Designing Boundaries in Early China: The Composition of Sovereign Space

Author:

Garret Pagenstecher Olberding

Publisher: 

Cambridge University Press

Publication date: 

November 2021

Abstract:

Ancient Chinese walls, such as the Great Wall of China, were not sovereign border lines. Instead, sovereign space was zonally exerted with monarchical powers expressed gradually over an area, based on possibilities for administrative action. The dynamically shifting, ritualized articulation of early Chinese sovereignty affects the interpretation of the spatial application of state force, including its cartographic representations. In Designing Boundaries in Early China, Garret Pagenstecher Olberding draws on a wide array of source materials concerning the territorialization of space to make a compelling case for how sovereign spaces were defined and regulated in this part of the ancient world. By considering the ways sovereignty extended itself across vast expanses in early China, Olberding informs our understanding of the ancient world and the nature of modern nation-states.

Table of Contents:

I. Preamble
II. The basis of ancient borders
III. The visual modeling of space in text and map
IV. Movement and geography
V. The perception of the "state": the internal definition of sovereign space
VI. The perception of the "enemy": the external definition of sovereign space
VII. Transgressions: rupturing the boundaries between sovereignties
VIII. Conclusion

[Open Access] Documentation and Argument in Early China：The Shàngshū 尚書 (Venerated Documents) and the Shū Traditions

Author:

Dirk Meyer

Publisher:

De Gruyter Mouton

Publication date:

July 5, 2021

Abstract:

This study uncovers the traditions behind the formative Classic Shàngshū (Venerated Documents). It is the first to establish these traditions—“Shū” (Documents)—as a historically evolving practice of thought-production. By focusing on the literary form of the argument, it interprets the “Shū” as fluid text material that embodies the ever-changing cultural capital of projected conceptual communities. By showing how these communities actualised the “Shū” according to their changing visions of history and evolving group interests, the study establishes that by the Warring States period (ca. 453–221 BC) the “Shū” had become a literary genre employed by diverse groups to legitimize their own arguments. Through forms of textual performance, the “Shū” gave even peripheral communities the means to participate in political discourse by conferring their ideas with ancient authority. Analysing this dynamic environment of socio-political and philosophical change, this study speaks to the Early China field, as well as to those interested in meaning production and foundational text formation more widely.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1 Shū traditions and philosophical discourse

2 Archiving cultural capital

3 The materiality of meaning networks

4 Moulds of discourse

5 Shū traditions in narrative

6 Shū genre in manuscript cultures

7 Conclusion: the Shū and political argument in early China

*Link: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110708530/html

The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire

Author:

Brian Lander

Publisher:

Yale University Press

Publication date:

November 30, 2021

Abstract:

This book is a multidisciplinary study of the ecology of China’s early political systems up to the fall of the first empire in 207 BCE. Brian Lander traces the formation of lowland North China’s agricultural systems and the transformation of its plains from diverse forestland and steppes to farmland. He argues that the growth of states in ancient China, and elsewhere, was based on their ability to exploit the labor and resources of those who harnessed photosynthetic energy from domesticated plants and animals. Focusing on the state of Qin, Lander amalgamates abundant new scientific, archaeological, and excavated documentary sources to argue that the human domination of the central Yellow River region, and the rest of the planet, was made possible by the development of complex political structures that managed and expanded agroecosystems.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1. The Nature of Political Power

2. Seeds of Life: How People Came to Build Their Own Ecosystems

3. Herding People: The Rise of Political Organizations in China

4. The Power in the West: A History of the State of Qin

5. Watching Over the Granaries: The Ecology of the Qin Empire

6. A Hundred Generations: How China's Empires Shaped Their Environments

Epilogue: States of the Anthropocene

Violence and the Rise of Centralized States in East Asia

Author: 

Mark Edward Lewis

Date Published: 

March 2022

Publisher: 

Cambridge University Press

Abstract:
Violence, both physical and nonphysical, is central to any society, but it is a version of the problem that it claims to solve. This Element examines how states in ancient East Asia, from the late Shang through the end of the Han dynasty, wielded violence to create and display authority, and also how their licit violence was entangled in the 'savage' or 'criminal' violence whose suppression justified their power. The East Asian cases are supplemented through citing comparable Western ones. The themes examined include the emergence of the warrior as a human type, the overlap of hunts and combat (and the overlap between treatments of alien species and alien peoples), sacrifice of both alien captives and 'death attendants' from one's own groups, the impact of military specialization and the increased scale of armies, the emergent ideal of self-sacrifice, and the diverse aspects of violence in the regime of law.

Table of Contents:
1. Definitions
2. Violence in the Shang world and other 'bronze age theocracies'
3. Violence in the eastern Zhou: spring and autumn through the warring states
4. Violence under the early empires
5. Conclusion