With La dynastie des Song—the culmination of over three decades of research on the Song dynasty—Christian Lamouroux of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (EHESS), has written a comprehensive, meticulous, and authoritative history of the dynasty. A prime example of the unique French genre of haute vulgarisation—high-level popularization—this book achieves a major miracle: while the informed public will discover in its pages a reliable, accessible introduction to the dynasty, the professional historian will find on these same pages sharp summaries of top scholarship in the field, new insights into old arguments, and fascinating perspectives that arise from Lamouroux's unique juxtapositions of issues and sources. One could argue that La dynastie des Song develops the full potential, first seen in the pioneering work of Étienne Balazs (1905–1963) and Herbert Franke (1914–2011), for a distinctive European approach to Song studies. In short, La dynastie des Song is at the same time the best one-volume, general history of Song in any language and also a work of major scholarly importance that every serious student of Chinese history should study carefully. As such, given the international community of sinologists’ ever dwindling ability to read French, the book is a prime candidate for translation into both English and Chinese.

Lamouroux's book constitutes the fourth volume to appear in the projected ten-volume Histoire générale de la Chine under the direction of Damien Chaussende.Footnote ¹ Whether intentionally or not, this title echoes that of the monumental Histoire générale de la Chine ou annales de cet empire traduites du Tong-Kien-Kang-Mou, published in Paris in thirteen volumes between 1777 and 1785, the French translation by the Jesuit Joseph de Moyriac de Mailla (1669–1745) of the Outline and Details of the Comprehensive Mirror that Aids Governance (Zizhi tongjian gangmu 資治通鑑綱目) by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200). One could make the case that, just as Zhu Xi had written a “general history” for the informed public of his time, so the French Jesuits adapted his work for their own eighteenth-century audience. If, as Pierre-Étienne Will maintains, this first general history “remained influential until the twentieth century,”Footnote ² the past century of French sinology has laid the foundations for this new general history of China, written by French scholars for the contemporary French reading public. The new Histoire générale de la Chine invites comparison to the multi-volume and soon-to-be-complete Cambridge History of China, a comparison to which I shall return later in this review.

Many of the formal features of Lamouroux's volume follow guidelines established for all volumes in the series. Thus, La dynastie des Song is divided into two parts. First comes “une histoire dynastique (960–1279)” in chapters one through five (33–276), a political narrative that focuses on court-centered policy initiatives and administrative actions as well as external and internal military campaigns. Chapters six through ten (279–639), collectively titled “un monde ouvert,” treat respectively geography, economics, the political culture, intellectual history, and society. There are also a detailed year-by-year chronology (659–78), the bibliography (679–711), and a glossary-index (713–61), as well as a general introduction (15–30) and conclusion (625–39), and four appendices (641–56), the longest of which is a brief but masterful summary of the vexed question of Song commodity prices. Included are thirty-four well-chosen, color illustrations. Another striking visual feature of the book are twenty-five color maps inserted in the text but also gathered and reproduced again in sequence at the end of the volume (783–808). As might be expected, these maps highlight military campaigns and changes in territorial boundaries. Although Lamouroux has based many of these on earlier maps and data by other scholars (with acknowledgements, 763–64), he has interwoven them with new maps to illustrate his own specific points regarding population shifts and the geographical distribution of financial resources. The entire map sequence is a model of cartographic narratology with clear pictorial storylines and absolutely no clutter. The visual consistency and clarity of the entire map sequence enhance the larger arguments that Lamouroux develops throughout the book.

Each of this long book's ten chapters is subdivided into titled sections, which are themselves then further divided in smaller sub-topics that range in length from several paragraphs to several pages. Frequent and cogent introductions and summaries keep the reader oriented toward the larger arguments amid the always pertinent wealth of detail. Although there are no Chinese characters in the text, the combined index-glossary contains all Chinese terms mentioned in the text, arranged by pinyin, with characters and translations. The index also contains many extended, topical entries that guide the reader toward the dispersed treatments of related topics and thus provide additional coordination between the narrative and topical parts of the book.

In order for Anglophone readers to better understand the methodology, general orientation, and larger arguments in La dynastie des Song, it may be helpful to describe more broadly the book's relationship to trends in French sinology and historiography. Lamouroux has dedicated his book to Jacques Gernet (1921–2018) and Bernard Lepetit (1948–1996). Of these two scholars, Gernet is probably the better known to readers of this journal. He was, in the words of his successor at the Collège de France, a “sinologue total,” the last of the “giants” of French sinology and heir to the tradition of Édouard Chavannes (1865–1918), Paul Pelliot (1878–1945), and Paul Demiéville (1894–1979).Footnote ³ As a discipline, the sinology of these scholars applied the perspectives and methodology of nineteenth-century European classical philology to Chinese texts.

This application resulted in precise translations and extensive commentaries that, although they often ranged far afield, usually confined themselves to issues within the text itself. While these French sinologists always considered the full historical dimensions of the texts they translated, they seldom engaged other emerging social science disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, or economics. Gernet maintained this focus on textual exegesis as the disciplinary backbone of his sinological praxis. Pierre-Étienne Will recalls Gernet's innate “delight in the text” (“plaisir du texte”) and “the abundance of carefully annotated translations, admirably precise and elegant without embellishment, and most often directly integrated into the text [of Gernet's scholarship].”Footnote ⁴ One can also sense this same “plaisir du texte” in La dynastie des Song. Lamouroux's quotations from primary texts are carefully chosen, meticulously translated, and precisely positioned to illustrate his major points. The translations in turn anchor his more extended analyses. The analytical discussions themselves consistently refer to the primary sources. And the secondary scholarship that Lamouroux cites itself seldom strays far from the careful exegesis of its sources.

