The Cambridge History of China, Volume 5, Part Two: Sung China, 960–1279 ed. by John W. Chaffee and Denis Twitchett (review)

In 1966, John King Fairbank and Denis Twitchett agreed to become the general editors of a Cambridge History of China. They planned "to provide a substantial account of the history of China as a bench mark for the Western history-reading public: an account of the current state of knowledge in six volumes."¹ By extending the prestigious Cambridge History series to China they intended to demonstrate that "Chinese history belongs to the world, not only as a right and necessity, but also as a subject of compelling interest."² Their design for a concise series, however, was soon overwhelmed by "the out-pouring of current research, the application of new methods, and the extension of scholarship into new fields," forcing them to adjust the projected number of volumes to fourteen in 1976, and to sixteen or eighteen by 1982.³ In his memoir, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir, Fairbank describes the dilemma raised by the rapid growth of the number and the size of the emerging volumes: "the more massive our history becomes, the fewer its readers may be."⁴ The general public could still read the individual articles "for the story they tell," but the series would also aid professional historians by offering an increased apparatus of notes and bibliographies.⁵

In his preface to the second, final part of the Cambridge History of the Song dynasty, editor John Chaffee writes that its earliest essays date to the 1970s.⁶ Three of those original essays (by Edward Kracke, James T. C. Liu, and Ira Kasoff) could not be included in the eventual volume because their authors had passed away or had left the field before they could revise their contributions for publication. Two of the early essays, however, were repeatedly revised and have been retained: a chapter about fiscal administration by Peter Golas and a chapter about law and the legal system by Brian McKnight. After Chaffee joined Denis Twitchett as coeditor in 2000, they commissioned an essay by Charles Hartman about Song government and politics, to replace the contributions by Edward Kracke and James Liu, and asked Peter Bol to expand his paper on Northern Song intellectual culture to include "the Neo-Confucian masters of that period" (p. xvi). Of the additional chapters they solicited—on Song literature, relations with contiguous polities, maritime trade, Daoism, and Buddhism—they received only Angela Schottenhammer's chapter on maritime trade. The remaining contributions appear to have been conceived in the 1980s and completed at different times in the 1990s and 2000s: Wang Tseng-yü's 王曾瑜 history of the Song military, John Chaffee's own study of Song education, Hoyt Tillman's account of Southern Song Daoxue, and two chapters that Chaffee singles out as having achieved "an unanticipated breadth and scope" (p. xvi)—Robert Hymes's monograph on Song society and social change, and a joint essay by Joseph McDermott and Shiba Yoshinobu 斯波義信 about economic change. Considered in the approximate sequence of their completion, the chapters of this volume follow the arc traced by Fairbank, from concise accounts that "give nonspecialists a readable historical account of a large subject" to longer, more detailed treatises that provide an introduction to their subject matter as well as an extensive review of primary and secondary sources.⁷

The chapters by Peter Golas ("The Sung Fiscal Administration," pp. 139–213) and Brian McKnight ("Chinese Law and Legal System: Five Dynasties and Sung," pp. 250–85) offer concise introductions to Song institutions, based on primary sources and on a selective body of authoritative scholarship, mostly from the 1930s through the 1980s. Golas explains the structure of the Song fiscal administration and describes changes in institutions, taxation, labor service, monopolies, disbursement, and the monetary system. He argues that the growth...