"Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern": The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960-1276 CE) by Ruth Mostern (review)

This book is a pioneering monograph on the administrative spatial history of Song China, featuring the innovative application of historical GIS to a dynastic narrative succinctly constructed and lucidly examined in the broader context of political space in imperial China. The author has produced a database titled The Digital Gazetteer of Song China—now open to the public and operable with GIS software—that constituted an important basis of many of her original arguments in the book. To my knowledge this is the first monographic product of GIS not only in Song history, but also in Chinese history at large.

Historical GIS has been more actively applied in the study of history for two to three decades for a number of countries—for instance, Great Britain, the United States, Western Europe, Japan, etc.—whose historical information is more adequately available for conversion into georeferenced data usable in GIS. Active engagement of GIS in Chinese history began much later, with the Harvard CHGIS project taking the lead a decade ago. Since then there have been many projects off the ground but Mostern's work is the first book-length output. More important, she has demonstrated well the potential of how GIS may advance our understanding of China's past beyond what we may otherwise not be able to observe. The book comes with a very useful appendix on The Digital Gazetteer of Song China (with Elijah Meeks), discussing the provenance and reliability of the data compiled into the Digital Gazetteer and the prospect of spatial analysis and GIS in historical studies of China. Although we now have a few standard references for historical GIS like those by Ian Gregory and Anne Knowles, this account of how to develop a specific GIS database on middle period Chinese history is still illuminating and encouraging to prospective students of GIS in Chinese history. In this direction, the next stage may be a more extensive application of the powerful computational functions of GIS for spatial analysis.

Mostern's spatial history is primarily one of state power. In a more conventional categorization it belongs to the sub-field of history of local administration 地方政治制度史 or, using Mostern's translation, "[Historical Geography of] Persistence and Transformation [of local government units and their jurisdictions]" 沿革地理. This sub-field used to be a prominent one in history departments of Chinese universities in the middle of the past century, but it is now no longer a popular subject. With the advent of historical GIS, it may revive. The field requires the meticulous treatment of detail in the geographical and other historical records to trace the ever-changing locations, names, and other attributes of local government units over time. The tracking exercise can be more challenging than tedious as there are often gaps of information and numerous contradictions among the sources. It thus takes a lot of creativity to solve one's problem in the process. Traditional Chinese scholarship often associated this field with the methodology of textual verification 史料考証. My first impression of Mostern's book is that it is one that appears to have taken on board this long tradition of scholarship, not only in the way she managed the construction of her narratives of all those administrative changes but also in the way she described how she produced the database of the Digital Gazetteer.

The main thrust of Mostern's book is to account for the historical evolution of those local government administrative units in imperial China, and particularly Song China in her case study, by pointing to the previously neglected factor of politics or state activism among the players involved in the process due to various interests and ideologies, which were primarily short-term by nature. This should constitute an explanatory dimension as least as important as the more conventional explanations that emphasized...