Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination.

• Author: Habberstad, Luke
• Position: Book review

Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination. By Tamara T. Chin. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, vol. 94. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi + 363. $49.95, 36.95 [pounds sterling], 45.00 [euro] (cloth).

In Savage Exchange, her first book, Tamara T. Chin traces literary transformations and cultural anxieties brought about by imperial expansion during the Western Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.-9 C.E.), especially during and immediately after the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 140-87 B.C.E.). Offering a "counter-history of literary aesthetics as well as of economic thought" (p. 304), the book characterizes the rise of classicizing literature and writing not as a triumph of particular genres in a hermetic history of literary form, but rather as the surprising outcome of debates brought about by the new political economy of Western Han imperialism. In Chin's estimation, at this dawn of "Silk Road" trade, territorial annexation, market-oriented calculation, and new forms of luxury consumption drove literary change. Early China specialists will be interested in the depth and novel perspective Chin brings to a new scholarly consensus that a) rejects Emperor Wu as the architect of a state-sponsored "Confucianism," and b) emphasizes in turn the importance of a late Western Han "classical turn," starting in the late first century B.C.E., that called for a "return to antiquity" (fu gu) and corresponded to transformations in practically every arena of politics and culture. (1) More broadly, Chin addresses a host of questions relevant to all scholars of the ancient world and comparative literature: How should we read literary works in light of archaeological and material evidence? What must we do in order to place literature responsibly in its social, economic, and political contexts? How can we write comparative literary histories that move away from juxtapositions tending to support anachronistic cultural-national boundaries and toward "histor[ies] of contact" (p. 301) sensitive to the myriad repercussions of political and economic interaction?

In a literary analysis of mathematical abstraction, Chapter 1 reads the Debate on Salt and Iron (Yan tie lun), a highly stylized version of an 81 B.C.E. debate about the state salt and iron monopolies, in light of the qingzhong (lit: "light and heavy," meaning "relative value") chapters of the Guanzi, an important...