The TPNW demonstrates growing support of humanitarian efforts to take action against nuclear weapons. It marks a fundamental shift by some states and individuals in the international community in their approach to addressing concerns regarding nuclear weapons and represents their willingness to challenge the status quo regarding the power of the nuclear states and their allies. Humanitarian disarmament efforts through civil society groups, in conjunction with a core group of like-minded states, have rallied together to outlaw nuclear weapons. The intention is to relegate them to the annals of history – eliminating them forever.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons 2017 marks an important development in nuclear arms control law, diplomacy and relations between states. Adopted by the UN General Assembly on July 7, 2017, it was supported by 122 nations, representing a potential disruptor to the nuclear status quo. It is the first treaty to ban nuclear weapons outright, taking a clear humanitarian approach to disarmament. Despite its success in coming to fruition, however, it is not celebrated by all nations. The permanent members of the UN Security Council neither participated in its negotiations, nor adopted the final text. No state with nuclear weapons endorses the Treaty and indeed they openly oppose its very existence.

The most compelling one would probably be to keep in mind that international sporting institutions are formally private institutions. There is one important exception, however, that is the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), an interesting case of global hybrid public and private body, which adopts the World Anti-Doping Code (WADC). Beside WADA, international sporting bodies, such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), and the decades of International Sports Federations are genuinely private entities and, in most cases, it is Swiss civil law that regulates them.

The idea of comparing European and Chinese traditional epistolary cultures is not new, even if so far it has led to few really relevant studies. There are many reasons for this relative neglect. The first one has already been pointed out and concerns the imbalance of secondary scholarship in the two fields. The study of letter and letter-writing has a longstanding tradition in the West and there has been a spectacular increase of interest in the subject during the last decades. Letters and letter-writing are notably associated with crucial moments of definition of the stylistic and cultural Latin tradition (Ciceronianism, the rise of the Christianism and theological debates in late antiquity, the structuration of the feudal world and of the medieval state, the birth and flourishing of Humanism, later the so-called ‘republic of letters’). Interestingly, letter-writing in the West suffered from a lack of theorization until quite late in this long history (later, one could paradoxically argue, than in China): one must await the end of the eleventh century to see the rise of the first relevant tradition of Latin letter-writing manuals. In spite of this, however, the letter was more often than not at the centre of redefinitions of proper style and communication, at times in a dialectical relationship with oratory. In Chinese history, by contrast, even if the practice of letter-writing was prominent since at least the end of antiquity, and clearly theorized by no later than the sixth century, the genre as such has not received consideration by modern scholars to the same degree.

Comparisons between European and Chinese history are in danger of becoming the cliché of the global turn. Whether it is a case of comparative studies of empire, the exploration of ‘Great Divergence’, or the study of ‘Eurasian Transformations’, the choice of ‘Europe’ and ‘China’ as comparators seems inescapable. While there is some comparative work that deliberately takes a different line — Victor Lieberman's ‘Strange Parallels’ between Eurasian ‘rimlands’ would be one obvious example — it is not hard to see why discussion so often focuses on these two major centres of culture and power: there are rich Anglophone historiographies; there are equalities of scale; there is topicality; and there is a pre-existing comparative literature which inevitably raises questions for further examination. We make no apology for adding yet another layer of Chinese-European comparison in this volume. Although we shall draw on some established approaches — above all, the ground-breaking work of Shmuel Eisenstadt in the 1960s — we shall also seek to strike out in new directions.

As a starting point, we will build our comparison upwards, starting from themes that are more prominent in the regional literatures of European and Chinese history than in the comparative literature. We hope that this might help us to break free from some of the familiar repertoires of analysis — particularly the comparison of ‘states’ — and to do justice to the specificity of social experience, capturing something of the micro- and meso-levels of political life as well as the macro-level. Second, we aim to explore process more than structure or development. Like Eisenstadt, but resisting the pressure to create taxonomies, we want to get at patterns of interaction rather than grand narratives. Third, as the Introduction indicates, we want to extend our examination into periods less frequently compared.

