Reviewed by: Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China by Hilde De Weerdt John Chaffee Hilde De Weerdt. Information, Territory, and Networks: The Crisis and Maintenance of Empire in Song China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. Pp. xxii + 512. $60 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-674-08842-9. In 2007, Hilde De Weerdt published Competition over Content: Negotiating Standards for the Civil Service Examinations in Imperial China (1127–1279), a book that explored the conjunction between civil service examination preparation and book publishing in Song society—especially as manifested in the examination-preparation genres of books that appeared for the first time in the Southern Song. Over the ensuing decade, through almost twenty articles, book chapters, and on-line publications, she has explored a large variety of topics that relate to her abiding interest in Song books and book publishing. In Information, Territory, and Networks, she has now pulled much of that work together in a book that is broad in its scope and ambitious in its goals, a book that promises to be an instant classic and to fundamentally shape our conception of literati society and culture in the Southern Song. There is more than one way to describe this book. One is by the genres of books that De Weerdt treats: the large corpus of official works including but not limited to veritable records, draft histories, collected statutes, legal codes, and court gazettes; private works dealing with these same topics; maps, atlases, and works about cartography; accounts of embassies and military treatises; and especially notebooks (biji 筆'). Her command of these materials is masterful, not only concerning the particulars of authorship, publication, and content but also of their functions and significance. This catalog, however, gives no sense of what the book is about. For that, its title offers a good guide: information concerning governmental and political affairs; territoriality, real and imagined; the networking of authors, interlocutors, and publishers; and the intellectual crisis of empire. This last refers to the wide-ranging discourse among Southern Song literati responding to the traumatic loss of the north and the need to restore it, thereby creating an idealized concept of empire that was to have long-term ramifications. I will [End Page 219] therefore structure my review around considerations of each of these themes. In many ways the entire volume is about information, how it was produced, transmitted, and received in writings and in print. Professor De Weerdt identifies two major trends that existed in a paradoxical relationship. First was the general move towards political centralization from the Northern Song onwards, which built on and reshaped pre-Song institutions. Government regulations and record-keeping became more elaborate, and concerns over government secrecy resulted in laws forbidding the copying or printing of court gazettes, state documents, draft histories, and the like (pp. 46–48). At the same time, De Weerdt demonstrates how many supposedly secret documents were being openly collected and printed by literati. Not only did the government tacitly accept this, it often made use of privately printed works—encyclopedias, collections of statutes, edicts, and memorials—to correct or fill in lacunae in the official records, something that became particularly critical in the early years of the Southern Song when records had to be reconstructed. This overt use of official documents was more than a minor accommodation. De Weerdt argues that it was a response to literati information needs. For example, the court gazettes (theoretically restricted to central government officials and prefects in local governments) provided information about who was serving where and became "a site for the construction of a class-based empire-wide imagined community" (p. 431). Moreover, access to draft histories, veritable records, and statutes, often in an edited, easy-to-use form, was essential for those preparing for the examinations; the crucial policy questions often required the kind of information only available in these sources (pp. 46–47). Since examination preparation involved hundreds of thousands of individuals, this was no small matter, for it meant that materials that had previously been considered the prerogative of the court and higher levels of the government were now available to a broad reading public. So...