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Mark Edward Lewis has produced an impressive volume on the history of the Tang dynasty as part of Harvard University Press's History of Imperial China series. Its greatest contribution is its integration of the latest secondary scholarship into interesting arguments about the evolution of Chinese society between the seventh and tenth centuries. Lewis concentrates on the forces at work within China, and in this sense, he differs from another recent one-volume exploration of Tang history, S. A. M. Adshead's Tang China: The Rise of the East in World History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Whereas Adshead views Tang history as part of a larger world history, Lewis concentrates on two internal developments: how the Tang imperium consolidated innovations from the period of division and how Chinese society evolved during the three Tang centuries.
China's Cosmopolitan Empire eschews a chronological approach, adopting instead a topical organization. The political narrative constitutes two chapters (chapters 2 and 3), occupying just 55 of the main text's 278 pages. The remaining seven chapters are devoted to geography, urban life, rural life, foreign affairs, kinship, religion, and writing, respectively. This choice facilitates Lewis's excursion through recent secondary literature from the...