An Urban History of China By Toby Lincoln. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 286 pp. $29.99 (paper)

being his book on space. In one of Lewis’s anecdotes (this time from the Mencius), a court official protests that he alone respects his ruler since he alone offers criticism, while others do not trouble to do so. I share that official’s sentiments, when I say this book does not do what the book on space does: offer a survey of the perspectives of the historical actors themselves. To my mind, an ideal work devoted to honor and shame would map the contours of the shifting terrain of the vocabulary of “honor and shame” and the precise contexts in which new versions of these concepts erupt, sometimes within the same group of “intellectuals” or local magnates. I want to familiarize readers with a broader range of motivations and immediate situations that propelled people, high and low, to take action. The potential appeal of this book is nonetheless very wide—interested readers outside of the academy and undergraduates, as well as professional historians—and I suspect that different readers will happily take away different lessons. General readers outside the academy may find that its arguments resonate with what they have learned elsewhere, while offering a new lens through which to view the issues of honor and shame that introduces them to some classics of Chinese thought in the process. Undergraduates will learn from Lewis that the emotions are a fit topic for historical exploration, also that groups do not command stable power, even in remote antiquity, and many of the translations gathered within its pages are good to “think with.” His decision to trace the emergence of later “formal legal systems” to the honor-shame discourse is surely important, unless we should reverse cause-and-effect. (That the laws, ascriptive as well as descriptive, always reflect the norms of the powerful seems vital to register.) These are not paltry gifts to those of us who labor in “Area Studies,” and I am grateful. The framing is all.