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Mark Edward Lewis has emerged in the burgeoning field of early China studies as a master synthesizer who is particularly adept at formulating broadly interdisciplinary yet tightly integrated approaches to an impressive range of complex historical problems. The Construction of Space in Early China is easily his best work to date, both in the insights and arguments it presents and in the sophistication of its conceptualization and organization. At its core is the notion that during the classical period in China, ideas about the configuration of space and mankind's position in that configuration were of central importance to writers, thinkers, and other elite actors of all sorts. Although today there is a growing body of theoretical and comparative work on the importance of spatial configuration in a variety of fields, Lewis's work is most intriguing because his theoretical concern is intrinsic to the sources he uses and the period he explores rather than imposed on them from without. Exploring early China through the lens of spatial configuration is analytically productive, precisely because it opens up a mode of inquiry that was itself enormously productive in Chinese history.
This becomes most abundantly apparent when Lewis examines Chinese conceptions...