Yet, even as Gernet the sinologist continued his predecessors’ focus on textual exegesis, his career as an historian coincided with the rise of the multidisciplinary approach to history practiced by Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) and the mid-twentieth century Annales school of French historiography. As is well-known, Braudel pioneered the use of the social sciences such as geography, sociology, and economics to identify socioeconomic trends in the “longue durée.” Braudel hired Gernet and Balazs in 1955 to work in the famous “sixth section” of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the forerunner of EHESS, where Gernet remained until 1975.Footnote ⁵ Gernet's Le monde chinois, which appeared in 1972 in the Braudel directed series Destins du monde, reflects his experience of two decades in the sixth section. Described as a “tour de force and a paradox,” the 750-page book, without notes or scholarly bibliography, was directed at the general public, but nonetheless, in Will's words, “literally overflow[ed] with often unpublished data, summary maps and tables, original approaches and theoretical considerations, and also those realia that Gernet had already accumulated” from his earlier scholarship.Footnote ⁶ “Far from a work of simple vulgarization,” the work applied for the first time, at least in France, a “multidimensional approach” to Chinese history that emphasized temporal change, links between politics, society, economics, and culture, and China's contacts with its immediate neighbors and beyond.Footnote ⁷

If Le monde chinois was both a tour de force and a paradox, La dynastie des Song repeats the tour de force and resolves the paradox. After Braudel's retirement in 1968, historians began to suggest that the potential of the Annales paradigm had run its course. This critique developed along two parallel lines. First, his critics argued that Braudel's three-way partition of historical time into structure (long-term trends)—his fundamental object of historical analysis—followed by conjoncture (medium-length units varying from ten to fifty years) and événement (short-term events) had resulted in a persistent focus on impersonal macroeconomic forces in the over-arching structure of the longue durée. They contended that this focus obscured the personal, the local, and the random elements in history—creating, in essence, a history without humans. Second, the fragmentation of the Annales school forced in turn a reconsideration of the nature of history and its relationship as a discipline to the social sciences.Footnote ⁸

Prominent among the critics of Annales was Bernard Lepetit, a young scholar of French urban history at EHESS. He advocated and demonstrated in his own practice a history that addressed both critiques of the Annales paradigm. Confronting the top-heavy emphasis on the longue durée, he focused on “events,” especially at the local level, that destabilized longer perspectives. The result was a more pragmatic, more politicized social history, “centered on the skills of the actors, attentive to the conditions for the emergence of an agreement in a situated action.”Footnote ⁹ He also advocated a “restricted interdisciplinarity” that restored the distinctiveness of history as a discipline and suggested guidelines for its interaction with the social sciences. History should not be merely an enormous, temporal database for the social scientist, nor should it become a slave to social science theories. Rather, Lepitit made three points. The social sciences can help to formulate new research areas for the historian; the social sciences can provide different techniques for producing new historical knowledge; the historian can employ these various techniques to create a progressive construction of the object of his inquiry that tests the “internal coherence” of his hypothesis against the evidence of his sources. A major goal was to understand, not the structures of permanence, but the roots of change—“to analyze with greater precision how the development of human societies is contained, at the same time, in their past and yet is unpredictable.”Footnote ¹⁰

In a conceptual, almost metaphorical sense, one could perhaps read Lamouroux's opening political narrative as a legacy of Gernet's sinology and his ensuing topical chapters as an application of Lepetit's post-Annales historiography. But Lamouroux has closely interwoven the two parts of La dynastie des Song in a perfect union of the two intellectual currents. He has constructed his political narrative to “set up,” introduce, and coordinate the major points he develops in the topical chapters; and copious cross-references back and forth link the two parts of the book. Lamouroux, the historian, identifies his major social science handmaidens as economics, anthropology (with an emphasis on religious studies and law), sociology, and political science (17). His five topical chapters treat (1) geography in its broadest sense, the physical and ethnographic space of Song and its neighbors (279–324); (2) the economy, with an emphasis on demographic change as a driver of economic expansion (325–406); (3) political culture with a strong focus on the “new sovereignty” of the Song monarchy (407–67); (4) the history of thought, broadly construed as a confluence of literati culture, political ideology, and philosophy (469–547); and (5) social life, with a strong emphasis on local religion, family and village structures, and law (549–624). The over-arching heading and theme of these chapters, “un monde ouvert,” unifies Lamouroux's conception of the Song as a period in which China “opened” in new ways (with connotations of receptivity, accessibility, and freedom) both to latent possibilities, now opened, in its own culture and to the world beyond.

The Introduction (15–30) sets forth the goals of the La dynastie des Song in the context of the past century of international scholarship on Song. As an historian, Lamouroux presents the historiographical problem of how to research a society that bequeathed a large quantity of printed text but virtually no primary archives, a condition for which archaeology to date has offered only limited correctives. He notes that because most of this printed record derives from official dynastic institutions that were controlled by civil literati, modern historians can seldom accept their accounts at face value. Throughout his book, and especially in the political narrative, Lamouroux carefully distinguishes between these “traditional” accounts and more recent alternative explanations and scenarios. He reads Song texts with a sharp eye for the realia they contain but remains always alert to the historiography of the context that envelopes them. Thus, La dynastie des Song offers not only a “history of Song” but also a “history of the history of Song” (17).