Political anthropology has familiarized us with the idea that power is more firmly based upon consent than on pure strength: domination is more often accepted than imposed, and constraint is more a sign of weakness than of assertive confidence. Consent depends chiefly upon symbolic power, and symbolic power is entirely generated and managed by the communication system. Symbolic power is built on sets of values which have been described as ideology by Marx, but since this term has too often been used improperly and in rather simplistic ways, I prefer a term introduced by Maurice Godelier, which encompasses a much larger range of meanings: idéel, from idea, but not ideal, though the ideal is part of the idéel. The idéel is what is in the minds of all people in a given society, it is everything that is thought (either expressed through words or unformulated) or dreamed, what is called in French the imaginaire (which is both the act of imagining and what is being imagined) as well as the media through which it is conveyed and perceived.

Having served for two years as the prefect of Yizhou 益州 (modern-day Chengdu), the regional centre of Sichuan, Tian Kuang 田況 (1005–1063) was appointed to the imperial court as provisional state finance commissioner (quan sansishi 權三司使) on 22 December 1050. On 2 January 1051, prior to his departure to the capital, a local scholar Zhang Yu 張俞 (1001–1064) composed a parting valediction (xu 序 or songxu 送序) and presented it to him as a gift. Composing valedictions for a departing friend or acquaintance was a common social practice in Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) times. These valedictions typically offered compliments, advice, and words of exhortation and encouragement to the recipient, who might either be in a higher or lower social position than the author himself.

It is not hard to see that communication — political communication — lies at the heart of empire. In communication, both in the simple sense of the transmission of orders from centre to periphery, and information from periphery to centre, and in the more complex one of creating networks of shared discourse and identity, lie the limits of empire.

To some extent historians (and empire builders) have always known this, but work over the last three decades or so has made the processes more obvious. The potential bibliography is vast, but the seminal classic in the field remains Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, and most recently reissued in 2016, its appeal undimmed. After Anderson who could possibly talk about nations and states, identity and political community, without invoking communication? Many medievalists reading Anderson's book when it first appeared were quick to react against his chronology, and the link he drew between national consciousness and print technology.

Keywords: Yue Fei, Thomas Becket, masculinity, literati, wen/ wu

Thinking about political communication in China and Latin Europe during the Middle Ages inevitably entails notions of masculinity. It is easy to take for granted that both political cultures were intensely patriarchal, but to understand this in historical terms — rather than as a product of biology or ‘human nature’ — we will take specific phenomena as our starting point, namely the cases of Yue Fei and Thomas Becket.

It is only in the last generation that masculinity has received systematic attention from historians. As far as we are aware, ours is the first attempt to compare elite masculinities in China and Latin Europe during the Middle Ages. The main danger in a project addressing such a fundamental element of these societies (apart from hubris) is being overwhelmed by data. We have therefore adopted a ‘micro-comparative’ approach, based on two case studies. This draws on Carlo Ginzburg's methodology of using spie (keyholes) or clues, in order to diagnose past societies. This notion has been pursued in an explicitly comparative direction by Chris Wickham, who argues that ‘if we want to compare across different societies, a good way to do it is by taking spie which are sufficiently similar in each society that they are comparable […] but which articulate with the other elements of each society in different ways, which are themselves illuminating’. While Ginzburg is most characteristically concerned with quotidian experience, and Wickham's interest is in comparing economic and political change, this chapter addresses cultural phenomena. We explore elite masculinities by peering through two spie: the deaths and subsequent reputations of Yue Fei 岳飛 (d. 1142) and Thomas Becket (d. 1170).

It has been calculated that in the German part of the Holy Roman Empire the production of handwritten books increased by roughly 25 per cent per decade between 1370 and 1470, from 20,000 annually in 1370 to 200,000 by 1470. No wonder that efforts were made to find more efficient methods of reproduction. Fifty years after the first Gutenberg Bible, 2 million books were printed in the same area in the decade around 1500. A minimum of 5 million manuscript books may have been produced in west and central Europe as a whole during the fifteenth century, but between 1454 and 1500, no less than 12.5 million books were printed. While these were impressive figures for Europe, a comparable level of communicative capacities had been attained four centuries earlier in Song China, where gazettes were circulated through the empire on a massive scale. The differences of chronology and dimensions don't matter as much as the questions of how a qualitative leap forward could be reached after a period of steady quantitative progression, and what impact the same technological innovation had in different environments.

