This is an important book – with an unfortunate title. The word “savage” in “savage exchanges” is ambiguous, and “Han imperialism” suggests something other than the Han dynasty (206bc–220ad) that is the subject of the book. I would dare to suggest that a less elegant but more explanatory title might have been “International exchanges as a source of change: new representations and conservatism during the Han dynasty”. To put it simply, Savage Exchange discusses the relationships between the Han dynasty economic expansion and various innovations in literary genres and other practices – and hypothesizes that the conservative orthodoxy that was reasserted during the Han dynasty was a direct reaction to these new representations.

Savage Exchange is a feat of erudition and good imagination. It relies on transmitted texts as well as on excavated materials, and very often interprets both sets of sources according to new perspectives. There is indeed a correlation between the genre innovations addressed in the book and the innovation that this book represents. In terms of discipline, Savage Exchange is difficult to categorize: it is certainly an enterprise where interdisciplinarity is not an empty word. The main originality of the approach is the blending of the textual and the material, of the literary and the economic, for the mutual benefit of both, with conclusions that are important for almost all aspects of Han dynasty history: literature and economy of course, but also Confucianism (though the word is hardly used), religion, women's studies, art, mathematics and diplomacy.

The first chapter, “Masters dialogue”, establishes the influence of economics on philosophical argumentation in the “Qingzhong” essays of the Guanzi and in the Debate on Salt and Iron (Yan tie lun), with the invention of new metaphors and the inclusion of mathematical abstraction into philosophical texts; the “Qingzhong” chapters, composed during the Former Han dynasty, offered a theory of market economy that was a reflection of Emperor Wu's expansionist policies. Chapter 2, “Epideictic fu”, shows how the Han dynasty fu poems, for instance Sima Xiangru's “Fu on the excursion hunt of the Son of Heaven”, with its extended descriptions of luxuries (many of them foreign), are not only descriptive, but reflect Han dynasty markets and their goods in an international context, and conflicting views concerning expenditure and the accumulation of goods, against the background of Emperor Wu's long and extravagant reign. In chapter 3, “Historiography”, Tamara T. Chin raises the hypothesis that the Shiji's thematic and formal patterning as well as its “assemblage of competing ethnographic narratives” (notably, the chapter on the Xiongnu people) reflect a market vision of the economy that challenged the political and tributary model of economy advocated in ancient sources.

Whereas the first three chapters deal with discursive genres, chapters 4 and 5 address social and material practices, respectively “Kinship” and “Money”, but with the same idea that growing international relations challenged traditional values and influenced social practices. Thus “Chinese” frontier history, notably heqin diplomacy (i.e. marrying imperial princesses to foreign rulers) challenged not only the hierarchical vision of frontier relations (the tributary system), but also the “ritual propriety” of marriage and of gender relations; and Silk Road trade produced new economic roles for the thousands of women hired as industrial workers in large weaving factories: they were no longer part of the traditional marriage-based household economy; they were economic actors instead of moral subjects, in a paradigm that maximized their productivity rather than their virtue. The same tension between traditional values and market economy is discussed in chapter 5, devoted to money, in particular during Emperor Wu's reign: against the conservative vision of money as a symbol for the moral and cosmological order (as part of wen-culture), foreign exchange instead presupposed a purely quantitative view of money, in a connected world where all currencies could be exchanged on the basis of their metallic value, and by the relative amounts of commodities and money in circulation.

All five chapters thus show the challenges imposed by Han dynasty expansion and international commerce; and to various extents, they all show the successful backlash of conservatism against these innovations. Indeed, such new values were dead ends: they meant challenges to the traditional order, but in the end offered this order opportunities to reaffirm itself as orthodoxy. An important thesis of the book is that advocates of traditional values, “Classicists”, as they are often called in recent sinology, did not evolve in a discursive vacuum, but reinterpreted and reinforced traditional claims against the new representations that accompanied Emperor Wu's expansionist economics. Thus, against the innovations discussed above, conservative discourses reasserted the centrality of frugality, of agriculture, of tributary diplomacy and of kinship economy. In sum, as is acknowledged by the author, Savage Exchange is largely the narrative of values and practices that failed, but were instrumental in the definition of the traditional values that became unchallenged orthodoxy during the Han dynasty and for the millennia to come.

This book is mandatory reading for researchers of the Han dynasty; but it will also be stimulating for anyone interested in original approaches to ancient history. Savage Exchange is certainly one of the best examples of what interdisciplinarity can bring to our knowledge of ancient periods for which data are scattered – too scattered to be interpreted in themselves and according to traditional disciplinary divisions.