If this history begins with traditional sources such as the official Song History of 1345, its modern historiography begins with Naitō Konan 内藤湖南 (1866–1934) and the “Tang–Song transition model,” which Lamouroux views as the first attempt to employ methodologies from the social sciences to access and reassess the traditional sources. He reviews the Kyoto and Tokyo schools of Japanese historical scholarship, the Marxist scholarship of 1950s and 1960s China, the “American school,” and the “immense workshop” of present-day international scholarship on Song that has been stimulated by post-1980s Song scholarship in China (cited by name are Bao Weimin 包偉民 and Deng Xiaonan 鄧小南). Lamouroux displays in his book a total command of this scholarship—not merely a simple bibliographic knowledge but an ability to identify and distill the most pertinent points of the most relevant research from the top craftsmen within this “immense workshop.” Every major Song scholar of the past forty years (and many others) will find in La dynastie des Song his or her research fully digested and fairly summarized, often more cogently and succinctly than in its original presentation. Naturally, this scholarship includes works written in French – and unfortunately little known to Anglophone scholars – for example the works of Alain Arrault, Anne Cheng, Stéphane Feuillas, and Roger Darrobers.Footnote ¹¹ Many sections in the book are summaries of Lamouroux's own earlier wide-ranging research, principally in economic and financial history, but also in such diverse fields as geography, hydrology, political history, and historiography.

While Lamouroux accepts that the Tang–Song transition model remains the framework for present-day research on Song—partially by default of a better alternative—he embraces attempts both to expand upon and problematize that model. Faced with conflicting sources, he is suspicious of single, simple answers. Where the sources are ambiguous, he accepts that ambiguity. In this book, when a theory confronts the “history of realities” (histoire des réalités), the realities prevail. Like Lepetit, Lamouroux seeks out the local, the particular, the specific “reality” that often undercuts sweeping generalizations. As a result, individuals and the realities of lives lived during the Song populate and animate the pages of La dynastie des Song. This focus begins in the political narrative (33–276) where the reigns of each Song monarch constitute both the fundamental markers of time and the units of historical analysis. The parentage, education, and temperament of each monarch, as well as his political and administrative policies, are carefully detailed. Detailed as well are the entries and exits of the top leadership of both the civil and military administrations. Lamouroux places these personnel details in the larger context of the pressure that external wars, internal rebellions, and ecological disasters placed on state finance. The result is a quite granular look at the political response of individual leaders to military, environmental, and economic change.

A striking feature of the book is Lamouroux's juxtaposition of sub-topics within the five topical chapters, juxtapositions that often contravene the conventional boundaries of the social science disciplines. This approach permits Lamouroux to make connections between events and trends that the rigid application of sub-disciplinary boundaries has hitherto frustrated. For example, demography—the study of population growth and movement—might typically belong to geography, but Lamouroux discusses these statistics at the head of his chapter on the economy, a placement that enables him to better explain the links between the rapid growth of Song urbanism, the resulting changes in urban–rural interchanges, and economic expansion (325–44). To cite yet another example, Lamouroux's account of the civil service examinations serves as introduction to his chapter on intellectual history. This placement prepares the way for his conception of the relationship between the pervasive mental apparatus that exam culture instilled and the interwoven contours of dynastic ideology and private thinking that the chapter details (469–92). This is not the old intellectual history, conceived as a self-contained repository of “thought,” but a dynamic history of ideas generated from within the vortex of political, social, and economic change.

The first of these topical chapters, entitled “The Frontiers, the Imperial Territory, and the World,” foregrounds a consistent theme that runs through the book from the first to the last page; namely, how the dissolution of the Tang empire and the emergence of newly centralized imperial governance forced changes in the perception of an ethnically redefined Han/Hua 漢/華 self at the political center and other civilizations of the, now peripheral, steppe and southern borderlands. As Lamouroux notes, the issue is certainly more complex than the simplistic notion of a once unified Tang “China” suffering through repeated, unsuccessful Song attempts at reunification (280). Rather, the Song imperium came increasingly to define itself as the defender of Han superiority over the peripheral races and adopted a stark colonial attitude toward their interface and eventual governance. Song officials longed to restore the geographical reach of the Tang, but the redefinition of their own ethnic and cultural identity meant they could no longer embrace the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural empire of Tang Taizong 唐太宗 (r. 627–649). Lamouroux makes Wang Anshi's 王安石 (1021–1086) endorsement of Wang Shao's 王韶 (1030–1081) operations in the Amdo region the epigraph for this chapter and later translates the passage in full: because the Tibetans value goods over their land, by trading with them we can acquire their land, and they will become Han. “Each [race] will obtain what it wants, their lands will be developed, and goods will circulate. The Tibetans and the Han will become one, and we can easily exercise our control over them” (287).Footnote ¹²

This chapter traces the different effects of this Song colonization in the north, northwest, and southwest. The end of active military action in the north after the Treaty of Chanyuan in 1005 permitted the Song to focus efforts on the northwest and south, although irredentist passions constantly tested the Chanyuan accords and fractured the bureaucracy. Lamouroux treats both diplomacy and trade as ancillary aspects of Song colonization that, despite the failures of political integration—spectacularly after 1127—made the Song an East Asian “cross-roads” (281) open in new ways to the peoples beyond its borders (296–315; and map 18 on p. 308). The well-known expansion of maritime trade, the foreign resident populations, and Song trading communities abroad were not extraneous tangents in the evolution of Han Chinese culture; they were central to its self-identity and, perhaps more importantly, to its finances. Intertwined official and illicit trade brought overseas goods into Song, many of which were then resold north and northwestward into the steppe, enabling the Song state to maintain a stable position as financial “middleman.” These growing contacts with foreigners brought perceptions of the “other” that conflicted with the ethnic hierarchization of the population. They also brought a vast expansion of geographic knowledge, not only of “other” parts of the world, but also about Song itself, as reflected in the explosive growth of local gazetteers. Political centralization required detailed local knowledge that was vital to the expansion of the fiscal state. The final sub-section in this chapter relies on the work of Hilde De Weerdt and Ruth Mostern to detail this internal “opening”—a new definition of “imperial space” as an administrative network that relayed the local information necessary for central decision making and managed the local resources necessary to support those decisions (315–24).Footnote ¹³

