Final Report Summary - CHINESE EMPIRE (China and the Historical Sociology of Empire)
This project revisited a big question in world history: how can we explain the continuity of Chinese empires. Moving beyond the comparison of early world empires (China and Rome) to explain the different courses Chinese and European history have taken, we aimed to assess the importance of political communication in the maintenance of empire. Large empires only became dominant in Chinese history from about 1300. We focused on the period just prior to this and asked whether and how communication networks and identities formed during the last period of lasting multi-state rule played a role in later Chinese history. The core questions were thus twofold: 1) How can the continuity of empire in the Chinese case be best explained? 2) Does the nature and extent of political communication networks, measured through the frequency and multiplexity of information exchange ties, play a critical role in the reconstitution and maintenance of empire?
Our methodology was based on the conviction that an investigation of the nature and extent of political communication in imperial Chinese society should include a systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of the rich commentary on current affairs in notebooks and correspondence. In the first two years of the project we focused on developing tools and researching data. We created and made available MARKUS, an online platform for the markup and extraction of information embedded in large corpora of classical Chinese texts. By the end of the project MARKUS featured a broad range of functionality for the annotation, extraction and visualization of textual data, allowing researchers and ordinary readers to create maps, networks, tables, and timelines of their data. By August 2017 MARKUS had over 10,000 users globally.
We held one workshop on the sources on which our analysis of communication networks was based. The papers presented at this workshop have been published in two theme issues, one in English and one in Chinese, focusing on the significance of letters in political communication and the expression of networks and identities in the large number of notebooks published from the eleventh century onwards. Based on an analysis of the notebook data, the PI published a monograph, titled Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China, with Harvard University Asia Center in 2016 (copyright 2015). Her work emphasized the crossregional nature of communication networks established among cultural elites in the twelfth and thirteenth century in the south. Articles by the PDF in Chinese history on the north in the thirteenth century, by contrast, demonstrated the focus on a small number of metropolitan areas there, and underscored the differences between north and south not only in economic development but also in terms of cultural and political development. The differences in political cultures in north and south is an area deserving more long term research in Chinese history.
We held one workshop and a reading seminar on methods in comparative research, followed up by a final conference on the comparative history of political communication in 2015. The PI and the PDF in comparative history edited the papers presented at the conference into a manuscript entitled “Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600” (currently under review). In 14 chapters and 2 epilogues an international cast of authors examines how political communication at court and in the provinces shaped polities in the Chinese and European middle ages.
We also accomplished the final important goal of the project to make more key texts in Chinese political thought from this period accessible in translation. The PI and a student assistant compiled a translation of The Essentials of Government from the Zhenguan Reign with a group of seven international contributors—this work has been accepted in the Cambridge University Press series on Texts in The History of Political Thought.
Our methodology was based on the conviction that an investigation of the nature and extent of political communication in imperial Chinese society should include a systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of the rich commentary on current affairs in notebooks and correspondence. In the first two years of the project we focused on developing tools and researching data. We created and made available MARKUS, an online platform for the markup and extraction of information embedded in large corpora of classical Chinese texts. By the end of the project MARKUS featured a broad range of functionality for the annotation, extraction and visualization of textual data, allowing researchers and ordinary readers to create maps, networks, tables, and timelines of their data. By August 2017 MARKUS had over 10,000 users globally.
We held one workshop on the sources on which our analysis of communication networks was based. The papers presented at this workshop have been published in two theme issues, one in English and one in Chinese, focusing on the significance of letters in political communication and the expression of networks and identities in the large number of notebooks published from the eleventh century onwards. Based on an analysis of the notebook data, the PI published a monograph, titled Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China, with Harvard University Asia Center in 2016 (copyright 2015). Her work emphasized the crossregional nature of communication networks established among cultural elites in the twelfth and thirteenth century in the south. Articles by the PDF in Chinese history on the north in the thirteenth century, by contrast, demonstrated the focus on a small number of metropolitan areas there, and underscored the differences between north and south not only in economic development but also in terms of cultural and political development. The differences in political cultures in north and south is an area deserving more long term research in Chinese history.
We held one workshop and a reading seminar on methods in comparative research, followed up by a final conference on the comparative history of political communication in 2015. The PI and the PDF in comparative history edited the papers presented at the conference into a manuscript entitled “Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800-1600” (currently under review). In 14 chapters and 2 epilogues an international cast of authors examines how political communication at court and in the provinces shaped polities in the Chinese and European middle ages.
We also accomplished the final important goal of the project to make more key texts in Chinese political thought from this period accessible in translation. The PI and a student assistant compiled a translation of The Essentials of Government from the Zhenguan Reign with a group of seven international contributors—this work has been accepted in the Cambridge University Press series on Texts in The History of Political Thought.