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Science and Civilisation in China, Part 7, Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic
The Gunpowder Epic is one of three planned publications on military technology within Dr Needham's immense undertaking. The discovery of gunpowder in China by the 9th century AD was followed by its rapid applications. It is now clear that the whole development from bombs and grenades to the invention of the metal-barrel hand gun took place in the Chinese culture area before Europeans had any knowledge of the mixture itself. Uses in civil engineering and mechanical engineering were equally important, before the knowledge of gunpowder spread to Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Dr Needham's new work continues to demonstrate the major importance of Chinese science and technology to world history and maintains the tradition of one of the great scholarly works of the twentieth century.
Herself an Author
"Grace Fong has written a wonderful history of female writers’ participation in the elite conventions of Chinese poetics. Fong’s recovery of many of these poets, her able exegesis and elegant, analytical grasp of what the poets were doing is a great read, and her bilingual presentation of their poetry gives the book additional power. This is a persuasive and elegant study." —Tani Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism "In this quietly authoritative book, Grace Fong has brought a group of women poets back to life. Previously ignored by scholars because of their marginal status or the inaccessibility of their works, these remarkable writers now speak to us about the ...
Sharing the Light
Explores historical and philosophical shifts in the depiction of women and virtue in the early years of the Chinese state. Includes an examination of the history of yin-yang theories.
The Pristine Dao
The Laozi (Daodejing) and the Zhuangzi have long been familiar to Western readers and have served as basic sources of knowledge about early Chinese Daoism. Modern translations and studies of these works have encouraged a perception of Daoism as a mystical philosophy heavy with political implications that advises kings to become one with the Dao. Breaking with this standard approach, The Pristine Dao argues that the Laozi and the Zhuangzi participated in a much wider tradition of metaphysical discourse that included a larger corpus of early Chinese writings. This book demonstrates that early Daoist discourse possessed a distinct, textually constituted coherence and a religious sensibility tha...
The Imperial Qín Dynasty
The Lǐyē 里耶 text corpus, which is named after an ancient township in present-day Lóngshān 龍山, Húnán province, grants unique opportunities to reshape the image and redefine our knowledge about social, legal, political, administrative and ritual responsibilities of the first Chinese empire. The impressive collection of over 37,000 documents span a time period from 222 to 208 BC and grant a unique opportunity to reshape the image and redefine our knowledge about social, legal, political, logistical and ritual responsibilities of the first Chinese empire. This book is concerned with the overall governance at the southern fringes of the Qín dynasty as reflected in the excavated doc...
The Construction of Space in Early China
This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.
The Thinking Past
"This book takes an analytical approach to world history. Instead of proceeding through history descriptively, it looks at several major questions and ideas, such as the role of technology, the development of universal religions, global trade, or participatory politics. If this sounds thematic, it is. But it also progresses chronologically, analyzing these themes as they apply in certain eras. We use both primary sources in-text, and the latest scholarship as secondary source. These we use frequently in each chapter both to employ the voices of scholars where they say things better than we could, and footnote them for students' reference. We also hope to convey the sense that all this content is part of an ongoing debate amongst historians--and scholars from different disciplines. Finally we attempt to keep the text accessible by focusing on narrative elements of history, and keeping in mind that the readers are undergraduates, often with little exposure to the subject matter. However, the level of ideas remains high"--Provided by publisher.
The King's Harvest
A multidisciplinary environmental history of early China's political systems, featuring newly available Chinese archaeological data 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.
Slavery and Other Forms of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies
In der Buchreihe des "Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies" werden Monographien und Tagungsbände, die das Phänomen der Sklaverei und andere Formen asymmetrischer Abhängigkeiten in Gesellschaften untersuchen, veröffentlicht. Die Reihe folgt dabei der Forschungsagenda des BCDSS, die die vorherrschende dichotomische Vorstellung von "Sklaverei versus Freiheit" überwindet. Das Cluster hat dazu ein neues Schlüsselkonzept ("asymmetrische Abhängigkeiten") entwickelt, das alle Ausprägungen von ungleichen Dependenzen (wie etwa Schuldknechtschaft, Zwangsarbeit, Dienstbarkeit, Leibeigenschaft, Hausarbeit, aber auch gewisse Formen der Lohnarbeit und der Patronage) berücksichtigt. Dabei werden auch Epochen, Räume und Kontexte der Weltgeschichte bearbeitet, die nicht der europäischen Kolonisierung ausgesetzt waren (z.B. altorientalische Kulturen sowie vormoderne und moderne Gesellschaften in Asien, Afrika und den Amerikas).
Social Memory and State Formation in Early China
A thought-provoking book on the archaeology of power, knowledge, social memory, and the emergence of classical tradition in early China.
