Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Violence and the Rise of Centralized States in East Asia
  • Cited by 10
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2022
Print publication year:
2022
Online ISBN:
9781108975551
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108975551
Subjects:
East Asian History, Area Studies, Asian Studies, History, Archaeology of Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and The Pacific
Series:
Elements in Ancient East Asia
Information

Book description

Violence, both physical and nonphysical, is central to any society, but it is a version of the problem that it claims to solve. This Element examines how states in ancient East Asia, from the late Shang through the end of the Han dynasty, wielded violence to create and display authority, and also how their licit violence was entangled in the 'savage' or 'criminal' violence whose suppression justified their power. The East Asian cases are supplemented through citing comparable Western ones. The themes examined include the emergence of the warrior as a human type, the overlap of hunts and combat (and the overlap between treatments of alien species and alien peoples), sacrifice of both alien captives and 'death attendants' from one's own groups, the impact of military specialization and the increased scale of armies, the emergent ideal of self-sacrifice, and the diverse aspects of violence in the regime of law.

References

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.