상세정보

In a series of pioneering comparative studies, leading historians break new ground by exploring government and power relations in the two largest empires of the ancient world. They shed new light on key issues such as elite formation, the rise of bureaucracies, and the determinants of urban development.

The Chinese and the Romans created the largest empires of the ancient world. Separated by thousands of miles of steppe, mountains and sea, these powerful states developed independently and with very limited awareness of each other's existence. This parallel process of state formation served as a massive natural experiment in social evolution that provides unique insight into the complexities of historical causation. Comparisons between the two empires shed new light on the factors that led to particular outcomes and help us understand similarities and differences in ancient state formation. The explicitly comparative perspective adopted in this volume opens up a dialogue between scholars from different areas of specialization, encouraging them to address big questions about the nature of imperial rule. In a series of interlocking case studies, leading experts of early China and the ancient Mediterranean explore the relationship between rulers and elite groups, the organization and funding of government, and the ways in which urban development reflected the interplay between state power and communal civic institutions. Bureaucratization, famously associated with Qin and Han China but long less prominent in the Roman world, receives special attention as an index of the ambitions and capabilities of kings and emperors. The volume concludes with a look at the preconditions for the emergence of divine rulership. Taken together, these pioneering contributions lay the foundations for a systematic comparative history of early empires.

정보제공 :

Contributors		ix
Chronology		xiii
Maps		xvi
Introduction	Walter Scheidel; 	3
1	Kingship and Elite Formation	Peter Fibiger Bang; Karen Turner; 	11
2	Toward a Comparative Understanding of the Executive Decision-Making Process in China and Rome	T. Corey Brennan; 	39
3	The Han Bureaucracy: Its Origin, Nature, and Development	Dingxin Zhao; 	56
4	The Common Denominator: Late Roman Imperial Bureaucracy from a Comparative Perspective	Peter Eich; 	90
5	State Revenue and Expenditure in the Han and Roman Empires	Walter Scheidel; 	150
6	Urban Systems in the Han and Roman Empires: State Power and Social Control	Carlos F. Noreña; 	181
7	Public Spaces in Cities in the Roman and Han Empires	Mark Edward Lewis; 	204
8	Ghosts, Gods, and the Coming Apocalypse: Empire and Religion in Early China and Ancient Rome	Michael Puett; 	230
Bibliography		261
Index		297