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

Between Command and Market: Economic Thought and Practice in Early China

Editors: 

Elisa Levi Sabattini & Christian Schwermann

Publisher:
Brill

Publication date:
2021

Abstract:
Ancient Chinese economic thought has never been related to the evidence of economic practice. We know how state economies were supposed to be run in theory, but not the degree to which economic thought reflected everyday economic activity. Moreover, it is still not clear to what extent economic thought constituted a separate field of inquiry and was independent of fundamental cultural notions or political considerations. Finally, why was there so much more sustained interest in political economy in China than anywhere else? This book sets out to consider such questions through contextualized analyses of both received and newly excavated sources on economic thought and practice.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Authors: Elisa Levi Sabattini and Christian Schwermann

Chapter 1 Economic Cycles and Price Theory in Early Chinese Texts
Paul R. Goldin

Chapter 2 Agriculturalism and Beyond: Economic Thought of The Book of Lord Shang
Yuri Pines

Chapter 3 Situating the “Qingzhong” 輕重 Chapters of the Guanzi管子
Hans van Ess

Chapter 4 Feng Xuan Buys Rightness, Gongyi Xiu Expels His Wife: Economic Exemplars in the Warring States and Early Han
Andrew Meyer

Chapter 5 Between Command and Market: Credit, Labour, and Accounting in the Qin Empire (221–207 BCE)
Maxim Korolkov

Chapter 6 The Economic Activities of a Qin Local Administration: Qianling County, Modern Liye, Hunan Province, 222–209 BCE
Robin D.S. Yates

Chapter 7 To Ban or Not to Ban: Jia Yi on Copper Distribution and Minting Coins
Elisa Levi Sabattini

Chapter 8 The First Chinese Economic Impact on Asia: Distribution and Usage of Monies in Early China in Synchronic and Diachronic Perspective
Yohei Kakinuma

Technical Arts in the Han Histories

Editors: 

Mark Csikszentmihalyi & Michael Nylan

Publisher:
SUNY Press

Publication date:
November 2021

Abstract:
While cultural literacy in early China was grounded in learning the Classics, basic competence in official life was generally predicated on acquiring several forms of technical knowledge. Recent archaeological finds have brought renewed attention to the use of technical manuals and mantic techniques within a huge range of discrete contexts, pushing historians to move beyond the generalities offered by past scholarship. To explore these uses, Technical Arts in the Han Histories delves deeply into the rarely studied “Treatises” and “Tables” compiled for the first two standard histories, the Shiji (Historical Records) and Hanshu (History of Han), important supplements to the better-known biographical chapters, and models for the inclusion of technical subjects in the twenty-three later “Standard Histories” of imperial China. Indeed, for a great many aspects of life in early imperial society, they constitute our best primary sources for understanding complex realities and perceptions. The essays in this volume seek to explain how different social groups thought of, disseminated, and withheld technical knowledge relating to the body, body politic, and cosmos, in the process of detailing the preoccupations of successive courts from Qin through Eastern Han in administering the localities, the frontier zones, and their numerous subjects (at the time, roughly one-quarter of the world’s population).

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Michael Nylan 戴梅可 and Mark Csikszentmihalyi 齊思敏

1. Land Tenure and the Decline of Imperial Government in Eastern Han
Michael Loewe 魯惟一

2. Water Control and Policy-Making in the Shiji and Hanshu
Luke Habberstad 何祿凱

3. The Hanshu Geographic Treatise on the Eastern Capital
Lee Chi-hsiang 李紀祥

4. Celestial Signs in Three Historical Treatises
Jesse J. Chapman 柴傑思

5. On Hanshu "Wuxing zhi" 五行志 and Ban Gu's Project
Michael Nylan 戴梅可

6. Western Han Sacrifices to Taiyi
Tian Tian 田天

7. Writing Abstractly in Mathematical Texts from Early Imperial China
Karine Chemla 林力娜

8. Commentarial Episodes in Early Chinese Medicine: An Experiment in Decentering the Standard Histories
Miranda Brown 董慕達

9. Narratives of Decline and Fragmentation, and the Hanshu Bibliographic Taxonomies of Technical Arts
Mark Csikszentmihalyi 齊思敏 and Zheng Yifan 鄭伊凡

