Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800–1600

For at least the last thirty years rumors have been circulating that edited volumes are on the way out, that presses are no longer interested in publishing collections of conference papers, and that, if they are to appear together, workshopped articles are best published in journals. Happily, these reports appear to be not entirely true, and on occasion we have the opportunity of adding to our libraries that rara avis: the tightly edited, well-written, and intellectual coherent conference volume. Such a one is the present collection.This volume is the result of a multiyear project led by Leiden University and King's College London and reveals careful thought on the problem of comparative history—in this case, of political communication (defined both as the circulation of information within political institutions and the exchange of knowledge between state and nonstate actors) in medieval and early modern Europe and China. Whereas participants began by assuming fundamental variance between European and Chinese patterns, they soon discovered as many similarities as differences and opted instead for a “more open-ended investigation” (13), recognizing the analytical value of organically locating points of commonality while avoiding the heuristic costs inherent in subscribing to an overarching theoretical formulation in which either “divergence” or “convergence” is forced. The editors’ willingness to not push things too far and establish a middle ground in meso-level comparison centered on structures and processes is to be applauded.Readers without the time to make their way through all six hundred pages but looking for a way to reap the benefits of the fine scholarship presented here are advised to focus on the excellent lead essay by Hilde De Weerdt and John Watts, which starts out part 1, “Communication and the Formation of Polities.” The authors lay out the rationale and method for a comparative history of Europe and China, at the same time providing a useful survey of main themes in recent studies of Chinese and European political history during the medieval period. One of their important conclusions is that similar challenges to the state precipitated similar responses in political communications strategies, in the sense that, though specific adaptations varied, structurally they provided significant opportunities to those in positions mediating authority, leading over time to greater levels of centralization (66), with Chinese literati on the whole finding greater space for autonomy than their European counterparts (85) and with the language of communication taking more varied form in Europe (81).This theme is developed in the following three chapters, which outline fiscal centralization in the Southern Song (Christian Lamouroux), script reform in ninth-century Byzantium (Filippo Ronconi), and political sociolinguistics in late medieval France and England (Jean-Philippe Genet). The first is tied more closely to the arguments of communication as a tool of political centralization, and the second two are tied more to arguments around cultural centralization, with the “cultural revolution” (195) generated by the rise of the vernacular contributing to the weaking of central authority (e.g., of the Catholic Church), a development lacking a parallel in the Chinese case.There is not the space here to describe each of the remaining nine chapters of the book, divided evenly into three sections: “Letters and Political Languages” (focused on epistolary networks), “Communication and Political Authority” (on state use of communication technologies), and “Memory and Political Imaginaries” (on discursive constructions of the state). Every contribution is solid and enlightening, some dwelling more in the particular and others venturing further into comparative territory. Most successful from the latter point of view are those coauthored essays—for example, by Beverly Bossler and Benoit Grévin on letter writing or Chu Ming Kin and Franz-Julius Morche on printer-intellectuals—in which experts from both sides engage each other in truly thoughtful debate over similarities and differences. Just to take the former as an example: the authors find on both sides a similar explosion of epistolary sources and a style of letter writing that becomes gradually less ornate, but they conclude that because of social context and stylistic requirements, European and Chinese letter writing did not fulfill the same political functions (279). Perhaps most exciting is the late Mark Whitrow's chapter on the Byzantine “imagined community,” in which he draws what to this reader were original and fascinating comparisons between Byzantium and Song China (317–20); one imagines this would fit well alongside Joseph Fletcher's famous 1985 essay “Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500–1800.”1As a contribution to “the global turn in medieval history” (24), the two essays in the final section also count as important contributions. Though they are called “epilogues,” they really serve as conclusions to the volume as a whole. The authors (Wim Blockmans of Leiden and Robert Hymes of Columbia) deserve praise for grappling with a diverse range of topics and furnishing ways for the reader to tie themes and problems together. Blockmans emphasizes the transformative power of printing as the primary basis for comparing tenth-to-twelfth-century China and fourteenth-to-fifteenth-century Europe, siding with the “divergentists” and pointing to the prevalence of court-centered outcomes in China versus European polycentrism (593). Many readers may find it profitable not to wait but to read Hymes's final essay immediately after the introduction. In fifteen short pages, he sets out with admirable clarity the challenges faced by the editors and authors as well as their successes and shortcomings in meeting them, and he explains why the volume represents “a new kind of promise in comparative history” (600)—a claim that seems indeed well justified. One hopes this impressive book will inspire just that kind of new work

Political science · Politics · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity