Political Communication in Chinese and European History, 800–1600 Edited by Hilde De Weerdt and Franz-Julius Morche. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 634 pp. € 218 (cloth).

Institutionally, historians are trained as specialists in country-based history.It takes tremendous effort to learn the necessary craft to interpret and re-interpret primary materials in their specific contexts.However, as Hilde De Weerdt and Franz-Julius Morche point out in their introduction, historians often implicitly appeal to comparison to reach their conclusions or suggest general implications of their empirical studies.One great contribution of this edited volume is that it conducts an explicit historical comparison by inviting specialists in the history of Song China and medieval European history to engage with each other.The edited volume focuses on the role of political communication (mainly in the written form) in political systems, which range from city-state to territorial empire and state.The category "political communication" in the volume is quite wide, including communication within a bureaucracy, between authorities and their subjects, and among literate elites with a strong political consciousness.This broadly defined political communication opens many new arenas to compare the processes of transmitting, mediating, and reacting to information of various political types in different institutional contexts.Also considered is the interaction of political communication with critical historical events.Readers may wonder about the value of detailed micro-level comparative historical study.Regardless of the similarities or differences demonstrated in comparison, the question remains of why, or to what extent, these comparisons matter to our understanding of political development in Chinese and European history.What is at issue here is the methodology of comparative research in general and of comparative historical analysis in particular.Would specialist historians conducting a comparative study implicitly be guided by the case study of which they have expert knowledge, and then look only for similarities or differences that appeal to them in cases that they are not familiar with?In this case, would the conversation among specialists in comparative historical studies just pass each other by, without real engagement?Could the conclusion