The present volume offers a rich array of micro-historical case studies and general parallels inspiring further reflections on fundamental characteristics of Chinese and European cultures. Systematic comparison sharpens the insight into the conditions leading to their differentiated developments. I will f irst discuss a number of observations on the Chinese Empire, and then review each of these items in the European context. In each of the two sections I will first investigate the ways in which polities were created; further developments largely depended on these prior conditions. I will then deal secondly with the control of space, and, thirdly, with the shape of state administrations. Special attention will finally be paid to communication processes between political centres and peripheries, and I will conclude with a discussion of parallel developments.

Chinese History

The formative period

Communities construct their identity on the basis of references to common origins, many of which may be mythological, idealized, or imagined. The longer such a projection can be connected with lived experience, the more prestigious it appears to be. The Zhou Dynasty legitimated their overthrow of the Shang Dynasty after a military victory in 1046 BCE by introducing the doctrine of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ that prescribed the ruler to act justly and to govern in the interest of his people.

This study explores events that resulted in the recentralization of fiscal administration in Song China (960–1279) from the vantage point of the institutional dislocation emphasized in the sources. In 1141, thus even before the 1142 peace treaty between the Song and the Jin Empires temporarily ended the war that had begun in 1125, three General Commands (zonglingsuo) were established in the Lower and Middle Yangzi areas, and a similar administration was also created in Sichuan in 1145. The goal of the Song court was to draw more resources from those four strategic regions and also to enforce its control on the generals in charge of defence. This new fiscal and financial organization, grounded in the fragmented monetary system and the territorial consequences of the war, led to an increased technical complexity of fiscal and financial procedures, and hence to changes in the form and content of accounting procedures between the central administrations and the offices that managed regional and local affairs.

The wars the Song Dynasty fought for its survival against the Jin Empire are not simply taken as an historical context. The sources indeed suggest that the restoration of its dynastic power, which had lost all of Northern China, occurred through a series of hastily improvised decisions in reaction to the dysfunctional relationship between civil officials and increasingly autonomous military commanders. We shall attempt to reconstruct one of these processes by studying the circulation of quantitative data.

The question of whether and how governments may interfere with the free distribution of the written word is as current as it is politically and historically controversial. This is particularly the case from a Sino-European comparative perspective. While contemporary China continues to attract both domestic and international criticism for stifling its citizens’ freedom of expression through, for example, restrictions on internet use, European democracies are no strangers to controversy either. Incidents such as the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015, widely seen as an Islamist response to the satirical newspaper's publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed, have triggered calls to restrict the reach of political satire. ‘Anti-platforming’ movements seeking to prevent the public pronouncement of perceived extremist views pose a challenge to media organizations and educational institutions alike, while social media providers are being pressured to prohibit contents that are deemed disruptive to social cohesion.

The following studies focus on two distinct sets of events that led to changes in the administrative and political cultures of the Byzantine Empire during the eighth and ninth centuries, and in Song China (twelfth century). In both cases, these changes were initiated by an institutional repositioning of the tax administration. More specifically, our sources reveal groups of bureaucrats who, by mobilizing expert knowledge, contributed fundamentally to the reorientation of political and institutional frameworks.

In Byzantium, at the end of the eighth century, Irene ascended the throne as the reigning empress (797–802), having already acted twice as co-regent to her son Constantine VI (780–790 and 792–797) before having him mutilated and probably killed. Faced with increasing opposition, she allied herself with the bureaucracy of the capital, appointing several former bureaucrats-turned-monks as heads of important monasteries. This followed the re-establishment of Iconodulism (787), brought about by a patriarch who was also appointed by Irene and who came from the same social group. This reform upset the ideological foundation of the dynasty (that is, Iconoclasm) of which Irene's son was the last representative. The ensuing conflict between two composite factions — a legitimist and heavily militarized ‘nostalgic’ one, loyal to the deceased emperor, and one made up of administrative elites and monastic leaders supporting Irene — indirectly transformed the methods of knowledge transmission in the empire. The need for a rapid dissemination of propaganda texts aimed at the stabilization and legitimization of Irene's rule led to a sudden and sharp increase in the circulation of writing. Some monasteries — particularly the monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople — became main centres for the production and diffusion of manuscripts. From that point on, the transmission of literary texts was based on the minuscule script (replacing the majuscule), which is still used today and which, according to many palaeographic studies, had been used almost exclusively in tax documents up to this point. As a result, influential figures in the finance offices were able to take advantage of a particular political situation in order to extend their influence through a new application of their professional know-how. On a wider scale, they thus also triggered a process of profound change in the means of knowledge transmission.