This is a marvelous, genre-transforming book that no China scholar will want to miss. Scholars of literature and of economics, including of the magic of money, are also inevitably going to get drawn in, because it shows connections that few of them probably knew before.
This is a unique, very learned, and fiercely ambitious book. Most concretely, it is about the genesis and rise of new forms of economic-literary imaginaries in early imperial China. Tamara Chin's genius is to refuse to assume separate genres of “literature” or “economics,” or historiography, or the like. Instead, she investigates the specific kinds of literary economics and poetics of exuberance that emerged in the new social landscape of imperial China's expanding commodification and market trade. This explosion of new genres was rather like the bursts of new forms of alien life seen in the novel environment of each new biological-evolutionary era—except these were not blind lifeforms, but mutually competitive ideas concocted by people, to describe, define, and manipulate this new social landscape.
A comparative footnote (pp. 39–40n15) is helpful: Whereas in pre-imperial eighteenth-century Britain there was a “fact-fiction continuum” that explained and engaged the new commodity economy—now-forgotten novels served as finance primers, and finance primers were intentionally populated by fictive characters—only later on were “literature” and “economics” delineated as the separate genres we think we know today. In the expanding early Chinese empires, Chin explicates, “an almost reverse scenario” played out as the market engulfed society. Early-imperial economic treatises like the transgressive Guanzi were fashioned as a fact-fiction continuum with Chinese characteristics: “[The Han] Emperor Wu's economic advisers championed a text that took the fictional character Mr. Calculate-y as its source of economic expertise” for managing the calculated expansion of monetized markets under the aegis of the state, seeking wealth and power far beyond the tribute relations of old.
The emergent imperialist management theory was also at the very same time mirrored in an explosion of poetic enumerations of the exotic products now streaming into the empire from newly conquered frontiers, as in the epideictic fu rejecting classical thrift, and instead embracing “lavish expenditure.” There was in the midst of this, argues Chin, an ideological divide between those who—much like some Western economists today, we might note—wanted to explain (and celebrate) the trade flows of commodities and currencies as a new, self-evident order of things, and those who wanted to force-assimilate the new mercantilist-imperialist reality (the “savage exchange”) into the old-style moral-conceptual framework of kinship and kingship. In this reading, China as we know it appears as an outcome of the victory of the traditionalists who resurrected and revised the much older, agriculture-based classical canon (Confucius and the like) from what might well have been their oblivion. As explicated in Chin's masterful new reading of the dialogues of the Debates on Salt and Iron, they framed this as a “return” to such “roots,” and created a fusion ideology of the market as a moral economy by imperial grace; and the economy as a means to ever more power.
Chin's revolutionizing perspective enables her to examine multiple other genres of social expression and their place in these great debates. This includes astute assessments of the contemporary historiographic-“ethnographic” framings of foreigners and barbarians in relation to the new empire.
Money tokens—coins—emerge as much more than the archaeological periodization evidence or artistic-calligraphic heritage that they have often figured as in past scholarship. The dual-faced coins reflect the struggle over if and how to enact a state cosmology in the supervision of markets—even when, or especially when, coins themselves were taken off the market to be buried in tombs, to buy favors in imaginary afterworlds—and in the ever-unresolved debates over the inscription of putative cosmic order in the very design and adornment of coins. Here Chin helps relaunch the study of Chinese coins (and of foreign coins in China!).
Kinship, too, is reread in a similarly novel way, shining new light on the broad imperial repoliticization of kinship, the harnessing of women's work, and the generalized institutionalization of the household. For all the stunning wealth of detail on the world of Han China amassed and analyzed here, for me this part also evokes comparison—such as with Sarah Josepha Hale, the nineteenth-century imperial visionary who designed the US Thanksgiving ritual as part of her redefinition of the family for the coming American Century.
Savage Exchange is a breathtaking achievement that is sure to inspire both within and beyond China studies, including more widely the study of society, literature, economy, ideology, and power—but above all, for understanding the Chinese empires.
