Mark Edward Lewis has produced an impressive volume on the history of the Tang dynasty as part of Harvard University Press's History of Imperial China series. Its greatest contribution is its integration of the latest secondary scholarship into interesting arguments about the evolution of Chinese society between the seventh and tenth centuries. Lewis concentrates on the forces at work within China, and in this sense, he differs from another recent one-volume exploration of Tang history, S. A. M. Adshead's Tang China: The Rise of the East in World History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Whereas Adshead views Tang history as part of a larger world history, Lewis concentrates on two internal developments: how the Tang imperium consolidated innovations from the period of division and how Chinese society evolved during the three Tang centuries.
China's Cosmopolitan Empire eschews a chronological approach, adopting instead a topical organization. The political narrative constitutes two chapters (chapters 2 and 3), occupying just 55 of the main text's 278 pages. The remaining seven chapters are devoted to geography, urban life, rural life, foreign affairs, kinship, religion, and writing, respectively. This choice facilitates Lewis's excursion through recent secondary literature from the subfields of Tang studies. It comes, however, at a cost. The size of this material requires that Lewis move quickly through Tang political history. The streamlined result covers the important trends, but with few details. Two examples will suffice: Empress Wu Zetian's rise to prominence and the Sweet Dew Incident, the 835 anti-eunuch conspiracy, merit just one paragraph each (pp. 35, 68). The aging Tang volume in the Cambridge History of China series (Vol. 3, Sui and T'ang China, 589–906, Part I, ed. Denis Twitchett [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979]) therefore remains the best English-language source for Tang political history.
As compensation, Lewis employs the latest scholarship, which focuses little on political history, to offer interesting perspectives on the period. His chapter on the “Geography of Empire” is particularly effective (pp. 5–29). In it, he describes the physical environment of the seventh century and illustrates how it conditioned political, economic, and social decisions. He notes that, by the Sui dynasty, the political and economic centers of the empire had already diverged, and he shows how this followed directly from agrarian limitations of the Guanzhong region, thus explaining the need for massive public works projects to supply the traditional, albeit poorly situated, capital (pp. 10–11). Lewis's book is an example of the growing interest in Chinese environmental history best represented by Mark Elvin's Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004).
Despite writing discrete thematic chapters, Lewis provides an overall interpretation of Tang history. He identifies four central dynamics in the period: decreasing state control over property and population, leading to increased urbanization and commercialization; the shifting of China's cultural center of gravity southward; the restructuring of relations with the outside world; and the evolution of the literary arts paralleling economic change (pp. 2–4). The topical chapters elaborate these central interpretations. The result transcends the usual portrayal of the Tang as an era of initial Chinese power and cultural florescence followed by tragic decline. Instead, it is a period of dynamic change across all areas of human activity.
There is, however, a tension between the dictates of the series and the book Lewis has written. The series required him to write a volume on the Tang, but his desire to be comprehensive leads him to material that transcends the dynasty's dates. Put simply, the periodization chosen for the series is essentially a political one: the familiar succession of dynasties. Lewis, in the service of his larger arguments, deemphasizes political history. In its place, he offers much on topics such as economics, social history, and foreign affairs. Developments in these spheres that began in the Tang, however, continued long after the dynasty's fall. For example, Lewis notes that mid-Tang geopolitical reconfigurations “culminated in a concept of ‘China among equals’ in the Song dynasty” (p. 146). The temporal limitations also affect how he organizes his material. His discussion of printing, for example, appears at the end of the chapter on religion (pp. 238–40). This placement makes sense, given the initial use of printing for disseminating religious texts during the late Tang, but its broader implications, which ultimately justify its mention, were not predominantly religious and could not be adequately explored in this volume.
Despite these issues, this book remains an excellent place to see the latest insights into Tang history. It is a thought-provoking effort to synthesize that work and reflect on the significance of the Tang for China's history. If it inspires the next generation of students to pursue Tang history seriously, Lewis will have made a real contribution to Tang studies.
