In one sense this book is the analysis that Hope Wright could scarcely have hoped for when she published her Alphabetical List of Geographical Names in Sung China (Paris: École Pratique des Hautes-Études) in 1956. Ruth Mostern has applied a wholly new methodology of digitizing the data in the List and using GIS (geographical information systems) to analyze them, in an attempt to write spatial history at the scale of the state. This work provides an overview—unachievable before now—to complement the extensive body of local histories for the Song period. The data on which it is based are freely available online, with links to a number of other GIS projects.
Hope Wright's work listed every change in status for every named place in the Song empire: establishment, abolition, promotion, demotion, name changes, and so on. These are what Mostern calls “place-making events,” and by trying to explain patterns in the aggregated data, she offers an argument that rule was territorialized during the Song period. The first three chapters present theories of spatial organization, explain the prefecture/county structuring of the Song landscape of governance, and examine maps and other frameworks within which Song people understood territory. The second half of the book tells the complex and multifaceted story of waves of “spatial renovation” as the state built on the groundwork laid by the Five Dynasties regimes to try to realize a “new Song vision for the direct imperial rule of territory by bureaucrats” (p. 11). As a result, the Song period is unique among China's dynasties in the density of the state presence in the localities and in the energy put into spatial management.
Of the structural contradictions that emerge from this analysis, the most visible is that between military spending (associated with prefectures) and revenue extraction (associated with counties), which arose from the insistence that every prefecture must raise all of its own operating costs, including military expenses. This tension found spatial form in the Song trend to establish prefectures to increase their military presence in difficult borderlands of warfare or settlement, and to abolish counties that were too impoverished or sparsely populated to supply funding for armies. Shifts in geographical patterns of establishment and abolition, illustrated with maps generated from the GIS data, reveal the changing priorities of the Song state. The Song founders took a different approach in each region; the eleventh-century court paid closest attention to the northwestern frontier; and the Southern Song aimed to regularize the administration of indigenous groups on the southern settlement frontiers. But no court had free rein, for spatial change was also affected by “the politics of place-making”: competing factions advocated rival policies, and local residents organized to protect their interests. When the contradictions became overwhelming, new methods could emerge, as when the failure to extend county-and-prefecture organization to the southwest generated new approaches to government funding.
Given the way that Mostern's analysis emphasizes how people—their presence, absence, taxpaying ability, and political activity—were so central to decisions about the organization of jurisdictions, I find it hard to agree, even regarding the spatially minded Song, with her opening contention that sovereignty was based fundamentally upon territory. Mostern shows incontrovertibly how deeply concerned were the Song to make their realm more legible (not a word she uses) for state purposes, but another issue bubbling underneath her analysis is the difference between the land itself (and the people who live there) and the administrative entities superimposed to make space into place. This is just one of several points of engagement in the book that should generate much useful discussion. Indeed, the one thing missing from the text is a conclusion to address some of these theoretical ramifications, and to mark the book's contribution to the historiography of Song localism and Song statism. It is also a shame to see the important methodological issues raised by the process of digitization confined to an appendix. Although the author has addressed these issues elsewhere, the implications of disambiguating historical data deserve a more prominent position here.
The Harvard University Asia Center is to be commended for giving the author so many illustrations, and the maps of establishment and abolition contribute markedly to the argument, assisted by the variety of graphs used. The local maps are less useful, particularly because they lack clearly marked rivers or indications of the broader geographical context. The writing is clear but for one or two awkward sentences. Ruth Dunnell's name is consistently misspelled, and the book contains my current favorite typo: “emporium” for “imperium.”
But as someone whose focus is further north, I can only be deeply envious. Mostern has taken a rich evidence base and offers valuable historical results that could not have been achieved with traditional methods. If only we had the records to study the Song's neighbors in the same way.
