Nicola Di Cosmo's (ed.) Military Culture in Imperial China, is a valuable addition to the small, but growing, number of books on Chinese military history. As is often true of volumes of this kind, there has been a considerable delay between the original conference (which I attended in 2001) and the publication of the papers, but this in no way detracts from the high quality of the book itself and of its individual chapters, which range in quality from merely good to truly excellent. Indeed, one of the most significant aspects of this book is its demonstration of the breadth of the field of Chinese military history, or perhaps military culture, and the diverse scholarly perspectives available.

In his introduction Di Cosmo directly confronts the question of what “military culture” is, providing some guidance and organization to the otherwise disparate chapters of the book. He offers four definitions:

As this extended quote makes clear, there is currently no single, simple definition of military culture. Di Cosmo's definitions are, to his credit, proposed rather than insisted upon, since the main task of expanding scholarly research on military aspects of Chinese culture is to reassure academics that there is more to the field than battles and campaigns. This also highlights the main weakness of all Chinese military studies, namely that there is, as yet, very little research on those battles and campaigns. Hence the field of military culture must necessarily proceed without knowing what happened during war. So we have definition three operating at the strategic level without any awareness of what was happening at the tactical level. At some point in the future, and this is certainly not Di Cosmo's responsibility, scholars must research battles and campaigns, and stop defensively skirting the issue.

The individual chapters fit into Di Cosmo's categories (with one exception, which I will come to shortly). The first chapter, by Robin Yates, explores the relationship between military law and the regular law codes that dynasties used. This is an important line of research though it was clearly quite preliminary when presented. Several large issues like the simple definition of “law” or the validity of broader generalizations based upon the limited material presented were beyond the scope or space of the chapter. The second chapter, by Ralph Sawyer, makes the obvious point that prognostication was an important part of military culture in China.

Chapters 3 and 4, by Michael Loewe and Rafe de Crespigny respectively, concern the Former (Western) and Later (Eastern) Han Dynasty. Both masterful chapters by senior scholars present wide-ranging considerations of the Han military and its place in the political and social life of the dynasty. The late Edward Dreyer, to whose memory the volume is dedicated, presents a window into the usually overlooked War of the Eight Princes, 300–307, in chapter 5. As is so often the case with Chinese history, the sources reveal an often bewildering array of political and military figures engaged in many-cornered and many-layered struggles for power. Regrettably, with Professor Dreyer's passing, it seems unlikely that this complicated period will receive further treatment.

David Graff takes up the issue of battle accounts in Tang Dynasty historical sources, specifically the Old Tang History, in chapter 6, arguing that the sources are neither as lacking in detail nor as purely straightforward as we have been led to believe. Graff adds considerable nuance to the issue, explaining the background of the authors, civil officials without military experience, as a lens through which accounts should be seen. Jonathan Skaff follows this consideration of Tang history in chapter 7, with a truly impressive discussion of the influence of Inner Asian culture on Tang military culture. Skaff makes it clear that trying to understand military decision making in the Tang without understanding the backgrounds of the individuals involved is impossible: decisions were not made based solely on a textual military tradition, but upon the culture and experience of individuals.

Don Wyatt ventures into the fraught area of what constituted martial ethos in the Song, by comparing the characterizations of a number of civil and military men. Kathleen Ryor continues in a similar vein, taking up the use of civil and military aspects of elite culture. Ryor's chapter is both arresting and thought-provoking, forcing us to confront the complexities of civil elites who were fascinated by things military. Sam Gilbert similarly finds odd connections between Mencius and the Kangxi Emperor's approach to military exams. The emperor sought to create Confucianized generals and saw no inherent clash of interests in this policy.

Grace Fong's chapter is the only one to seem out of place in the volume. I found it fascinating, but the life experience of a literati during the Ming–Qing transition does not, ipso facto, translate into military culture. Chapter 12, by Joanna Waley-Cohen, who describes the increase of war and militarization of political culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, returns to the volume's main themes. Yingcong Dai then describes the development of military finance during the High Qing, something that allowed the Chinese state to project power in entirely new ways. The volume closes with Peter Perdue's broad consideration of the different practices for dealing with barbarians on the land frontier in the north-west versus the maritime frontier in the south-east.

This is an extremely valuable study of Chinese military culture that I fear this review does insufficient justice. My only regret is that more volumes on this subject and of this quality are not currently available.