The second millennium of China's imperial history (roughly the tenth to early twentieth centuries) shows an impressive record of success in maintaining a unified empire over a vast territory of great regional diversity. The mystery behind this success has fascinated more than a generation of scholars. Hilde De Weerdt's book Information, Territory, and Networks is one of the most ambitious studies that grapples with this question in recent years. She argues that the continuity of empire was sustained by a literati elite who, despite their residence and marriage ties in the provinces, fashioned identities that tied them closely to the empire in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and that these identities were constructed within concrete social relationships and through the articulation of shared concerns and norms for an empire-wide imagined community. This extremely rich and thoughtful volume, therefore, studies the “cultural history of literati identities in the process of formation” (p. 22), and its argument is firmly grounded in meticulous research of the changing structures of vertical and horizontal exchanges of information in the Song dynasty. It draws on a wide range of primary sources (including court compilations, commercial editions of encyclopedias and examination manuals, poems, atlases, and private book collectors’ catalogs) and combines close reading of texts with the analytical power of different digital tools (from prosopographical databases and GIS mapping to text markups and corpus linguistics). Along the way, De Weerdt also offers insightful explorations into a variety of topics that range from strategic thinking to historical reasoning and to the conceptualization of ethnic and political boundaries. She also makes frequent—and very helpful—pauses to discuss her findings in relation to dominant paradigms in Chinese studies (e.g., G. William Skinner's model of spatial analysis, p. 367) and in the context of relevant scholarship on Japan and Europe. The depth and range of these discussions make this volume not only a must-read for China historians but also a source of inspiration for others who have an interest in digital scholarship and comparative research.
In the first five chapters, De Weerdt reveals a “structural transformation” in the Song dynasty's information regime. Her study yields fascinating details about the publication and circulation of all manners of materials related to the reigning dynasty's geography, history, and current affairs, including archival compilations, newssheets, empire maps, and texts about defense and border affairs. While the production and consumption of these materials was nearly monopolized by the court early on, from the late eleventh century onward they became widely accessible, legally or illegally, to literati in and outside of officialdom. Through the producing, sharing, and disseminating of these materials, the literati “created and sustained horizontal network ties that linked them to one another as well as to the court” (p. 102). If the viability of a unified empire depended on its ability to inscribe itself as an “imaginary realm” on the minds of its elite, the regular supply of authorized and unauthorized court archives, newssheets, and administrative maps in Song times made the empire ever more “legible” (p. 102) and continually reinforced the imagery of it with an intensity and tangibility that far exceeded what the classical canon and court-commissioned compendia had provided. Herein lies De Weerdt's apt answer to the paradox of why the court tacitly acknowledged the circulation of these materials, despite its statutory illegality: “publicity,” she says, became an “increasingly significant aspect of state control in Song times” (p. 433).
In the final three chapters, De Weerdt turns away from vertical toward horizontal structures of communication, focusing on notebooks (biji 筆記) as both a form of literati networking and a medium for articulating their identities. The evolution of notebooks as a genre provides additional evidence to the structural change in the Song dynasty's information order. Originally statesmen's records of court affairs, biji were appropriated and adapted for the literati's self-representation. Appearing in print in large numbers from the twelfth century onward, they featured a broad and free choice of subject matter, gave voice to an ever-broadening segment of the literati, and provided diversified templates for what defined a scholar. Nevertheless, court life and literati culture remained core areas of their concern and the two were “closely entwined” (p. 382) in the minds of twelfth- and thirteenth-century notebook authors.
De Weerdt expressly challenges “localism” as an adequate model for understanding Song China. Even though literati marriages became geographically more confined and they became more engaged in the affairs of their native locales, notebook authors did not construct identities based on their position in local communities. Rather, they cast themselves as members of a “class-based empire-wide imagined community” (p. 100) bound by concrete social relationships, common concerns, and shared behavioral norms. While the wide-ranging networks of information exchange “facilitated the localist turn” by allowing for the pursuit of political success without maintaining a presence or personal networks in the capital (p. 103), they also counterbalanced the elite's local attachments by positioning the court firmly at the center of literati networks and their identities (p. 17).
These findings, in my view, may not discredit earlier scholarship that has emphasized local identity discourses in Song times. As De Weerdt aptly points out, “differences between media carried important implications for the kinds of identities they could sustain” (p. 104). The types of sources she uses, I suspect, may have been particularly fitting venues for articulating supralocal concerns. The persistence of court-centered, class-based identities she finds in the Song literati does not preclude the formation of local identities at other venues. But it does complicate the picture and invite us to ask how a literatus may have negotiated his different identities and what identities became salient in what contexts.
De Weerdt aims to offer a more concrete explanation for “literati collaboration with the imperial court” beyond “broader generalizations about the dominant role of a classical or Confucian repertoire in norm integration” (p. 326). This volume has unquestionably succeeded on this score. Those who read carefully between the lines, however, will also find plenty of evidence on fissures and tensions—in addition to coherence and collaboration—within the ranks of the literati themselves and in their relationship with the imperial state. The literati's commitment to irredentism, for example, was at odds with their immediate interests (p. 17), and not all literati shared this commitment, or at least not with the same determination (p. 195). The elite's commitment to the normative Chinese empire did not automatically translate into an endorsement of the ruling dynasty, nor did their promotion of literati ideals. Loyalty became contingent on the dynasty's dedication to the recovery of the full extent of the Chinese territories (p. 18), and the legitimacy of the ruler was premised on his ability to live up to the literati's standards of cultured behavior (p. 384). We know not all emperors met these expectations—the treaty of 1141 and the coup of 1194 were examples. The consolidation of empire was as much a story of contention as it was one of collaboration.
