A Brief History of Ancient China By Edward L. Shaughnessy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 416 pp. £81 (cloth), £26.99 (paper)

Edward Shaughnessy has made the bold move to model his latest general history of China on the five-part structure of Sima Qian's Historical Records (Shiji, compiled ca.90 BCE).However, his failure to adhere to the aims and spirit of that model makes Shaughnessy's choice curious.That does not mean that his A Brief History of Ancient China necessarily fails the reader, but it leaves one wondering who are the target readers for this book, and what are they to make of it.Shaughnessy styles his own endeavor "dividing the history into numerous independent items that do not necessarily follow any logical sequence," although nothing so trendily post-modern could possibly reproduce what scholars have come to call Sima Qian's hu jian fa (mutual illumination method), nor what Sima Qian aspired to: to create a specific defining form of historical expertise for all time (cheng yijia zhi yan ).One recent book, Lei Yang's Narrative Devices in the Shiji, opines that Sima Qian forged logical connections "to an unprecedented degree." 1 As readers may recall, the Shiji consists of five parts: The "Basic Annals" detailing emperor's reigns; the "Tables" supplying the chronologies for major figures and events; the "Treatises" sketching the evolution of eight aspects of governing; the "Hereditary Houses" tracing the histories of the ruling lines in several leading pre-Han states; and the "Biographies" (individual and collective) analyzing the lives of leading men and women from the time of the Shang-Zhou transition until the reign of Han Wudi (r.141-87 BCE).Readers who have not been deeply immersed in the Shiji, the Tables and Treatises of which were hailed as major innovations soon after the text entered circulation, may not pick up on the immense differences in contents and in style between Sima Qian's and Shaughnessy's histories written two millennia apart. 2 However, even English-only readers familiar with Burton Watson's Ssu-ma Ch'ien: Grand Historian of China (1975) cannot but be struck by the difference in rhetorical styles: whereas Sima Qian openly addresses the readers, demanding that they