In addition to his many forays into the byways of Song history, Lamouroux is principally an economic historian with a research focus on Song financial administration. His 2003 translation of Song History chapter 179 (kuaiji 會計) is a model for how such translation/studies should be conducted.Footnote ¹⁴ Accordingly, chapter 7, “An Exchange Economy” is literally and figuratively the center of La dynastie des Song, and this chapter displays Lamouroux's deepest reach into the primary sources and control over the specialized secondary scholarship, from which he distills some of his book's most important insights. These insights arise not because Lamouroux privileges economics as the center of his conception of Song history but because he never loses sight of how Song economic forces and institutions influenced all other facets of Song society. This chapter begins with a short summary of the older narrative on Song economic history as originally formulated by pre-war Japanese scholars such as Katō Shigeshi, Hino Kaisaburō, and Sudō Yoshiyuki. In this view, newly introduced plants and enhanced farming techniques generated agricultural surpluses that market forces distributed over a rapidly improving infrastructure, which facilitated in turn the growth of trade in manufactured goods; both trends then combined to generate urban growth, and the cities became centers of increasingly complex economic and financial structures that linked together a national market. Against this view, Lamouroux endorses the focus of Joseph McDermott and Shiba Yoshinobu on the local economies and regional variations that prevented the emergence of a truly national market.Footnote ¹⁵

On the one hand, Lamouroux sees a much greater role for the fiscal state in the Song economy than did the pre-war Japanese scholars; on the other hand, he is reluctant to apply notions such “capitalism” or “mercantilism” to describe this involvement. He highlights the state's role in forging (forcing?) the cooperation of merchants in coordinating and maintaining the production of regional networks that united urban and rural communities. To this end, the Song state employed a money-based system of sprawling taxation (“une fiscalité tentaculaire”) in order to sustain its military and bureaucratic needs. In this way, the state both satisfied the demands of its growing urban population but also extended its centralized control over rural landowners, craftsmen, and merchants—producing a “new social stratification” in both city and countryside (325–27). Defining these regional networks, Lamouroux relates that an average of 40 percent of land was under cultivation in four regions with the greatest population densities—along the Yellow River valley in the north, the lower Yangzi basin, the middle Yangzi basin, and Sichuan. Empire wide, these figures ranged from 90 percent in the most intensely cultivated areas within these four regions to under 20 percent in the southern borderlands (333–37 and map 21). Referencing the work of Bao Weimin, he emphasizes that the state's primary goal, given this wide variation in production, was not to foster interregional exchange but rather to guarantee regional self-sufficiency and economic stability. Through its taxation and monetary powers the state coordinated such interregional exchanges as were necessary to sustain each region, thereby consolidating its own control over all regions (355–58).

The chapter proceeds to describe regional specialization in manufacturing, focusing on the production of salt, silk, ceramics, iron and steel, and shipbuilding. It emphasizes how these industries were coordinated through interlocking networks of merchants, middlemen, and low-level government agents who operated a system of 20,000 tax stations that linked rural production with regional urban administrative centers. Lamouroux attributes this “porosity” between government and commerce to a dynamic that the Song state inherited and developed from the Five Dynasties, resulting in expanded artisanal and semi-industrial manufacturing (374). He then addresses the question of whether this “economic activism” amounted to a mercantilist political economy, replying, basically, “No.” He admits that one strain of Song economic thought advocated easing government curbs on trade and increasing state revenues by taxing the resulting increased volume of goods sold. Yet he agrees with Guo Zhengzhong 郭正忠 that the eleventh-century rise in revenue from indirect taxation did not result from a state-sponsored increase in trade. Rather, as the increasingly opaque nature of land ownership rendered the collection of land taxes more difficult, the government simply increased the taxes that were easier to collect: those on merchants. An additional benefit was that the state could more easily adjust indirect taxation to accommodate regional variations in productivity.

For example, Fan Zhongyan stated in 1040 that the best way to finance the Tangut war was to raise taxes on the profits of merchants, not on peasants. Drawing a distinction with the cooperation between European states and their mercantile agents, Lamouroux describes the “troubled relationship” between the Song state and its merchant clients (384–90). He notes, for example, that the ruzhong 入中 system of supplying provisions for the northwest border wars was not effective, since the state lost enormous sums on the operation, but only a few of the largest merchants garnered the bulk of the profits. He cites the example of the state's “wealth capture” from Sichuan (386–89) whereby the state squeezed merchant profits by retaining the use of iron currency in Sichuan and profiting when merchants were then forced to convert their proceeds into the bronze currency used in the rest of the country. Again, in early Southern Song, in order to cover the cost of military operations in the province, the Song court reorganized the Sichuan tea and salt monopolies into “contract markets,” a mechanism to extract greater participation fees from merchants. Too often, Lamouroux concludes, the state suspended or cancelled the terms that governed its cooperation with merchants. In short, the Song state's reluctance and/or inability to devise “a binding framework” with its merchant clients calls into question the nature of a supposed Song “mercantilism.”

