Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
evolving political landscape of China's Song dynasty (960-1276 ce),
research findings based upon the DGSD. Historians have long typified
the Song dynasty as an era of high state ambition and demographic and
commercial revolution paradoxically coexisting with military weakness
and conflict. The combination of factors makes for a fluid and complex
spatial history that HGIS analysis helps to reveal and explain.
The first case demonstrates that several Song phenomena - the em-
powerment of a civil bureaucracy that also controlled the military, the
expansion of population and state power in south China, the quest for
commercial revenues, and the defense of the northern frontier - trans-
formed Song spatial organization. Spatial analysis reveals that Song rul-
ers split and merged existing tax- and personnel-bearing jurisdictions -
counties and prefectures - throughout the empire in order to adjust the
density of the state presence. Collectively and over the course of almost
two centuries, the court recalibrated military power along international
borders and aligned administration with economic and demographic
reality in old and new imperial cores as well as the setlement periphery.
During the Song, almost 20 percent of the jurisdictions that constituted
the realm were founded, abolished, or moved from one parent unit to
another. However, while the population of the empire tripled, the total
number of jurisdictions remained almost constant.
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he second case integrates administrative unit gazeteer data from
the DGSD with environmental information on the changing course of
the Yellow River. It explains that both sudden catastrophe and long-term
environmental degradation shaped the political landscape, not only the
natural and agrarian ones. In distinction with the first case, this regional
study reveals that even within a single province, environmental factors
and setlement distribution created distinctive regional paterns in the
organization of political space.
For a century, the historiography of the Song era has had a vaguely
spatial cast. Scholars have charted a momentous turn toward imperial
centralization and diminishing local and provincial political power.
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However, the conversation has, ironically, unfolded without much refer-
ence to actual imperial geography. In fact, as HGIS analysis reveals, even
though court jurisdiction did expand, policies were transacted in and
through hundreds of fiscally autonomous and militarily independent
