How China’s Early Empires Conquered and Colonized the Yangtze Delta

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

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Since the twelfth century CE, the Yangtze delta has been among the world’s most prosperous places, a region that defined high culture across East Asia. This would have seemed a highly implausible future to most people in the Han empire (c. 200 BCE-200 CE) who tended to see the region as a miasmic swamp inhabited by tattooed barbarians. This talk will analyze how the Chu, Qin and Han empires conquered and colonized this region, gradually transforming it from a culturally alien frontier into a regular, if remote, part of the Han empire. The paucity of texts on this region’s early history reflects the disdain early China’s literate elites held towards it and makes archaeological evidence particularly important. I will argue that existing historiography on this region has been profoundly shaped by the lack of alternatives to the narratives written by officials of the Han central government. Because they rely so heavily on these sources, subsequent historians have tended to adopt a perspective of the imperial state and have rarely acknowledged the silence of the colonized, whose languages were eradicated by the Chinese empires.   

Brian Lander is a historian of early China who combines textual, archaeological and paleoecological evidence to study the long history of how humans replaced China's natural ecosystems with ones built by and for people. His first book The King’s Harvest explored the ecology of China’s early political systems. It showed how early states had to transform their environments in order to gain the resources they needed to build their power, and then once the imperial system was established it became key forces in subsequent environmental change. He has also written on topics including the water control and deforestation in early China, and has co-authored papers on the histories of pigs, cattle, deer, and soybeans in China. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2015.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

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