A palaeographical description of the scripts within the archive, grouped according to their features and purposes, with a focus on the first appearances of shapes of letters which will become common in later stages of Roman documentary writing (the ‘new Roman cursive’).

Chapter 6, “Agents of Technocracy,” begins with the premise that the Song founders inherited a robust system of technocratic governance that had evolved after the collapse of Tang centralized authority in the middle of the eighth century. Its features included the rise of “commissions” (shizhi 使職) to replace the fossilized Three Departments (Sansheng 三省) structure of early Tang as well as inner court control over imperial decision making, financial administration, and security. The Song founders succeeded in coordinating these structures, all the while preserving many of their essential elements in a centralized and much strengthened monarchy. This chapter features the first detailed, English-language studies of the principal non-literati, non-Confucian groups that were vital to this imperial technocratic governance – the female members of the monarchy, including the empresses and the palace female bureaucracy, the eunuchs, the military servitors, and clerks. This chapter seeks to by-pass the aspersions that traditional historiography has cast upon these groups in order to examine their internal dynamics and to describe their administrative functions and their place within larger Song political culture.

This chapter starts to analyse the institutional frameworks of different international courts and tribunals in comparative perspective. More importantly, it introduces the invisible army of legal bureaucrats (clerks, registry and secretariat officials, and arbitral secretaries) who assist international adjudicators in their daily duties. The story focuses on their backgrounds, their modes of recruitment and promotion, their relationship with the judges and arbitrators they are called to serve, and the ambiguities inherent in that relationship. From here onwards, the role of bureaucrats in the judicial process will come into sharper relief. Their duties typically include: summarizing the parties’ arguments for the benefit of the adjudicators, conducting legal and factual research on the disputed issues, circulating internal memoranda that suggest options on how to solve the case, assisting in the preparation of oral questions for hearings, attending deliberations, and drafting the final judgments or awards.