“Currencies: Between Taxation and Markets,” the concluding section of this chapter, continues this theme and describes the complex Song currency system as another reflection of the problematic nature of the state-merchant relationship. After a detailed survey of the many forms of Song metallic and paper currencies (390–402), the final subsection (402–6) addresses the question: what was the nature of Song money, especially after the introduction of the huizi 會子 in the 1160s? Lamouroux demurs from the hypothesis of William Guanglin Liu that the huizi functioned as a type of bond that the government issued to finance budgets deficits that grew as a result of continued warfare against the Jin and as inflation sapped its profits from monopoly sales. He argues that the division of the empire into diverse currency zones and the varied uses and relationships of “money” to other stores of value within these zones precluded the existence of a sustainable empire wide “debt market.” Lamouroux emphasizes again here the regional character of Song markets. Despite the early emperors’ push toward centralization and the standardizing trajectory of the New Policies, the loss of the north to the Jurchen in 1127 brought a decisive halt to the Northern Song drive toward centralization. The result was a tense stand-off between the Lin'an monarchy and its regional administrations, now the four General Command Offices (zonglingsuo 總領所), whose primary responsibility was to maintain the armies within their jurisdictions. Because of this responsibility, each Office issued its own flavor of paper currency. Merchants profited from variations among these different “payment communities.” Although warfare and inflation ultimately undid the huizi in the thirteenth century, Lamouroux accedes—by way of segue into the ensuing chapters—to Robert Hymes's construction of how the Song monetization of commerce fundamentally changed Chinese society.Footnote ¹⁶

The next chapter, “A New Sovereignty” (407–67), offers perhaps the best example of Lamouroux's ability to extract far-ranging syntheses from ambiguous sources and contentious scholarship. The chapter presents an overview of Song politics and administration throughout all levels of governance. He grounds this overview in two innovative perspectives. First, in contrast to the prevailing view that civil officials dominated Song governance, he places the emperor—and especially the monarchy's financial apparatus—at the center of the administrative exercise of this new sovereignty. Second, he views the legitimacy that supported this sovereignty as a creative tension between two visions of imperial power. On the one hand, a largely Daoist inspired image conceived the emperor as religiously imbued with absolute political authority. On the other hand, another vision defined and channeled that authority through “the policies of the ancestors” (zuzong zhi fa 祖宗之法), a body of historical precedent curated by the Confucian literati and through which they accorded themselves a countervailing role in imperial decision-making.

The chapter begins with the observation that the Tang–Song transition model, content largely to accept the pre-war Japanese scholars’ dismissal of Song governance as absolutist, “has abandoned the strictly dynastic dimensions of imperial sovereignty” (408). After a description of the imperial compounds in Kaifeng and Lin'an and the imperial family, including the female monarchy, comes an extended discussion of what Lamouroux terms “la fonction publique,” or in English, public service. This careful word choice emphasizes the full, diverse range of Song “public servants” and avoids the confusion that the terminological hodge-podge of bureaucrats, scholar-officials, the shidafu, and the elite often drags into English language scholarship. Lamouroux rarely uses the French equivalents of such terms. His preferred term is “fonctionnaires” which refers to any government official without implication of rank. Thus “fonctionnaires civils” indicates wenguan (文官) generally, while “fonctonnaires lettrès” or just “lettrès” designates top intellectual and political leaders in government.

He notes that while Emperor Taizong's expansion of the examination system to recruit civil officials is well known, the same emperor's creation in 987 of the Court of the Three Ranks (Sanbanyuan 三班院) to organize and supervise “servitors minor” (shichen 使臣), the lower class of military grade officials, “made all officers, including those of the palace, a body of civil servants [un corps de fonctionnaires]” (426).Footnote ¹⁷ His survey of the full gamut of these Song “functionaries” asks many probing questions; for example, was the much-lamented rise of the eunuchs into top military command at the end of the eleventh century perhaps an unintended consequence of civil leadership's assault on military culture and their advocacy of “Confucian generals” (rujiang 儒將) (433–34)? The formal description of civil administration notes the paucity of top officials who combined political, administrative, and intellectual leadership skills and the resulting dependency of civil officials on their clerical sub-bureaucracy (435–44). Despite his previous long chapter on the Song economy, Lamouroux places his detailed discussion of Song financial administration in a sub-section of this chapter entitled “The Emperor: Between Men and Gods” (444–53). This placement is key to his conception of the pivotal role of the emperor in Song governance. He envisions the role of the Inner Treasury (neizang ku 內藏庫), the emperor's private or privy purse staffed by palace eunuchs, as an imperial bank that, by dispersing loans to selected agencies for designated purposes, controlled the state budget and dominated other financial institutions (446).

The chapter concludes with a fascinating perspective on two aspects of imperial legitimacy, that of the emperor and that of his officials, which Lamouroux treats as two sides of the same coin. He posits the Song notion of “the body of the state” (guoti 國體) to describe the monarch and his “functionaries” as a coherent, functional body, simultaneously political and religious (461). If the ruler's Confucian advisors invoked “the policies of the ancestors” to define this body as a corpus of guidelines for political action, they also accepted its religious dimension. Through imperial ritual, the emperor was uniquely capable of communicating with Heaven. Citing Marcel Granet's (1884–1940) dictum that in China from early times “Everything in public life was religious,” Lamouroux emphasizes that a double parallel between the governances of Heaven and of earth undergirded the authority of the Song emperor and his officials: the parallel between celestial Heaven (tian 天) and the gods (shen 神) and the terrestrial monarch and his officials legitimized the monarch religiously as Son of Heaven and conferred political authority on his officials to govern with the celestial authority of the gods. A remarkable quotation from Zheng Xia 鄭俠 (1041–1118) equates the power of the gods, on behalf of Heaven, to requite with fortune or misfortune good or bad human action and that of a prefect, on behalf of the emperor, to confer punishment or rewards on those same humans. “If the regimes of the gods and the prefects are different, the principle they follow is the same” (神與太守所治不同, 而為道一矣) (467). In short, the monarch derived his legitimacy from Heaven; his officials derived their legitimacy from the monarch's relationship with Heaven.

