Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective: A Digital Approach

A Digital ApproachWe embarked on a collaborative project, titled "Communication and Empire: Chinese Empires in Comparative Perspective," to examine how political communication and, in particular, elite communication networks impacted the formation, maintenance, or fragmentation of empires and other kinds of polities. 1We proposed to do this through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of textual corpora, including notebooks and correspondence, that best convey individuals' engagement with politics but that have never been examined in the aggregate and for their relevance to Chinese political culture.Here we briefly introduce the historiographical background and goals of the project and the digital methods we developed and used. 2 We end with two case studies illustrating how digital methods can facilitate research on communication networks on the micro-and the macroscale.We hereby also aim to suggest that the combination of digital text analysis, biographical databases, historical geographic information systems (GIS), and social network analysis (SNA) can also be applied to a wide range of other questions in the historical study of empires and other kinds of polities.Chronologically, the project focuses on a crisis moment (the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) in Chinese political history.In 1126-27, the Jurchen army occupied the Song Dynasty (960-1279) capital of Kaifeng, one of the largest cities in the medieval world; took the reigning emperor captive; and set out to occupy the northern half of the Song Empire.The Song court retreated to the south and settled for a peace treaty that effectively divided rule over the Chinese territories between two competing states for the next 150 years: the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) in the north and the Song Dynasty in the south.