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The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (review)

operated in an environment where “[g]enerous fees, quiet nods, and loyal service kept the machinery of local courts operating smoothly and unobtrusively in elite favor” (185). Macauley is not wrong to argue that litigation has counterhegemonic potential, but this feature was surely only a part of Chinese legal culture. How do historians learn about the mundane and everyday aspects of the legal culture that are hidden from view? In her introduction, Macauley deanes legal culture as “a system of symbols, language, and diffusely shared attitudes that produced a common set of legal assumptions and beliefs.” She also reveals that she is “less hostile to structural analysis than others who employ cultural analysis” (14). This supposed hostility of others aside, Macauley certainly seems more at home, despite her attention to elements of popular culture and the ofacial discourse, in a structural or functionalist mode of analysis. She largely refrains, for example, from analyzing the archival reports as a form of textual construction—her nod at Davis’ observation that “archives are full of action” notwithstanding (15).1 Thus, even though Macauley maintains that ofacials throughout the centuries, subscribing to a Confucian order of harmony, consistently described the litigation masters as crafty and cunning, she offers little systematic textual analysis of the ways in which the ofacials recorded, constructed, and commented on their stories and, just as important, of the ways in which they concealed them. Readers interested in legal culture are likely to want to know more details about the constitution of the ofacial reports, and to go further in dissecting their presumptions of knowledge and lacunae, even if the methodology cannot yield a perfectly unobstructed vista.