Lamouroux's ability creatively to transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries also animates his final two topical chapters. “To Refound the Empire; to Rebuild the World” reframes the received intellectual history of Song within a much expanded, all-encompassing framework of private and public, political and philosophical thinking. The opening sections review the history of examination culture and its influence on the larger educational matrix. Lamouroux accepts that the examinations produced an intellectual “elite” whose success both strengthened their commitment to the new imperial sovereignty and accorded them superior social status (489–92). But exam culture also generated a backlash against its focus on tradition-bound exegesis of the classic canon. The combined result of these bidirectional forces was a much-expanded definition of learning—“a total culture” (une culture globale)—that Lamouroux understands as an expression of this elite's desire for a cohesive intellectual wholeness in the face of the dynasty's territorial incompleteness. In a vital sub-section entitled “Grandeur des Song” (The Greatness/magnitude/grandeur of Song) (492–99) he acknowledges the affinity of his conception of this total culture to “Song learning” (Songxue 宋學), a term the Qing scholars used to identify a Song tradition of canonical exegesis as distinct from the earlier “Han learning” (Hanxue 漢學). Modern scholars such as Deng Guangming 鄧廣銘 (1907–1998) and Qi Xia 漆侠 (1923–2001) extended the term to define an integrated vision of Song intellectual history that Western scholarship sometimes loosely identifies as “Neo-Confucianism.”

But Lamouroux's construction of “Song grandeur” is more expansive and more dynamic than the earlier articulations. First, he confirms a dynamic interaction at all social levels between the three major religious/intellectual traditions—Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—a position already articulated at the conclusion of “A New Sovereignty” (467) and one that will undergird his final chapter on Song society. This is not a mere intellectual syncretism but affirmation of the reality that “Song grandeur” generated a measure of openness and receptivity that often transcended doctrinal differences. Confucian scholars—Zheng Xia, for example—accepted the reality of the spiritual world and practiced inner alchemy. Second, the movement against the dominant Han-Tang exegetical tradition both opened the classic texts for new interpretations and generated a broad-based movement to identify enduring moral and ethical truths in Antiquity. Despite differing interpretations of the texts, this movement brought to Song a sense of “intellectual freedom” that its scholars perceived to have existed in Antiquity and strived to recreate in their own society (495). Lastly, the drive to redefine the new sovereignty as one that manifested these principles gave rise to a “resolutely political culture” that sought to apply these principles to contemporary political life (496–99).

It is not necessarily the originality of these individual trends that distinguishes Lamouroux's conception—as he acknowledges, other scholars have studied these three tendencies in detail—as much as the synergy that he develops from their juxtaposition. For example, based upon this methodological juxtaposition, he proposes three critical periods in the evolution of the “grandeur des Song”: the advent of the culture of “Great Peace” (taiping 太平) during the Zhenzong 真宗 reign (997–1022); the intellectual ferment of the New Policies era; and the Southern Song “learning of the Way” (daoxue 道學) movement. Any intellectual historian would acknowledge the second and the third, but to place the first on par with the latter two demonstrates a grander conception of Song history than most scholarship has embraced. Lamouroux relies upon the recent scholarship of Chang Wei-ling 張維玲 to buttress his own earlier work that establishes Great Peace culture as the “founding ideology” of Song, a pan-sectarian religious, political, and cultural mélange that dominated Song life until the first Confucian rumblings in the 1030s.Footnote ¹⁸ The two scholars agree that although Song Confucianism arose in opposition to the Great Peace, major parts of this founding ideology endured throughout the dynasty. Both scholars, in short, embrace the counterintuitive understanding that opposition as much as advocacy can drive influence. After sub-sections that detail new Song approaches to cosmology and historiography—both employed now to demonstrate the cosmic and historical ubiquity of the new “total culture,” this chapter moves into sections that present concentrated synopses of major figures, continuing the book's focus on the actions of people as the fundamental topic of history—Ouyang Xiu, Wang Anshi, Sima Guang, as historian and as thinker, Su Shi, Cheng Yi, Zhu Xi, Zhang Shi and Lu Jiuyuan, and Lü Zuqian as historian.

The final topical chapter, “The Organization of Society: the Cults, Order, and Disorder,” concentrates on religion and family—both broadly conceived—as major organizers of community and explains how each imparted formal and informal mechanisms to enforce social order and define disorder at the family and village level. The chapter concludes with a discourse on how the legal system both supported these mechanisms and attempted to supplement their deficiencies. Lamouroux demonstrates how Chinese society on all fronts underwent fundamental transformations during the Song. His treatment of Buddhism and Daoism in this chapter emphasizes the integration of these religions into all aspects of lived society rather than as intellectual or philosophical abstractions. As such, the chapter begins with a strong objection to the premise that Confucianism, Neo- or otherwise, dominated Song society (549–50). Lamouroux adopts from Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer the concept of “religious ecology” to describe the over-arching religious, “cultic” framework that accompanied the political and economic changes described in earlier chapters—an “invisible universe, consubstantial with social organization and all daily activities” (551). This framework is the true “popular” religion, not because its beliefs and practices were confined to the lower classes, but because they were pervasive and universal.

