on Song political history the volume also includes chapters on military, fiscal, and legal history. These have reference value, but are not as up to date on the literature as one might hope. Readers interested in legal and military history in particular may be better off reading the longer monographs on which these are based as the summaries here also leave out aspects that would have fitted well within the larger volume, such as the social history of the military or the expansive role of legal experts and expertise in Song society.
Two chapters on intellectual history, an area which has traditionally also drawn much scholarly attention, conclude the volume. Peter Bol's chapter analyzes the intellectual ferment of the eleventh century and sketches out the key differences amongst those who set the tone for later developments. Readers will find this a very accessible and compelling synthesis of Bol's earlier work on the intellectual shifts that accompanied the social and economic changes discussed above. Hoyt Tillman's chapter on Southern Song intellectual developments accounts for the development of the Neo-Confucian movement of the Learning of the Way mainly on the basis of a close reading of intellectual exchanges between Zhu Xi and select contemporaries. Given that this summarizes his important earlier work from the 1980s and 1990s, repeated claims about the neglect of the broader intellectual context within which this central figure operated as well as the paucity of scholarship on other trends in Southern Song intellectual history in modern scholarship are somewhat out-dated.
The editors express regret over the fact that other fields such as foreign relations, literature, Buddhism, and Daoism could not be covered in separate chapters—to some extent the first two topics are covered in Volume 6. Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 and in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, Volume 1: To 1375 and the latter are given some attention in Hymes' chapter. Some may wish that topics such as gender history, material culture, urbanization, or technology had been given greater attention, but overall the editor and authors merit our gratitude for a contribution that finally explains key developments in Chinese history during this period in more than the cursory fashion within which they are treated in English survey histories. It will remain up to the readership, however, to tie the diverse strands opened up in these chapters together and tackle bigger questions such as the place of the socio-economic, political, and intellectual developments described here in longue-durée transitions (the Tang-Song model versus the Song-Yuan-Ming model) and in transcultural and comparative frameworks.