ある地方官吏の生涯：木簡が語る中国古代人の日常生活

Editor:

宮宅潔 (MIYAKE, Kiyoshi)

Publication date:
July 2021

Publisher:

臨川書店

Table of Contents:
はじめに

第一章　人の誕生
第一節　出生の吉凶　／　第二節　いのちの始まり

第二章　出生届――中国古代の戸籍制度――
第一節　戸籍制度のあらまし　／　第二節　戸籍制度の整備

第三章　喜をとりまく人たち――家族制度・郷里制度――
第一節　家族の暮らし　／　第二節　郷里社会のすがた

第四章　書記官への道――教育制度――
第一節　書記官の養成とその地位　／　第二節　知識習得の場とテキスト

第五章　役人生活の始まり――地方行政制度・裁判制度――
第一節　官吏のキャリアと地方官府の構造　／　第二節　「治獄」の仕事

第六章　結婚と夫婦関係――婚姻制度――
第一節　喜の結婚　／　第二節　夫婦関係

第七章　従軍生活――秦の戦役史と軍事制度――
第一節　秦の軍事制度　／　第二節　兵士の日常

第八章　喜のそれから
第一節　喜の後半生――両親の死と相続――　／　第二節　始皇帝の臣民として

第九章　老いと死――人生の終わりに――
第一節　寿命とやまい　／　第二節　死と葬送

Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue: An Annotated Translation of Wu Yue Chunqiu

Author:

Jianjun He

Publication date:

April 2021

Publisher:

Cornell University Press

Abstract:

Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue is the first complete English translation of Wu Yue Chunqiu, a chronicle of two neighboring states during China's Spring and Autumn period. This collection of political history, philosophy, and fictional accounts depicts the rise and fall of Wu and Yue and the rivalry between them, the inspiration for centuries of poetry, vernacular fiction, and drama.

Wu Yue Chunqiu makes use of rich sources from the past, carefully adapting and developing them into complex stories. Historical figures are transformed into distinctive characters; simple records of events are fleshed out and made tangible. The result is a nuanced record that is both a compelling narrative and a valuable historical text. As one of the earliest examples of a regional history, Wu Yue Chunqiu is also an important source for the history of what is now Zhejiang and Jiangsu.

In Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yue, Jianjun He's engaging translation and extensive annotations make this significant historical and literary work accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1. The Tradition of the Great Earl of Wu

2. The Tradition of King Shoumeng of Wu

3. The Tradition of King Liao Commanded Gongzi Guang

4. The Inner Tradition of Helu

5. The Inner Tradition of Fuchai

6. The Outer Tradition of King Wuyu of Yue

7. The Outer Tradition of Goujian as a Servant

8. The Outer Tradition of Goujian's Return to His State

9. The Outer Tradition of Goujian's Secret Plots

10. The Outer Tradition of Goujian Attacking Wu

Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action

Author:
Mercedes Valmisa

Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Publication date:
September 2021

Abstract:
If you are from the West, it is likely that you normally assume that you are a subject who relates to objects and other subjects through actions that spring purely from your own intentions and will. Chinese philosophers, however, show how mistaken this conception of action is. Philosophy of action in Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the Western philosophical narrative. While the latter usually assumes we are discrete individual subjects with the ability to act or to effect change, Classical Chinese philosophers theorize that human life is embedded in endless networks of relationships with other entities, phenomena, and socio-material contexts. These relations are primary to the constitution of the person, and hence acting within an early Chinese context is interacting and co-acting along with others, human or nonhuman.

This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical Chinese philosophers, one which attempts to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency-what Mercedes Valmisa calls "adapting" or "adaptive agency" (yin) As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires heightened self- and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response. These capacities allow the agent to “co-raise” courses of action ad hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems.

Adapting is one of the world's oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to cope with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines. Valmisa exemplifies how to build meaningful philosophical theories without treating individual books or putative authors as locations of stable intellectual positions, opening brand-new topics in Chinese and comparative philosophy.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Chapter 1: What is Adaptive Agency?
Chapter 2: Locating Adaptive Agency
Chapter 3: Strategy and Control
Chapter 4: The Reifying Pattern
Chapter 5: Coping with Uncertainty
Chapter 6: The Unifying Pattern