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Established in 221 BCE, the Chinese empire lasted for 2,132 years before being replaced by the Republic of China in 1912. During its two millennia, the empire endured internal wars, foreign incursions, alien occupations, and devastating rebellions--yet fundamental institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural features of the empire remained intact.The Everlasting Empiretraces the roots of the Chinese empire's exceptional longevity and unparalleled political durability, and shows how lessons from the imperial past are relevant for China today. Yuri Pines demonstrates that the empire survived and adjusted to a variety of domestic and external challenges through a peculiar combination of rigid ideological premises and their flexible implementation. The empire's major political actors and neighbors shared its fundamental ideological principles, such as unity under a single monarch--hence, even the empire's strongest domestic and foreign foes adopted the system of imperial rule. Yet details of this rule were constantly negotiated and adjusted. Pines shows how deep tensions between political actors including the emperor, the literati, local elites, and rebellious commoners actually enabled the empire's basic institutional framework to remain critically vital and adaptable to ever-changing sociopolitical circumstances. As contemporary China moves toward a new period of prosperity and power in the twenty-first century, Pines argues that the legacy of the empire may become an increasingly important force in shaping the nation's future trajectory.

Lord Byron described Greece as great, fallen, and immortal, a characterization more apt than he knew. Through most of its long history, Greece was poor. But in the classical era, Greece was densely populated and highly urbanized. Many surprisingly healthy Greeks lived in remarkably big houses and worked for high wages at specialized occupations. Middle-class spending drove sustained economic growth and classical wealth produced a stunning cultural efflorescence lasting hundreds of years. Why did Greece reach such heights in the classical period-and why only then? And how, after \"the Greek miracle\" had endured for centuries, did the Macedonians defeat the Greeks, seemingly bringing an end to their glory? Drawing on a massive body of newly available data and employing novel approaches to evidence, Josiah Ober offers a major new history of classical Greece and an unprecedented account of its rise and fall. Ober argues that Greece's rise was no miracle but rather the result of political breakthroughs and economic development. The extraordinary emergence of citizen-centered city-states transformed Greece into a society that defeated the mighty Persian Empire. Yet Philip and Alexander of Macedon were able to beat the Greeks in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, a victory made possible by the Macedonians' appropriation of Greek innovations. After Alexander's death, battle-hardened warlords fought ruthlessly over the remnants of his empire. But Greek cities remained populous and wealthy, their economy and culture surviving to be passed on to the Romans-and to us. A compelling narrative filled with uncanny modern parallels, this is a book for anyone interested in how great civilizations are born and die. This book is based on evidence available on a new interactive website. To learn more, please visit: http://polis.stanford.edu/.

The aim of this essay is to contribute to the anthropological exploration of “traditional culture” in the Chinese south. Focussing on a description of one early-spring celebration in a township in Jiangxi Province, it suggests that these ceremonies are connected only superficially with local society and therefore lack a local message. A brief comparison suggests that there was nationwide conformity in the staging of these ceremonies, a degree of conventionality pointing to a single common origin —the discourse of the imperial state. Supreme dominance was articulated in ways that made the idea of the omnipotent emperor blessing his country manifest locally. Historically foreign to local southern societies, the festival was concerned with political incorporation, while still maintaining a degree of social alienation in that its main rituals were performed by the local state administrators alone. Demotic responses in local southern cultural contexts were limited and different.

This book, the first full account of Japan’s financial history and the Japanese gold standard in the pivotal years before World War II, provides a new perspective on the global political dynamics of the era by placing Japan, rather than Europe, at the center of the story. Focusing on the fall of liberalism in Japan in late 1931 and the global politics of money that were at the center of the crisis, Mark Metzler asks why successive Japanese governments from 1920 to 1931 carried out policies that deliberately induced deflation and depression. His search for answers stretches from Edo to London to the ragged borderlands of the Japanese empire and from the eighteenth century to the 1950s, integrating political and monetary analysis to shed light on the complex dynamics of money, empire, and global hegemony. His detailed and broad ranging account illuminates a range of issues including Japan’s involvement in the economic dynamics that shook interwar Europe, the character of U.S. isolationism, and the rise of fascism as an international phenomenon.

Covenants without Swords examines an enduring tension within liberal theory: that between many liberals' professed commitment to universal equality on the one hand, and their historic support for the politics of hierarchy and empire on the other. It does so by examining the work of two extremely influential British liberals and internationalists, Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern. Jeanne Morefield mounts a forceful challenge to disciplinary boundaries by arguing that this tension, on both the domestic and international levels, is best understood as frequently arising from the same, liberal reformist political aim--namely, the aim of fashioning a socially conscious liberalism that ultimately reifies putatively natural, preliberal notions of paternalistic order.

This article suggests that the Yao religious domain should be considered as an interface where the Chinese imperial state attempted to assert its “civilizing” power by incorporating local society into official governance, yet also where the Yao not only assimilated but also transformed imperial influences in the light of their own cultural values. It explores these issues by describing the patrilineal ideology of Yao ordination and its impact on the transmission of ritual manuscripts. Another key issue centres on the ways in which the ideological basis of filial piety, an important Confucian value at the core of ancestor worship, has been re-employed to sustain the practice of Yao ordination as well as their manuscript culture. Yao ritual manuscripts have generally been regarded as literary manifestations of the success of the imperial “civilizing project” among non-Han peoples, with previous scholarship considering Yao ritual manuscripts in terms of their contents and treating them as mere “textual artefacts”. In contrast, this essay argues in favor of conceptualizing Yao ritual manuscripts as “objects of value”, and shows how the Yao have projected their diverse perceptions of the state’s “civilizing” power as part of the cultural value attached to writing, as well as the object-hood embodied in ritual manuscripts.

This chapter evaluates how the DeLanceys governed in the assembly after the 1769 elections. It examines how they tried to maintain support considering fresh opposition and politically naïve governing as New Yorkers increasingly believed that Parliament was exerting undue control over their lives. The DeLanceys' political rise in 1760s Manhattan was driven by and dependent on their inclusion of non-elites in the political economic process, and their focus on financial stability was a form of economic reductionism. Their mistake challenged their political ascendancy, as some New Yorkers saw them as somewhat Manichean. One person confronted them head on, Alexander McDougall. McDougall's opposition to the DeLanceys presented New Yorkers with a competing political economy. Like many other radicals, he vehemently opposed Parliament's reorientation of the British imperial state.

This paper examines the intense competition between Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605)-the effective founder of the Mughal Empire in India-and his Kabul-based half-brother, Mirza Hakim (d. 1585). A focus on this rivalry serves to highlight the critical but historically unacknowledged role played by Mirza Hakim in shaping the trajectory of Akbar's reign and also that of the Mughal Empire in India. It is also intended to underline the continued significance of connective links between Central Asia and South Asia decades after the founding of the Mughal Empire in 1526. /// Cet article examine la concurrence intense entre l'empereur Akbar (règne 1556-1605)-le fondateur véritable de l'empire Moghol en Inde-et son demi-frère, basé à Kaboul, Mirza Hakim (d. 1585). L'étude de cette rivalité sert à souligner le rôle crucial mais historiquement méconnu joué par Mirza Hakim dans la définition de la trajectoire du règne d'Akbar ainsi que dans celle de l'empire Moghol en Inde. Cet exposé vise aussi à relever l'importance continue des liens entre l'Asie centrale et l'Asie du sud pendant plusieurs décennies après la fondation de l'empire Moghol en 1526.

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