Throughout the last two decades, Yuri Pines has enriched the early China field with a constant stream of important publications on the history of thought and politics. After a number of articles on the Qin, and on the Legalist classic Book of Lord Shang, he has now published a fine translation and study of this work, which sets out principles germane to the formation of the early imperial political system. Reflecting the fierce interstate competition leading up to the unification of the realm under the First Emperor, the statecraft of Shang Yang, the Lord of Shang, helped to set Qin on a path to ruthless efficiency, promoting a twin focus on food production and the strengthening of the military as well as the thorough mobilization and bureaucratic control of the population.

Compared to the later writings of the great systematizer of Legalist thought, Han Fei, the work attributed to Shang Yang has attracted less attention, possibly because its “blatant and provocative style” (p. vii), its “alienating rhetoric” (p. 90), and Shang Yang's “perceived immorality” (p. 100) were shunned as an embarrassment by those appealing to more refined sensibilities; perhaps because of the Book’s limited intellectual versatility; or because parts of it pose textual and interpretive problems so serious as to raise fundamental doubts about its authenticity. Many of the philological issues have been expertly addressed by scholars in Taiwan, China, and Japan since Duyvendank published the first English translation in 1928 (there are now French, Russian, German, and Japanese versions as well). Multiple discoveries of large caches of early imperial legal and administrative documents since the 1920s have vastly increased the number of first-hand sources recording the actual workings of bureaucratic institutions at the time, and these can be fruitfully compared to the recommendations of the Book. The expanded base of available source materials has, moreover, ushered in a mildly revisionist re-examination of Qin history among Western scholars, in which Pines himself has played a prominent role. In all, then, this is a propitious moment to publish a new translation of the Book. Pines is uniquely well placed to provide it, and he has lived up to the task.

The “Introduction” (pp. 1–114) offers information on the historical background, transmission, dating, and reception of the Book. Here as well as in the briefer chapter prefaces, Pines sums up the state of the field with regard to the likely dates of individual chapters as well as the internal structure and thought of the Book as a whole. The translation is accompanied by a meticulous annotation – somewhat impractically relegated to the back of the volume – which discusses points of doubt and refers, whenever necessary, to different editions and commentaries. Occasionally one might take issue with individual translation choices, and in this reviewer's opinion, comparisons with Duyvendak's rendering will not always be unfavourable to the latter. But minor quibbles are unavoidable in a work of this length and complexity, and Pines's translation is, on the whole, clear and accurate; his interpretive decisions are well documented, cautiously argued, and rely on scholarship far superior to that available to Duyvendak in his day.

Readers only peripherally interested in philological niceties but eager to find out about the place of the Book within the broader sweep of ancient thought will have good reason to consider the “Introduction” as well as the chapter prefaces valuable contributions in their own right. Pines outlines the Book’s view of social evolution and state formation, and of human nature as invariably predisposed towards the unremitting pursuit of self-interest. This provides the Archimedean point enabling comprehensive control of the populace through rewards and punishments. In fact, it is this predisposition which turns the government of the people into a tractable problem in the first place.

Reading through the Book, one feels all too easily overwhelmed by the reductionist bleakness of the carrot-and-stick approach which is relentlessly promoted to enhance state power as an end in itself. But, as Pines shows, there is potential relief from the all-pervasive oppressiveness in the form of the idea, likewise found in Han Fei zi, that harsh laws will induce people to internalize the rules of acceptable conduct and eventually make punishment superfluous. On some level, this suggests an acknowledgement of ethical imperatives in politics, a recognition of the hope that states should achieve more than merely acting as mechanisms converting manpower and resources into military prowess, though sceptical readers might suspect, nodding their head in agreement with James C. Scott's recent Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven: Yale UP, 2017), that this is but another ideological ruse to sugar coat the domestication of human beings in the service of their thorough exploitation by extractive political organizations.

This is, ultimately, also suggested by the Book’s emphasis on total mobilization, insightfully discussed by Pines. From the registration of all subjects in military-style units liable to collective punishment, down to the enlisting of women and the elderly in the defence of cities, the Book persistently promotes the view that successful government consists in the calculated and systematic utilization of the military and productive capacities of the population.

It is to be hoped that Yuri Pines's valuable translation, textual study, historical contextualization, and philosophical elucidation of this important but, somewhat inexplicably, neglected work of ancient Chinese political thought will rekindle scholarly interest in the intellectual architect of the Qin unification and in the impact of his thought during the early imperial era and beyond.