This is a valuable and innovative contribution to the relatively new subfield of Rome-China comparative studies. The author, Randolph B. Ford—a graduate of the interdisciplinary Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University—has acquired a strong command of Greek, Latin, and Classical Chinese and a deep understanding of the histories of both late antiquity and early medieval China. His book draws on and engages with modern scholarship in an even wider range of languages, including English, French, German, Italian, and Chinese, although the bibliography for China is limited to English and Chinese works. Mistakes in the reading of Chinese sources are few and relatively minor, but one is worth pointing out here, as it is central to Ford's reading of the relevant passage. On page 200, youshu choulei 有殊醜類 should be understood as “he was different from the wicked races,” rather than “he was of an especially wicked race.” The passage thus does not, in fact, ascribe a “barbarian” race to Feng Ba despite his Chinese ancestry.

Ford's main arguments are based on a comparison of the depictions of “barbarians” (i.e., ethnocultural others) in two texts: the Wars by Procopius of Caesarea (ca. 500–565), written as a narrative of Justinian's (r. 527–65) wars with the Persians, Vandals, and Goths, and the Jin shu, compiled by a large committee of Tang court officials in 646–48 as a history of the Jin dynasty (266–420) and its relations with the Sixteen Kingdoms (304–439). Procopius was a witness to and participant in many of the events in his account, whereas the Jin shu editorial team was dependent on sources written at least a century earlier (all, regrettably, lost to us). Despite this difference, Ford argues, the two texts have in common a conservative, classicizing adherence to the ethnographic conventions of their respective cultures.

To make the book accessible to both classicists and Sinologists, Ford devotes the first two chapters to surveying and comparing the Greco-Roman and Chinese ethnographic traditions, starting from Homer and Herodotus in the former case and the Shijing (Book of odes) and Sima Qian's Shiji in the latter. Toward the end of chapter 2, we see strong hints of the thesis that will be central to the rest of the book. From the Greeks, Ford concludes, the Romans inherited “a worldview where the foreign, and even the inimical, could be perceived and represented with admiration and empathy” (p. 128) and occasionally used to criticize one's own society. For the Han Chinese, on the other hand, Sima Qian's “sympathetic and relativistic approach” (p. 120) was a path not taken, as his “historiographical successor” Ban Gu established a tradition of essentializing barbarians as immutably inferior beings, age-old threats to civilization who had to be kept in a permanent state of subservience beyond the frontier. As a result, the Chinese empire shifted to more ethnocentric and xenophobic attitudes, while the Roman Empire “seems to have been characterized by an increasing cosmopolitanism and reduction of meaningful ethnic distinctions” (p. 123).

Chapters 3–5 use passages from the Wars and the Jin shu to argue that these basic orientations in Roman and Chinese ethnography remained unchanged through the sixth and early seventh centuries. While recognizing the wide range of scholarly interpretations of Procopius as an ethnographer, Ford takes the position that Procopius displays little ethnic hostility when writing about the Gothic and Vandal kingdoms and never stereotypes or denigrates their rulers as barbaric. When it comes to the Jin shu, on the other hand, he notes the “persistence of xenophobic ethnographic rhetoric” (p. 136) and finds it contrary to the thrust of much modern historical writing on the early Tang, which stresses its “cosmopolitan” inclusiveness. Ford acknowledges that the Jin shu chronicles (zaiji) for barbarian rulers of the Sixteen Kingdoms portray some rulers favorably as magnanimous and talented men. But he suggests that these depictions are holdovers from sources produced under the barbarian kingdoms themselves. The lun “colophons” to the chronicles, which he regards as the clearest evidence of the Tang court historians’ own views, consistently use denigrating and dehumanizing language and emphasize that any barbarian ruler is morally and politically illegitimate on account of his non-Chinese ancestry alone: “it is clear [from the colophons] that the greatest crime a barbarian could commit was to adopt the ways of the Chinese while attempting to rule legitimately over both barbarians and Chinese subjects” (p. 253).

In the conclusion, Ford lays out a provocative theory linking “the strength of inherited ethnographic paradigms and ethno-political categories” (p. 330) to the differing fates of the Roman and Chinese empires. In a nutshell, “barbarian” identities survived and spread in post-Roman Western Europe, eclipsing the Roman identity and permanently preventing reunification with the eastern empire, because Romans did not see political legitimacy as dependent on ethnic origin. In contrast, the Särbi-Xianbei elites of North China had to gain political legitimacy by assimilating to a Chinese identity, demonstrated in part by falsifying a Chinese ancestry and denigrating foreign enemies as barbarians; as a result, it was the Särbi-Xianbei identity that disappeared under the reunified Chinese empire.Footnote ¹ Ford does note that Buddhism served as an alternative source of legitimacy for barbarian rulers in North China, as it also would for the Sui and Tang. Nonetheless, he explains that “this study has not sought to examine the introduction and impact of new modes of thought as a means of improving our understanding of continuity and change. . . . [but rather] to look for an explanation more deeply rooted in the respective civilizational worldviews and hierarchies” (pp. 325–26). This methodological choice may strike some readers as problematic, as it is likely to skew a historian's reading of the evidence in favor of continuity.

Ford writes with admirable clarity and exhibits a welcome skepticism toward the modern over-idealization of Tang “cosmopolitanism” and the blatant presentism of much Chinese scholarship on historical ethnic relations. However, his characterization of early Tang political rhetoric as xenophobic and ethnicity-obsessed is likely to raise more questions than answers. After all, the integration of Turkic and Sogdian families into the early Tang military elite is well known from both traditional sources and excavated epitaphs, and they do not seem to have been under pressure to assimilate by concealing their origins.Footnote ² What explains the wide gap between rhetoric and reality?

From a Sinological perspective, the only significant weakness of Ford's analysis is that it does not do enough to situate early Tang historiography in the context of early Tang history—that is, the state of Tang politics and foreign relations during the writing of the Jin shu. For that context, Ford could have benefited from engaging more deeply with the work of Jonathan Skaff and this reviewer. He does cite both (e.g., pp. 18–19, 137) as recognizing the persistence of xenophobic rhetoric in the Tang, but he does not take into account our differing explanations as to why it persisted. Skaff argued that the “literati Confucians” who produced ethnocentric rhetoric like that of the Jin shu were an unrepresentative conservative minority whose monopoly on record-keeping has served to suppress the more pragmatic and less ethnocentric views of the men who actually made frontier policy.Footnote ³ I have argued that classical and Han-era tropes about barbarian inferiority were used expediently by a variety of early Tang political actors (all of whom could be seen as pragmatic) to achieve their rhetorical ends, and should not be assumed to reflect actual attitudes toward ethnic difference on a level of policy.Footnote ⁴

Claiming fidelity to tradition or precedent is a standard conservative move that does not preclude the operation of self-interest or the reinvention of tradition. Therefore, future research could look into reconstructing the polemical and political agendas of the Jin shu chronicles and colophons. This subject has received little attention since 1968, when Michael Rogers controversially claimed that the Jin shu editors fabricated history, inventing a major defeat for a fourth-century barbarian ruler to dissuade Emperor Taizong (r. 626–49) from launching a massive invasion of Goguryeo.Footnote ⁵ It is high time that historians revisited the issue, and anyone venturing to do so should now use Ford's fascinating and groundbreaking book as a starting point.