Böcker av Mark Edward Lewis

After the collapse of the Han dynasty, China divided along a north-south line. Lewis traces the changes that underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw China's geographic redefinition, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes to family life, literary and social developments, and the introduction of new religions.

This book provides new insight into the creation of the Chinese empire by examining the changing forms of permitted violence-warfare, hunting, sacrifice, punishments, and vengeance. It analyzes the interlinked evolution of these violent practices to reveal changes in the nature of political authority, in the basic units of social organization, and in the fundamental commitments of the ruling elite. The work offers a new interpretation of the changes that underlay the transformation of the Chinese polity from a league of city states dominated by aristocratic lineages to a unified, territorial state controlled by a supreme autocrat and his agents. In addition, it shows how a new pattern of violence was rationalized and how the Chinese of the period incorporated their ideas about violence into the myths and proto-scientific theories that provided historical and natural prototypes for the imperial state.

Traces the evolving uses of writing to command assent and authority in early China, an evolution that culminated in the establishment of a textual canon as the basis of imperial authority.

Traces the history of imperial China from the beginnings of unification under the Qin emperor in the third century BCE to the end of the Qing dynasty in the early twentieth century. This title also captures a dynamic era in which Tang dynasty reached its greatest geographical extent under Chinese rule.

In 221 BC the First Emperor of Qin unified what would become the heart of a Chinese empire whose major features would endure for two millennia. In the first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, Lewis highlights the key challenges facing court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity.