Andrew Chittick

Though he does not immediately proffer an explanation for this, the overall argument of the book is that, in the intervening four centuries, the unquestioned dominance of "imperial metageography" - familiar to all Sinologists as the conception of a single empire, divided into provinces and counties, and rimmed by less submissive foreign borderlands - gave way to other metageographies which often challenged and subverted the imperial view. Felt also links the three new subgenres to three historical "transformations" in the early medieval era: the fragmentation of the imperial order (resulting in more local works); the development of the Yangzi basin (leading to works on natural spaces); and the impact of Buddhism and knowledge of the wider world beyond the Sinitic ecumene (works on foreign lands). [...]I would be interested in how these two chapters might have played out if Felt had abandoned chronology and instead considered as two distinct metageographies the relatively de-politicized "ecumenical regionalism" of much local writing, and the more politicized "competitive empires" model (a term Felt doesn't apply generally but does use as a section subheading on p. 122) of both the Three Kingdoms and late Northern and Southern periods. [...]the Shuijiiig zhu's hydrocultural scheme does not "entirely decenter the state" (as Felt claims on p. 208), but instead leaves state agents playing an outsized role in shaping the world.

Abstract This essay uses the history of the Wu region in the first millennium ce to explore the relationship between locality and empire. Many major East Asian empires are considered to be “Chinese” and to have essentially similar characteristics which are largely independent of their local base. Recent work on the Jiankang Empire (third to sixth centuries ce , also known as the “southern dynasties”) has shown that it had an imperial culture which was quite different from Central Plains-based empires, and which is in part attributable to the distinctive culture of the local Wu region. The relationship can be further illustrated by linking those developments to evidence from the tenth century, when the Wu region again served as the core of a political regime with imperial pretentions.

"This book compares the ways in which new powers arose in the shadows of the Roman Empire and its Byzantine and Carolingian successors, of Iran, the Caliphate and China in the first millennium CE. These new powers were often established by external military elites who had served the empire. They remained in an uneasy balance with the remaining empire, could eventually replace it, or be drawn into the imperial sphere again. Some relied on dynastic legitimacy, others on ethnic identification, while most of them sought imperial legitimation. Across Eurasia, their dynamic was similar in many respects; why were the outcomes so different?"--

Most LIASE-sponsored programs incorporate some type of fieldwork in Asia as a primary element. Sustaining these field sites over the long term is vulnerable to varying levels of faculty commitment, personal relationships with overseas partner institutions, and the vicissitudes of student interest, especially given the small student pools at liberal arts colleges. Eckerd College has met this challenge by using a joint on-campus program to feed into multiple field research locations, which broadens the opportunities for faculty and student engagement. It has also allowed us to let some field sites lapse when they were not working out, without undermining the integrity and continuity of the overall program.

This work offers a sweeping reassessment of the Jiankang Empire (third to sixth centuries CE), known as the Chinese "Southern Dynasties." It shows how, although one of the medieval world's largest empires, Jiankang has been rendered politically invisible by the standard narrative of Chinese nationalist history, and proposes a new framework and terminology for writing about medieval East Asia. The book pays particular attention to the problem of ethnic identification, rejecting the idea of "ethnic Chinese," and delineating several other, more useful ethnographic categories, using case studies in agriculture/foodways and vernacular languages. The most important, the Wuren of the lower Yangzi region, were believed to be inherently different from the peoples of the Central Plains, and the rest of the book addresses the extent of their ethnogenesis in the medieval era.

In a recent leading article in the Journal of Asian Studies, Hugh Clark critiques the teleological construct of a unified China, arguing that, at least up through the tenth century, the unified regimes of Qin/Han and Sui/Tang were a "superficial overlay" atop an East Asia comprised of many diverse cultural regions. I believe that scholars should take up Clark's critique as an invitation: to write meaningful histories of East Asian cultural regions, their distinctive peoples, and their diverse cultural and political identities, without relying on the teleological construct of "China" and the "Chinese" (or Han) people and culture. Scholars of the early medieval period have exceptionally rich opportunities to do this sort of work, yet we mostly have not taken sufficient advantage of them. This essay uses my own work on the Wuren as a case study to propose some useful frameworks and methodologies available to us, such as re-thinking the concept of "empire," and writing regional histories. Thinking regionally, especially when done in collaboration with scholars of other periods of fragmentation, will allow scholars of the early medieval era to make distinctive and important contributions to the broader fields of East Asian and comparative World history.

In traditional Chinese and modern Western historiography, the period has been framed as a North-South rivalry between two dynasties that each sought to reunify "China," meaning the empire originally founded by the Qin and Han. The two empires are seen as culturally complementary; for example, the North is characterized as "martial" but lacking in cultural sophistication, while the South is described as more "literary" but lacking in military strength and assertiveness. The empire based at Jiankang had persisted since the founding of the Three Kingdoms state of Wu in the early third century, with only a brief 37-year interregnum of rule by the North under the Western Jin dynasty. Southern urban development was especially spectacular. The southern regimes also emphasized the internal colonization of new lands. The greatest output of non-religious prose writing during the northern and southern period was unquestionably in the genre loosely understood as "history."