In the 310 s ce northern ‘barbarians’ seized the ancient heartlands of China, setting up a series of conquest states; a century later an analogous process commenced in the Roman world. It was only in the sixth and seventh centuries that trajectories of state formation diverged. Whereas Justinian's campaigns were limited in scope and their gains were gradually reversed, hybrid regimes comprised of Han Chinese and Tuoba Xianbei (Tabgach Särbi) – the Sui and the Tang dynasties – reunited the lands once held by the Han Empire. These dynasties emphasised their Chinese character at the expense of their frontier heritage – the functional equivalent, as F. aptly puts it, of the Goths or Franks taking over all of the former Roman Empire while disavowing their Germanic identity in favour of a Roman one (p. 12).
How did the intense entanglements of this period affect the way in which Roman and Chinese literati portrayed these ‘barbarians’? F. addresses this question by focusing on two prominent historical accounts dating from the high-water marks of imperial restoration: Procopius’ Wars, on Justinian's military exploits up to the 550 s ce, and the Jin Shu, a quasi-official history of the period from 265 to 420 ce that was rapidly assembled by a committee in the 640 s ce at the behest of the second Tang emperor.
F. justifies his focus on just two works with compelling pragmatic concerns – doing justice to two separate historiographical traditions takes time and effort – and the rather more unsettling supposition that by adopting a wider scope he might well have unearthed sentiments diverse enough ‘to support any position’ (p. 19). F.'s objective is clearly defined: to shed light on the ‘ideological currents’ of the time when the great divergence between post-Roman fragmentation and Chinese serial imperial restoration began (p. 7), rather than on the causes of this process itself – a wise choice given the hazards of ideational approaches that tend to privilege and inflate the impact of elite texts. (An underdeveloped afterthought along these lines on pp. 332–3 remains a rare slip.)
The guiding question is straightforward: ‘while working within the parameters of a conceptual toolbox inherited from centuries-old ethnographic texts’ (p. 21), how did elite writers view ‘barbarians’ who were no longer geographically or socially marginal but had in fact ascended to great political power? F. explores this ‘conceptual toolbox’ in a sweeping and highly informative survey that reaches back to the Homeric and Western Zhou traditions (pp. 28–129). This breadth allows F. to track the deep roots of hostile tropes about the Si Yi, the ‘Four Barbarians’, whose nature, as the venerable Li Ji would have it, ‘cannot be changed’ (p. 46). While the Graeco-Roman tradition yields somewhat more sympathetic and less rigid depictions of outsiders, the Chinese canon locates them within a fixed political and moral order that equates ethnic difference with innate inferiority and disregards change over time, even as – somewhat paradoxically – identicidal absorption into Han society was deemed feasible. For good measure, those outsiders, endowed with ‘the faces of humans but the hearts of beasts’ (p. 121), were perpetually tainted by a writing system that logographically assimilated them to animals or slaves (pp. 101, 204) in ways unknown in the alphabetic Mediterranean.
These differences, F. argues, may reflect the unchallenged centrality of a Chinese culture that, developing in relative geographical isolation out of an early agrarian core, enjoyed considerable leeway in denigrating less settled neighbouring populations. The Greeks, by contrast, were very much aware of earlier civilisations nearby, just as the Romans were mindful of their cultural debt to Greece (pp. 128–9, 206). There were no ancient Egyptians or mighty Persians to put Chinese elites in their place.
How did such tropes fare when ‘barbarian’ forces finally gained the upper hand? Did ethnographic discourse become more inclusive, more cosmopolitan, more accepting of the ‘Other’ (p. 27)? At the risk of oversimplifying F.'s painstaking and nuanced analysis (pp. 130–310), as far as China is concerned, the very short answer is ‘no’. The Jin Shu doubles down on established dichotomies of Chinese and human-faced/beast-hearted outsiders, stressing imaginary continuities between ancestral ‘barbarians’ and more recent conquest regimes that are denied legitimacy whenever they lay claim to emperorship. Non-Chinese rulers, thought to reflect the ‘hideous’, ‘cruel and uncivilized’ and ‘wicked’ character of their people (pp. 245–6, 252), are quite consistently cast in an unfavourable light.
Procopius, meanwhile, seems more relaxed about ethnic difference. The conventional Roman-‘barbarian’ template, upheld without great fanfare, does not drive his narrative. Ready to abandon traditional biases specifically regarding those Germans who had taken over parts of the Roman Empire, he has no trouble expressing respect for their leaders.
F. rightly draws attention to the ‘almost counterintuitive’ quality of these contrasts (p. 208; cf. also pp. 255–6). While Procopius might well have looked down on defeated Goths and Vandals, Chinese literati whose societies had experienced centuries of foreign rule and considerable blurring of ethnic boundaries in real life – and who operated under an ethnically mixed regime – could be expected to have adjusted their rhetoric and criteria for legitimacy. Yet the opposite was the case. Expanding on his aforementioned discussion, F. attributes these outcomes not only to the dead weight of tradition but also to the inclusively legalistic and humanistic rather than descent-based nature of Roman rule and the deep background experience of the never-ending rise and fall of imperial civilisations in that part of the world. Chinese identity, by contrast, was constructed around the master myth of ‘an uninterrupted political genealogy’ (pp. 327–33).
F.'s rich study is doubly rewarding, by showing what a sustained comparative approach can accomplish but also how much more remains to be done. How representative are his two chosen texts – a single-authored work and a collaborative compilation (p. 21)? We must ask how more overtly Christian authors engaged with ‘barbarian’ power (p. 324). In his desire to foreground classical paradigms in classicising writing (pp. 21–2, 326), F. deliberately gives short shrift to the homogenising effect of Christianity (and of Buddhism in China), even though Procopius himself considered conversion as a significant factor in acculturation (pp. 166–7, 183, 305). As for China, we would also like to know whether xenophobic topoi were similarly common under the more substantively Tuoba/Tabgach regimes that preceded the Sui and the Tang. Answers might be found in the remains of the Shi Liu Guo Chun Qiu, the ‘Spring and Autumn Annals of the Sixteen Kingdoms’, composed under Tuoba/Tabgach rule in the early sixth century ce (contra pp. 23, 187 n. 208, this work is not ‘lost’, but partly recoverable through very substantial fragments, as P. Shi reminds us in BMCR 2021, forthcoming), as well as in the Wei Shu, compiled in the 550 s ce in the same context (see all too briefly pp. 318–19). And even such forays would still confine us to elite writings: is there any hope of discovering how widely the contrasting attitudes F. identifies were present beyond elite circles?
F.'s book serves as a reminder that comparison does not only deal with similarity, difference and causation: it can also be of great value in understanding any one case. F. lightly touches on this when he qualifies academic assessments of Procopius by noting that his stance becomes much clearer when viewed against the backdrop of Chinese alternatives (p. 310). Yet much more should be made of this, driving home the crucial point that comparison is not merely an optional means of analysis. Consider the burgeoning interest in representations of race and ethnicity in the Graeco-Roman world: taking account of the stark racism on display in some Chinese elite writings would provide much-needed perspective. For now, we are very much in F.'s debt for unveiling new vistas. Following his lead is bound to be a challenge: collaboration among area specialists will be essential for making this line of research take off.
