summarizes how key concepts like tianxia (All-under-Heaven) and jiaohua (assimilation) have been traced throughout to illustrate conditions leading to the formation of collective identities. This chapter offers closing thoughts on the entangled relationship between empire and ethnicity and ways to reanimate studies of ethnicity outside the standard idiom of biology.

Chapter 5 examines the craft industry in the capital core, as well as state-run workshops attached in the core region, to shed light on the mass production and distribution of military supplies and key commodities, such as iron farming implements and ceramics. These lines of evidence provide a framework to illustrate the economic foundation of the imperial state and imperial regimes of value.

Chapter 6 explores the craft industries for both prestige items (silk, lacquerware, bronze) and mundane commodities goods (iron and ceramics) in peripheries. This chapter suggests that the circulation of Han-style commodities constituted a new commercial network of intertwined state- and privately run workshops. A “biography of objects” approach employed in this chapter also illustrates how interpersonal relationships and social lives of imperial subjects were shaped by participation as consumers.

Chapter 2 compares patterns of population growth and settlement organization of the Ordos and Lingnan – two frontier regions – in a diachronic framework to argue for the transformation of frontier zones into extended networks and bounded territories in the middle Western Han. The Great Wall is reprised as a spatial infrastructure that is central to understanding Han imperialism as both an economic enterprise and a form of settler colonialism.

This chapter outlines a key debate in the study of the Han Empire that is currently represented by proponents of a “fictive” versus “realist” view of empire building in early China. It makes a case for the book’s archaeological approach, namely the potential for recently excavated materials to trace the emergence of a constellation of universal ideas about imperialism, cultural unity, and sovereignty in China. These ideas will be examined along four domains of Han sociopolitical life – Part i Imperial Geography, Part ii Agriculture and Foodways, Part iii Craft Industries, and Part iv Ritual – as documented in core and frontier regions.

Chapter 3 looks at the relationship between the state and its imperial subjects through the politics of food production in the core. Pairing historical sources with the archaeology of spatial infrastructures (i.e., granaries and irrigation systems), this chapter evaluates how the state’s active involvement in intensifying crop production also led to the development of new techniques for transforming fields and imperial subjects into legible units.

Chapter 8 expands on funerary practices of Yue/Viet, Qiang, and “Xiongnu” subjects and asks how and why ritual conversion, which underlines the assimilationist campaign of jiaohua, was carried out. Through a comparison of tombs belonging to indigenous and Central Plains diasporic groups, this chapter argues that cultural boundaries dividing the Han/non-Han or Huaxia/ non-Huaxia world were magnified by differences in the presentation of the deceased’s physical body along ethnic and gender norms.