Landscapes and Cityscapes of Power: The Rise of Territorial States in Ancient China
Introduction
Ancient China between 700–300 BCE was an age of dynamic state-building that witnessed the rise of a radically new type of state organization: the territorial state. For the first time in Chinese history, state power came to be grounded in centralized administrative and infrastructural control over lands, populations, and resources. As a crucial component of this process, the state reshaped and redefined the spaces it ruled to convert physical landscapes into governed territories. This talk explores how such territorial states emerged and how they transformed the natural and urban landscapes they occupied by examining the history of the Qi state in eastern China, one of the major regional powers of the era.
About the Speaker
Chris Kim is a historian of early China whose interdisciplinary research explores state-building, political economy, and urbanism in the Zhou dynasty. His current book project, Building the Qi State, examines the spatial, economic, and infrastructural dynamics of state power in Qi over the course of its transformation from a peripheral polity in present-day Shandong Province to a major territorial power of eastern China in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, c. 700-300 BCE. Chris is also working on a range of related projects including Eastern Zhou kingship, early Chinese coinage, and the cross-cultural exchange of metallurgical knowledge in the greater Yellow Sea region in antiquity. He received his PhD from Columbia University and MA from Harvard University. Before coming to Yale, he was a visiting assistant professor at New York University.