| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Beverly J. Bossler. Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, and the State in Sung China (960–1279). (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, number 43.) Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies; distributed by Harvard University Press. 1998. Pp. x, 370. $45.00.

Beverly J. Bossler's study of the marriage and kinship practices of grand councilors and the Wu-chou local elite falls within the scope of the social history of China in the seventh to thirteenth centuries. Largely relying on privately commissioned funerary inscriptions of mostly men and some women, Bossler marshals ample documentary evidence to confirm an important theme in current scholarship: the transformation and expansion of the educated class from aristocratic pedigree to the political elite, whose survival depended on success in the civil service examinations, local economic clout, property base, and marriage alliances (see Peter K. Bol, "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China [1992]). 1

Bossler observes this new elite operating as two fluid and permeable groups. The capital/national elite, landowners in high office and residing in the capital, forms the topic of the first half of the book; the Wu-chou local elite in Chekiang province is the focus of the second half. The first group, consisting of the Northern Sung (960–1127) and Southern Sung (1127–1279) grand councillors, is characterized by high political office, while the second group is geographically defined by residence and activity in Wu-chou, the center of Neo-Confucian learning in the Southern Sung. . . .

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