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The Cambridge History of China Volume 5. Sung China, 960-1279 AD Part 2 . Edited by John W. Chaffee and Denis Twitchett . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2015. 957pp. ISBN: 9780521243308 . $190.00, £99.99 (cloth), $152, £94.08 (ebook).
Ever since the first volume in the series was published in 1979, The Cambridge History of China has become a standard reference in the field of Chinese history. Chapters from the volumes published in the 1980s and 1990s are standard reading in upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminars and the hefty yellow volumes figure prominently in the reference sections of East Asian Studies libraries. The gestation period of the series has been long, however, so long that new authors and editors have had to step in to take over the unfinished work of an earlier generation. The long gestation period also underlies the oft-repeated criticism that many of the chapters are outdated by the time they appear in print and thus only poorly fulfil their role as an authoritative reference.
Volume 5 as well has been long in the making. According to John Chaffee's preface the first plans took shape in "the first half of the 1970s" (xv), but the first part only appeared in 2009. The latter was the first comprehensive political narrative of the Song Dynasty and its tenth-century precursors in English and it has generally received a warm welcome among Song historians and those working on other periods. Following the standard format for the series, this second Song volume, hereafter Part 2, is a topical history covering social, economic, trade, intellectual, legal, military and fiscal history as well as an overview of Song governmental and educational institutions. In this review I will mainly focus on the question to what extent this volume succeeds as a summation of the current state of the field of Song history.
The authors of each of the chapters are well-established senior historians who have published extensively on the topics assigned to them. This strategy of working with senior historians has had a dual effect. Some have taken this an opportunity to write a capstone piece, offering both a broad and up-to-date overview of their field and an...