The Politics of the Past in Early China By Vincent S. Leung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 202 pp. $99.99 (cloth), $28.99 (paper), $23.00 (eBook)

nature of these works, but also because it belies the narratives these works put forward about the triumph of literati governance during the Song. In a companion volume (now in press) to the present book, Hartman will recount the contest between Confucian and non-Confucian practices of governance during the Song, and thus reconstruct the periods of technocratic governance that daoxue historiography has misrepresented or omitted. Because much of the interest and merit of The Making of Song Dynasty History lies in the precise, telling philological detail of Hartman’s analysis, a summary of its chapters and arguments can give only a general impression of its admirable accomplishments. Details matter in this book. By patient philological analysis, Hartman identifies the layers of source texts that compose the compendia and digests, including source texts that do not survive and are known only from descriptions. He counts the number of entries about successive reigns in the major historical sources of the Song in order to show the increasing disproportion between their treatment of the reigns favored by advocates of Confucian literati governance and their treatment of the reigns of emperors and officials opposed to such governance. He proves with greater authority than any previous historian that many cherished anecdotes and tropes of Song political history —such as Emperor Taizu’s retirement of his generals over a cup of wine at a banquet and the correlation of the political character of a reign period to the personal character of the reigning emperor—were invented to create false precedents for advocates of literati governance. In sum, Charles Hartman demonstrates exemplary precision in his methods and in his arguments. With a combination of traditional and innovative approaches, he shows the narrative and ideological cohesion of voluminous historical works and exposes as a fiction what centuries of historians have accepted as fact. Readers should discover the riches of Hartman’s research and analysis for themselves, whether they are interested in the political and intellectual history of the Song dynasty or in history and historiography more generally. For the study of the Song dynasty, certainly, The Making of Song Dynasty History is an indispensable book.