The section on Buddhism highlights how the initial centralization of the Song state facilitated the consolidation of hitherto regional centers of Buddhist practice and enabled the emergence of Chan as a “collective” expression of Buddhist values. Powerful members of the Song monarchy brought prominent Buddhist monks to the capital where they interacted intellectually and politically with civil Confucian leaders. Lamouroux displays here his facility at weaving the cutting-edge research of other scholars into his own greater narrative of the “opening” of Song civilization. He advances the perspective of Albert Welter that the image of Tang dynasty Chan as transmitted in the colloquial language of the surviving Chan logia (yulu 語錄) is another expression of Song literati aspirations for a new, more “open” approach to their own textual tradition.Footnote ¹⁹ And so, if indeed the logia are, as Welter insists, a product of Song literati, not Tang Chan culture, then this would explain for example why Zhu Xi's disciples felt no qualms at compiling The Classified Conversations of Master Zhu (Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類), 140 juan of the master's teachings in colloquial dialogue format. In other words, the affinity of leading Confucian literati for Chan thought and expression, might be better understood not as the result of overt Buddhist influence but as an integral part of Song literati culture itself.

Lamouroux stresses the social and economic integration of Buddhist monasteries into local society, especially in the South, where, in Fujian for example, they controlled a third of cultivated land (561). As powerful as they were, however, the monasteries competed for both spiritual and material domination with at least two other types of local networks. These were the temples of local cults and the lineage organizations of the local clans. The discussion of Daoism centers upon John Lagerwey's notion of a “temple-centric society” (564–74). This society formed in the tenth century when Buddhist and Daoist priests preached a conception of the afterlife that centered around the Ten Kings of Hell. These magistrates presided over a divine bureaucracy that adjudicated the deeds of the recently departed and thus required of the still living a religious quest for salvation. Since the ultimate salvation meant believers could themselves join this netherworld bureaucracy, local “gods” and their cults swelled the ranks of a growing and diverse pantheon. As Lamouroux eloquently concludes: “The presence of gods and saints among men, or of the dead among the living, was a given of the human condition, called to weigh on the thoughts and actions of everyone, from the emperor to the simplest of his subjects” (570). A section on divination and geomancy explains how the living and the dead communicated (574–80).

Lamouroux's treatment of changes in family structure leads into a description of the Song village as the center of social and economic life (580–603). Several key themes resonate with other topical chapters in the book. For example, he points out how the demise of Tang aristocratic measures of family status “opened” the way for momentous social change. The drive of the early Song emperors toward political centralization demanded a new, more meritocratically qualified functionary. With aristocratic status no longer relevant, the newly emergent families of officials focused on wealth and meritocratic potential as desirable criteria in marriage partners. The desirability and status of women who possessed these criteria thus increased. Lamouroux finds these trends stronger in the south, and in tension with the more conservative north, whose leaders preferred to refashion family structures using traditional Confucian hierarchies. Although he dedicates no section exclusively to women's history, Lamouroux returns repeatedly throughout this chapter to concrete examples that show the increased status and visibility of some women's lives in Song. This argument gainsays the view that the rise of Neo-Confucianism somehow downgraded the general social status of women. In other words, despite the loud protests in the surviving record, the economic realities of the south prevailed over the Confucian dogmatism of the north.

The formal descriptions of family (jia 家) and lineage (zuzong 祖宗) emphasize the simultaneous religious, economic, social, and legal structures that under girded both, but Lamouroux also shows how family and lineage often conflicted. He cites at length Huang K'uan-chung's study of the Gao 高 clan of Mingzhou 明州, buttressed by the work of Beverly Bossler and Richard Davis, to illustrate both the importance of women—twelfth-century members of the Gao clan attributed their clan's successful emergence to its matriarch, née Fan 樊 (1050–?)—and the difficulty of sustaining the political, economic, and social capital necessary for continuous multi-generational domination (592–95).Footnote ²⁰ The section on village life describes the evolution of an administrative system in which rich families and local clerks were responsible for fulfilling tax quotas set by higher authority. Referencing the work of Patricia Ebrey and the late Joseph McDermott, Lamouroux envisions village society as composed of competing “circles of sociability”—the lineage organizations, the religious cults, and the Buddhist monasteries—that buffered the population against this administration by affording some measure of cooperative and often charitable protection (599–603).Footnote ²¹ The concluding sections on law highlight how legal institutions sometimes mitigated the tensions between the family and the larger lineage, focusing on several specific cases that illustrate the control of married women over their own property within the family. The final section on crime and punishment focuses on two cases, one from Kaifeng involving Wang Anli 王安禮 (1030–1095), brother of Wang Anshi, and another from Hangzhou during the same period, that shed light on economic crimes involving illicit connections between palace officials and merchants and thus reinforce the notion of “porosity” between officials and merchants first articulated in the earlier chapter on economics (614–24).

As a conclusion, Lamouroux offers a focused meditation on two questions central to his conception of the Song and its place in Chinese history. First, what happened after the loss of the north in 1127? Did Chinese culture really “turn inward,” as the title of the famous book by James T.C. Liu contends (630–33)? Second, what was the “contribution of the steppe” to that culture (633–39)? As prelude to his own responses to these questions, Lamouroux reviews two major answers to the first question, one by Liu himself and another by Yü Ying-shih in The Historical World of Zhu Xi.Footnote ²² Lamouroux finds both attempts to define Southern Song “political culture” inadequate. In his view, Liu's portrait of a sclerotic Confucian-bound and faction-ridden bureaucracy teleologically projects back to the Southern Song the general sentiments of many twentieth-century historians toward “imperial China.” On the other hand, Yü, “a historian of mentalities,” applies an overly rigid intellectual framework to the period and thus overstates the conceptual and functional coherence of an idealized Confucian persuasion.

