Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China by Hilde De Weerdt (review)

Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China is the second monograph by Hilde De Weerdt, one of the most active and prolific scholars in the field of middle period Chinese history. At the highest level of abstraction, the book asks and answers how empire was sustained and how social elites related themselves to the imperial mission in middle and later period Chinese history. It is a welcome and important addition to the growing number of literature that has been revising our conventional picture of the Southern Song dynasty as a period of state retrenchment and social elite's separation from state.¹

What distinguishes this book from other revisionist works of social history is that the author unpacks a whole new subject of the information order of empire, making use of a variety of materials that have received little attention in Western scholarship on Chinese history, thus adding significant new weight to the revisionist argument that has been gaining currency. As is made clear in the "Introduction," the author works at the interface of institutional, legal, and cultural history, weaving together seemingly disparate threads to produce an impressive tapestry that reveals a compelling picture. In so doing, the author deploys conventional methods of extensive survey and close reading of texts as well as tools provided by digital humanities.

The author argues that the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, the period after the geopolitical crisis known as the Jingkang crisis in which the Song dynasty lost its territory north of the Huai River to the Jurchen Jin, was a key to understanding the remarkable continuity and unity of the Chinese empire in the second millennium. As is well known in the field, this period, known as the Southern Song dynasty, has been viewed as a period of the retreat of state power from local society and the localization of social elites who ceased to identify themselves with the imperial center and concerned themselves with their local and regional community. Historians do often encounter facts that defy this influential paradigm of localist turn. Take the exponentially growing number of people who participated in the civil service examinations, a quintessential imperial institution, for example. This fact was interpreted, however, not as a sign of the literati's commitment to state institution and imperial authority but as betraying that the examinations were functioning largely as a status marker for those who chose to participate in them.² But questions still linger. If elites indeed turned away from government service and bureaucratic concerns and focused more on things local, what accounts for the appearance of various books on administration and governance in this same period?

The author finds in a wide range of sources, such as literati's private literary collections, their comments on court-issued documents, maps, gazetteers, and "miscellaneous" notebooks from the Southern Song that elites were seriously concerned with state affairs and court politics. Moreover, the number of people who actively sought access to and commented on bureaucratic documents was also growing far beyond the closed circle of the imperial bureaucracy. As the elite expanded, the ways in which information was exchanged between court and local elite (to use the author's word, provincial elite) also changed. As De Weerdt argues, the growing number of literati elite, and increasingly the lower-ranking officials and non-office holders, appropriated the (re)production and circulation of various texts in bureaucratic genres, thus challenging the authority of the court. Nevertheless, in this process of appropriation, the author proposes that we see not so much a transition of gravity from the court and bureaucracy to the literati elite as a broadening of stakeholders who shared imperial mission. This broadening involves "the bureaucratization of those who were not considered part of the bureaucracy" (p. 71). It did not undermine the unity of the...