This chapter introduces the various processes by which the Song government obtains resources from its people to pay for its expenses, and also how the Song state, in pursuit of its interests, is able to manage economic activities. After outlining the dynamics of Song society and the economy, it introduces tensions generated by the various goals the fiscal administration pursued at different political and military periods. The third and main section of the chapter offers an overview of the different taxes and tax mechanisms that the state used to extract revenues from the various sectors of the economy. Emphasis is placed on the state tea and wine monopolies which were crucial both for public finance and for guidance of the Song economy. The conclusion offers some answers to the problems raised by the tensions within this system.

The long transition – often marred by violence – between Tang and Song discerned by Naitō Konan marked the advent of a new world. The An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) triggered profound political and military crises that shattered the institutions of the Tang dynasty, but also set in motion the slow progression of the market economy, which the Tang leadership began to see as the necessary means to restore its fiscal authority. With the collapse of the equal-field system of state land allocations in the wake of the rebellion, the Tang abandoned the principle of uniform, in-kind taxation of farming households as the basis of its fiscal and military systems. Urgent necessity prompted the adoption of new and more flexible fiscal strategies to secure revenues from commerce and consumption. The expansion of the market economy mitigated the Confucian elite’s traditional hostility toward commerce and acted as a key catalyst for the mercantilist policies pursued by the southern kingdoms during the first half of the tenth century.

This study explores events that resulted in the recentralization of fiscal administration in Song China (960–1279) from the vantage point of the institutional dislocation emphasized in the sources. In 1141, thus even before the 1142 peace treaty between the Song and the Jin Empires temporarily ended the war that had begun in 1125, three General Commands (zonglingsuo) were established in the Lower and Middle Yangzi areas, and a similar administration was also created in Sichuan in 1145. The goal of the Song court was to draw more resources from those four strategic regions and also to enforce its control on the generals in charge of defence. This new fiscal and financial organization, grounded in the fragmented monetary system and the territorial consequences of the war, led to an increased technical complexity of fiscal and financial procedures, and hence to changes in the form and content of accounting procedures between the central administrations and the offices that managed regional and local affairs.

The wars the Song Dynasty fought for its survival against the Jin Empire are not simply taken as an historical context. The sources indeed suggest that the restoration of its dynastic power, which had lost all of Northern China, occurred through a series of hastily improvised decisions in reaction to the dysfunctional relationship between civil officials and increasingly autonomous military commanders. We shall attempt to reconstruct one of these processes by studying the circulation of quantitative data.

The following studies focus on two distinct sets of events that led to changes in the administrative and political cultures of the Byzantine Empire during the eighth and ninth centuries, and in Song China (twelfth century). In both cases, these changes were initiated by an institutional repositioning of the tax administration. More specifically, our sources reveal groups of bureaucrats who, by mobilizing expert knowledge, contributed fundamentally to the reorientation of political and institutional frameworks.

In Byzantium, at the end of the eighth century, Irene ascended the throne as the reigning empress (797–802), having already acted twice as co-regent to her son Constantine VI (780–790 and 792–797) before having him mutilated and probably killed. Faced with increasing opposition, she allied herself with the bureaucracy of the capital, appointing several former bureaucrats-turned-monks as heads of important monasteries. This followed the re-establishment of Iconodulism (787), brought about by a patriarch who was also appointed by Irene and who came from the same social group. This reform upset the ideological foundation of the dynasty (that is, Iconoclasm) of which Irene's son was the last representative. The ensuing conflict between two composite factions — a legitimist and heavily militarized ‘nostalgic’ one, loyal to the deceased emperor, and one made up of administrative elites and monastic leaders supporting Irene — indirectly transformed the methods of knowledge transmission in the empire. The need for a rapid dissemination of propaganda texts aimed at the stabilization and legitimization of Irene's rule led to a sudden and sharp increase in the circulation of writing. Some monasteries — particularly the monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople — became main centres for the production and diffusion of manuscripts. From that point on, the transmission of literary texts was based on the minuscule script (replacing the majuscule), which is still used today and which, according to many palaeographic studies, had been used almost exclusively in tax documents up to this point. As a result, influential figures in the finance offices were able to take advantage of a particular political situation in order to extend their influence through a new application of their professional know-how. On a wider scale, they thus also triggered a process of profound change in the means of knowledge transmission.