¹ I will not address the author's analysis of climate anomalies in this review.

² Some of these datasets clearly derive from the work of others. For example, Figures 2.5a and 4.4a are visualizations of my own data.

³ Hymes, Robert P., Statesmen and Gentlemen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Hymes, Robert, “Sung Society and Social Change,” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol.5, Pt.2, edited by Chaffee, John W. and Twitchett, Denis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 631–32Google Scholar; Hymes, Robert P. and Schirokauer, Conrad, eds., Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3Google Scholar; Bol, Peter K., Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), 246–56Google Scholar; Tackett, Nicolas, “Imperial Elites, Bureaucracy, and the Transformation of the Geography of Power in Tang-Song China,” in Die Interaktion von Herrschern und Eliten in imperialen Ordnungen des Mittelalters, edited by Drews, Wolfram (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 184–89Google Scholar.

⁴ Hymes, Statesmen and Gentlemen, 82–111; Hymes, Robert P., “Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy in Sung and Yuan Fu-chou,” in Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China, 1000–1940, edited by Ebrey, Patricia Buckley and Watson, James L. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 95–136Google Scholar.

⁵ Beginning in the Ming, native-place associations in the capital also played a critical role—a point that Wang does not bring up. See Belsky, Richard, Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁶ Tackett, Nicolas, The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014), 70–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Yuhua Wang, “Replication Data for: The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development. Princeton University Press,” Harvard Dataverse V1, 2021, accessed September 20, 2023, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KER9GK.

⁸ CBDB can be accessed at https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/home; my database is available at www.ntackett.com.

⁹ The sample consisted of all individuals appearing in the file “tang vertex.xlsx” (contained in the replication package) with a hometown situated either north of 38 degrees latitude or west of 105 degrees longitude.

¹⁰ Mao Hanguang 毛漢光, “Cong shizu jiguan qianyi kan Tangdai shizu zhi zhongyang hua” 從士族籍貫遷移看唐代士族之中央化, Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 52.3 (1981), 421–510; Tackett, Nicolas, “The Evolution of the Tang Political Elite and Its Marriage Network,” Journal of Chinese History 4.2 (2020), esp. 288–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is not entirely clear why in Wang's data the central official is more likely to be from the capital than his “kin.” In the data, the central official's ID appears to be equivalent to the individual's CBDB ID number, suggesting basic data was derived directly from CBDB. By contrast, the “kin” is usually identified with a non-CBDB ID number, perhaps indicating that a different methodology was used to determine the hometown.

¹¹ Li Zhengchen appears with ID=155565 in the files “tang edgelist.xlsx” and “tang vertex.xlsx” contained in the replication package. The longitude–latitude coordinates of his hometown, as recorded in the vertex file, correspond to Luoyang.

¹² The ten members of the Cui clan identified as Li's kin have ID=350 through 359 in Wang's data. Cui Yuanlue appears with ID=138699 in my database, and personid=32113 in CBDB. The hometown of all ten is identified in “tang vertex.xlsx” with longitude–latitude coordinates (115.510575 E, 38.230526 N) corresponding to Anping County.

¹³ The clan appears in my database with clanid=7568. There are 33 Luoyang burials in ver. 1.5 of my database (available for download), and 36 in the current version, which will be available for download in the near future.

¹⁴ “Tang Cui Yuanlue fufu hezangmu” 唐崔元略夫妇合葬墓, Wenwu 2005.2: 52–61; Wu Gang 吳鋼, ed., Quan Tang wen buyi: Qian Tang zhizhai xincang zhuanji 全唐文補遺: 千唐誌齋新藏專輯 (Xi'an: San Qin chubanshe, 2006), 257.

¹⁵ Wei Guangxian 韋光憲 (ID=159916 in Wang's tables, ID=142344 in my database) constitutes a second example. His six kin listed in “tang edgelist.xlsx” (ID=764 through 769) are all clansmen of his son-in-law Li Daogu 李道古 (769–821) (ID=151496 in my database). Wang correctly identifies Wei as coming from a Chang'an-based family. But he incorrectly localizes Li's six relatives to 104.6356 E, 35.00714 N, i.e. Longxi County in Gansu. In fact, Li Daogu was a sixth-generation direct descendant of Li Shimin (Tang Taizong). Although the Tang imperial clan claimed Longxi as its ancestral home, it had moved away centuries earlier. The surviving epitaphs of Li Daogu and of his father and grandfather all confirm that this branch of the family was buried in Luoyang. See Xie Guanglin 謝光林, ed., Luoyang Beimang gudai jiazu mu 洛陽北邙古代家族墓 (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 2015), 215–16, 218–20, 222–23.

¹⁶ Tackett, “Imperial Elites, Bureaucracy, and the Transformation of the Geography of Power,” 184–89.

¹⁷ The “officials of aristocratic descent” appearing in Figure 4.5 probably refer to the “patronage-based elite” described below. In addition, Figure 4.6 depicts a sharp change in kinship network localization scores, though (as noted above) I believe the Tang figures are flawed.

¹⁸ Tackett, Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy, 235–41.

¹⁹ Hartwell, Robert M., “Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations of China, 750–1550,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42.2 (1982), esp. 405–425CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bol, Peter K., “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 32–75Google Scholar.

²⁰ Hymes and Schirokauer, Ordering the World, 12. It was only in the Southern Song that educated elites “took a far less optimistic and far less ambitious view of central politics and institutions.”

²¹ The table in question is the Stata 13 file “Wang Anshi reform data_wk.dta” in the replication package. In the table, the degree of support for the reforms is recorded in the column labeled support_continuous. A value of 0 indicates a consistent opponent of the New Policies, 1 indicates a consistent supporter, and a value in between 0 and 1 indicates an occasional supporter. Of the 137 officials, support_continuous is left blank in 74 cases, indicating officials who never spoke up either in favor or against the reforms.

²² In fact, in order to take multiple variables into consideration for the regression analysis, Wang bases his conclusions on just “forty politicians for whom I have full information on all the variables” (235).

²³ I used hometown_prefecture_id to identify the hometown via the ADDR_CODES table in CBDB (November 2020 build).

²⁴ For jinshi recipients by prefecture, I consulted Chaffee, John W., The Thorny Gates of Learning in Sung China: A Social History of Examinations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 196–202Google Scholar.

²⁵ See, for example, Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 17–18.

²⁶ According to CBDB data, 77 percent (17/22) of opponents and 91 percent (31/34) of supporters of the New Policies had passed the jinshi exams.

²⁷ See, for example, Hymes, “Marriage, Descent Groups, and the Localist Strategy,” 103.

²⁸ Bol, Peter K., Localizing Learning: The Literati Enterprise in Wuzhou, 1100–1600 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2022), 189CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 335–36.

²⁹ Bossler, Beverly J., Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, and the State in Sung China (960–1279) (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1998)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Glahn, Richard von, “Imagining Pre-modern China,” in The Song–Yuan–Ming Transition in Chinese History, eds. Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 38–39Google Scholar.

³¹ Elvin, Mark, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), 298–315Google Scholar. For the Maddison Project (2010), see www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/. This dataset consists (in the case of pre-nineteenth-century China) of impressionistic estimates based on a set of assumptions, notably that China was indeed stagnating. The Maddison data's implausibly flat per capita GDP for China between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries can be visualized in Fukuyama, Francis, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 461Google Scholar.

³² Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Perdue, Peter C., China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ An additional factor permitting the state to operate at lower cost was the commercial economy, which facilitated the movement of people and goods. I thank Sarah Schneewind for reminding me of this point.