Toward Spatial Humanities: Historical GIS and Spatial History

5. The Politics of Territory in Song Dynasty China, 960–1276 CE

118 The Politics of Territory in Song Dynasty China, 960–1276 CE Elijah Meeks and Ruth Mostern five State power is inherently and fundamentally geo­ graphical. The existence of states is marked by whether or not they hold sway over some territory on the earth’s surface, and their persistence depends upon how the machinery of dominion is spatially distributed throughout their territory. However, territorial logic varies from one re­ gimetoanother,anditmaybesignificantlytransformedovertimeunder the pressure of politics and policies, events and ideologies. Therefore, by mappingandreadingaregime’sevolvingspatialorganization,historians can gain insights about the spatial distribution of political authority and changes in sovereign dominion. The advent of historical GIS makes it possible to manage all of the data about a historical empire in a coherent system and to track its transformations through time and space. HGIS and temporally and spatially referenced gazetteers enable his­ torians to study the spatial history of state power empirically.1 Analysis of historical gazetteer data reveals shifting geographies of cores and pe­ ripheries, divergent regional patterns of state investment, spatial im­ pacts of catastrophes and policies, and other phenomena that have been long theorized but difficult to demonstrate. This essay introduces the Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty (DGSD, http://songgis.ucmerced library.info), an innovative and fully implemented digital gazetteer for frequently changing places. Now that theDGSD and many other historical gazetteer systems are completed and functional, it is possible to move beyond discussions of methodology and to demonstrate that HGIS reveals new insights about spatial political history. This essay introduces two cases concerning the The Politics of Territory in Song Dynasty China 119 evolving political landscape of China’s Song dynasty (960–1276 ce), research findings based upon the DGSD. Historians have long typified the Song dynasty as an era of high state ambition and demographic and commercial revolution paradoxically coexisting with military weakness and conflict. The combination of factors makes for a fluid and complex spatial history that HGIS analysis helps to reveal and explain. The first case demonstrates that several Song phenomena–the em­ powerment of a civil bureaucracy that also controlled the military, the expansion of population and state power in south China, the quest for commercial revenues, and the defense of the northern frontier–trans­ formed Song spatial organization. Spatial analysis reveals that Song rul­ ers split and merged existing tax­ and personnel­bearing jurisdictions– counties and prefectures–throughout the empire in order to adjust the density of the state presence. Collectively and over the course of almost two centuries, the court recalibrated military power along international borders and aligned administration with economic and demographic reality in old and new imperial cores as well as the settlement periphery. During the Song, almost 20 percent of the jurisdictions that constituted the realm were founded, abolished, or moved from one parent unit to another. However, while the population of the empire tripled, the total number of jurisdictions remained almost constant.2 The second case integrates administrative unit gazetteer data from the DGSD with environmental information on the changing course of theYellowRiver.Itexplainsthatbothsuddencatastropheandlong­term environmental degradation shaped the political landscape, not only the natural and agrarian ones. In distinction with the first case, this regional study reveals that even within a single province, environmental factors and settlement distribution created distinctive regional patterns in the organization of political space. For a century, the historiography of the Song era has had a vaguely spatial cast. Scholars have charted a momentous turn toward imperial centralization and diminishing local and provincial political power.3 However, the conversation has, ironically, unfolded without much refer­ ence to actual imperial geography. In fact, asHGIS analysis reveals, even though court jurisdiction did expand, policies were transacted in and through hundreds of fiscally autonomous and militarily independent 120 Elijah Meeks and Ruth Mostern prefectures and over a thousand counties, which were repeatedly split andmergedascircumstancesdictated.Developingahistoricalgazetteer andperforminghistoricalspatialanalysisisthewaytomodelandvisual­ ize the geography and temporality of sovereignty. Digital Gazetteer Development and the Digital Gazetteer as a Source for History AnempiricalapproachtothespatialhistoryofSongstatepowerrequires a way to manage information about thousands of individual place­mak­ ing events that occurred over hundreds of years. In order to accomplish that, we organized the DGSD around named places and their attributes. The DGSD records information about all of the provincial circuits, pre­ fectures, counties, and towns that existed at any time during the Song dynasty and all of the occasions when they were promoted, demoted, split, merged, or renamed or when they changed...