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The tradition of writing histories of dynasties goes back two millennia in China. The most elaborate example of this genre in the West is the Cambridge History of China series, which has both political narrative and topical volumes. That enterprise has depended on a host of scholars to each contribute a chapter, a sign of the expansion of the field that specialization has entailed. The History of Imperial China series, edited by Timothy Brook, challenges that trend. Dieter Kuhn has presented his view of the Song dynasty (960-1279) in the broader context of the decline of the Tang (618-907) and rise of the Khitan and Jurchen states north of the border. It is not an easy task, for the primary sources available for the Song are beyond the capability of most to command and at this point reading the secondary scholarship in Chinese and Japanese would take several lifetimes. Kuhn's solution is to offer four chapters of political narrative, from the Tang to the Mongol conquest, and eight topical chapters, on philosophy and religion, education and office holding, marriage and death, literature and art and some technology, the capital as urban environment, agricultural economy and mining, the fiscal system, and lifestyle. This well-written book is more informative than analytic, more a textbook than an argument.
The dynasty is one framework for the analysis of China's history. Dynastic governments institutionalized the extraction of resources from society, projected power, and distributed patronage far more effectively than any other group. Buddhist institutions taken as a whole came close, but they did not constitute a centralized system. However, many historical developments were neither coterminous with dynasties nor controlled by them. Kuhn's work shows that...