| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 222 words from this article are provided below; about 525 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Mark Edward Lewis. Writing and Authority in Early China. (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture.) Albany: State University of New York Press. 1999. Pp. vii, 544.

"This book is about the uses of writing to command assent and obedience in early China" (p. 1), here defined as roughly the last half-millennium B.C. Literature is, in fact, central to traditional Chinese civilization, to an extent that it is often difficult for us fully to appreciate. As Mark Edward Lewis notes, this was a society whose officials came to be systematically selected for their mastery of classic texts, whose fine arts were dominated by the ink and writing brush of the scholar, and whose urban landscape was liberally festooned with written signs and inscriptions. This book addresses a vitally important issue. 1

For Lewis, the importance of writing to the Chinese Empire was less a matter of its practical administrative utility than of the parallel, "virtual," empire-of-the-mind it encouraged in the imagination. Universal elite commitment to a shared body of texts cemented together an empire twice the size of Europe, for two thousand years, with only the weakest of coercive machinery. Such idealized texts as the Zhou li (Rituals of Zhou) legitimated the imperial order and provided a model for successive dynastic regenerations along perpetually identical lines. . . .

There are about 525 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.