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Military Culture in Imperial China. Edited by nicola di cosmo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. 456 pp. $45.00 (cloth).
Like many edited volumes, this book has its origins in an academic conference. In 2001 a group of scholars specializing in Chinese mili- tary history convened at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and offered their views on the topic "Military Culture in Chinese History." The conference produced papers dealing with many aspects of Chinese military culture, fourteen of which appear as chapters in this book. In his introduction, Nicola Di Cosmo provides a multifaceted definition of "military culture," which can include the system of conduct and behavior that regulated the actions of members of the military, the cultural forces that shaped strategic decision making of both civil and military elites, the values and traditions that determined a society's willingness to engage in war, and the presence of a literary or aesthetic tradition that deals with military events and personalities. In short, the essays, which range chronologically from the Zhou to the Qing, explore the manner in which the wu (military) has influenced the wen (civil) in Chinese history, and vice versa.
The efforts of the editor and the contributors are successful for multiple reasons. First, several of the chapters shed important light on the...