In his own construction of Southern Song political culture Lamouroux detects both ruptures and continuities in the 1127 transition. The major rupture is the changed relationship between center and province. Four General Command Offices were created between 1141 and 1145 to impose imperial control over the four regional “house armies” (jiajun 家軍); Lamouroux sees them as new provincial administrative entities that overlayered and thus competed with the existing local agencies for tax levies to support the armies now stationed within the new jurisdictions. This realignment of military authority, increasing monetary and fiscal complexity, and the attendant corruption all rendered the provinces of Southern Song a far more complex and contentious place to live and to administer than they had been in Northern Song. What did not change was the civil literati's drive to continue the Confucian-based governance of Northern Song through which they asserted both dominance over other political actors and their own superior social status. But that drive collided with the power that the throne accorded to sole councilors like Qin Gui 秦檜 (1090–1155) and to other imperial agents and favorites. Such imperially backed actors did not suffer from the same malaise that James Liu detected in their literati, and in fact they played a vital role in the political culture. In this context, Lamouroux acknowledges aspects of the “localist turn” as developed in the “American school,” but he refines their explanations for the rise of this localism. In his view, the growing commitment of Confucian literati toward local governance—for example, Zhu Xi's efforts to establish local academies and maintain community granaries—reflects more than daoxue 道學 moral commitment. Localism was also a defensive political and economic response to the harsh realities of the altered relationship between center and locale.

The book's concluding section reprises another central theme. Throughout the volume, Lamouroux argues against simplistic ethnic, geographical, political, or cultural dividing lines between the Song dynasty and its steppe neighbors. He envisions a more nuanced relationship than the earlier formula of a “China Among Equals.”Footnote ²³ For him, virtually the entirety of Song civilization can be understood as a response to the steppe. Did the push for a new brand of Confucianism, rooted in Han ethnicity, reflect the Song literati's need for a self-identity distinct from the steppe of the present and the past? How much of this Confucian push—and its often-confrontational stance toward the monarchy—arose from their perception that the Song monarchy had already absorbed too many “contributions from the steppe”?

In thinking about those steppe contributions, Lamouroux cites examples of military organization that the Song founders adopted from the Turkic dynasties of the ninth century. Referencing Nicola Di Cosmo, he notes that the Altaic societies of the steppe perceived the leader's political power as the result of victorious warfare (often over the leadership itself), the charisma of which could then be transferred to sacred sites that made it ritually accessible to his successor. Lamouroux wonders if the culture of the Great Peace and the feng and shan sacrifices after the Chanyuan treaty with the Liao in 1005 were not either instigated or performed with this steppe context in mind. Although Lamouroux does not cite the passage, the Yuan historians who compiled the Song History in fact specifically linked the decision to perform the feng and shan sacrifices and Liao ritual practice.Footnote ²⁴ Finally, although Lamouroux does not make this comparison, I have often wondered whether the ortaq—as fully developed under the Mongols, an institution whereby the political leader coordinated the financial resources of family and supporters and deputed preferred merchants to conduct trade on behalf of the consortium—may not have had prototypes in the Turkic regimes of the ninth century and so influenced the Song founders and, through them, the dynasty's co-mingling of state and merchant interests that La dynastie des Song so exquisitely details.Footnote ²⁵

The length and scope of La dynastie des Song and its inclusion in the Histoire générale de la Chine invite comparison to the two Song volumes of the Cambridge History of China, the first volume of chronological narrative published in 2009 and the second volume of topical essays in 2015. The major difference, of course, is that the Cambridge History volumes are multi-authored; and despite the herculean efforts of their editors to ease the reader's way forward, a diversity of style, methodology, and viewpoint persists in both volumes. In addition, because six years separated their publication, cross-references from the narrative to the topical volume were not possible; and unfortunately, very few references from the latter topical to the former narrative volume were included. Finally, many chapters, especially in the narrative volume, were first drafted in 1970s and 1980s and are now seriously dated. Professional scholars of Song understand these problems, and for them, the volumes have become useful and standard points of reference. However, for lay readers, the Cambridge volumes open vast tracts of information but offer no compass. On the other hand, shorter, single volume treatments, such as Dieter Kuhn's volume in the History of Imperial China series, published by Harvard University Press, and Linda Walton's forthcoming volume in the Cambridge series New Approaches to Asian History are designed as textbooks for the American college market, and they fill that niche admirably.Footnote ²⁶

As should be apparent from this review, La dynastie des Song occupies an ideal middle ground between the two. It provides both the amplitude of the Cambridge History and the single-author focus of the shorter works. In addition, the depth of Lamouroux's scholarship enables him to formulate a truly global perspective on Song history, imbued with a keen sense of how the social sciences can contribute to that history. In the end, free of any ideological distortion, he remains a historian of realities who has written the most up-to-date, judicious, and stimulating history of the Song. The book will be especially attractive for students of other periods in Chinese history who desire an entrée into one of its most complex and transformative periods. Translations into English and Chinese are imperative. I suspect that the book, in Chinese, will be a revelation to our colleagues and to lay readers in China. They will see both how their scholarship has transformed the “global workshop” of Song studies and how Lamouroux has created in that workshop a distinctive, truly global narrative of their own history.