Readers of this Journal may be surprised to find here a review of a monograph on a Chinese historical genre that became widely published by the sixteenth century. China historians working in English know them as “gazetteers,” borrowing an English term coined at the end of the seventeenth century to designate descriptive national surveys of cities and towns (though the term also came to mean “newspapers” in the eighteenth century). The genres differ across these two cultures, most significantly in that Chinese gazetteers were produced, or at least overseen, by centrally appointed officials at the county level, rarely by private scholars. Historians have made much use of gazetteers since the turn to social history in the 1970s, and again with the turn to local history in the 1980s, so a study in English of the genre has been long overdue. The author consulted some 500 editions from the Ming period and earlier (roughly half of those that are extant, though this figure only a third of known editions), on which basis he presents some significant findings, notably the discovery of a close overlap between gazetteers and genealogies.

If it is surprising to find it reviewed here, it is because these local publications, which came out in print runs in the low hundreds, are famously weak on reliable economic data. They do include summary county budgets, salaries of local officers, tax revenues, and population data, though these numbers notoriously are reported more often as they were supposed to be rather than as they were. Gazetteers rarely include information about rent or trade, and prices appear only when famine drives them to shocking levels. But two sections of the book deserves the attention of comparative economic historians. The first is the second half of Chapter 4 (“Publishing Gazetteers”) on what the author terms the “business zones” of printing craftsmen. He describes a business zone as “the geographical area from which a block cutter either received manuscripts or traveled to jobs.” Earlier work on non-agricultural labor has focused on major manufacturing centers where labor concentrated; around 1600 commercial printing was concentrated in some half-dozen centers. Unlike commercial publishing, gazetteer production was dispersed among, potentially, a thousand county seats. Though not a high skill (it did not require literacy), block carving was a specialty nonetheless, and magistrate-publishers understood the economy of contracting the task to specialists rather than paying unskilled carvers for shoddy work. As engravers often signed their blocks to facilitate accounting, the author is able to trace elements of five labor networks. A slight majority of carvers who traveled to work journeyed up to 50 km., though it was not uncommon for publishers to contract with carvers (often by letter, in an era before regular postal services were available) up to 200 km. away and even further. The other arrangement was for carvers to contract the work at home and ship the finished blocks to where they were needed, which may have been preferred for the production of gazetteers for counties at greater distance from production centers. More work needs to be done, but what emerges here is a strong sense of an active commercial labor market at a middle skill level: not an integrated market perhaps, but one in which overlapping networks communicated skill and demand over large distances.

The other chapter of interest to economic historians is Chapter 5 (“Financing Gazetteers”). Differences in funding sources make comparison with European publishing awkward. Being quasi-official publications, gazetteers were often produced using funds the local magistrate made available, since there was no commercial market for these books (although a secondary market emerged later, as collectors sought to acquire old editions). This is not the first study to estimate costs of materials and labor for publishing, but it brings to that literature two strengths. Firstly, it samples a genre produced across the realm, and therefore across markets where potentially prices varied; the author's data indicate that costs tended to run higher away from the major publishing centers. Secondly, it exposes transactions within the non-commercial sector of the Ming economy. Our understanding has heretofore been weighted toward the commercial sector, which led the economy but did not dominate it. Individuals published, families published, and state institutions published. These publishers had to work within the constraints of the commercial market, yet could avail themselves of funding opportunities—by soliciting officials as well as local status elites seeking to promote personal reputations and family interests—in ways that altered prices up and down and shaped decisions about which projects to pursue and which to abandon, thereby complicating what we choose to call the “economy.” The author does not explore these analytical possibilities, but others should.