September 2026
Convict Politics: From Utopia to Serfdom in Early China (221 BCE—23 CE)
Register: https://tangcenter-columbia.org/september-11-2026/ This talk, based on newly mined data from newly unearthed manuscripts and traditional sources, explores convict politics in the early Chinese empires. Whereas a substantial number of bureaucratic personnel were convict laborers, assisting local officials, the central court reemployed numerous previously convicted individuals as high officials. The talk argues that convict politics emerged because the mutual responsibility system and high-performance-oriented law extensively criminalized people, including the innocent. Via a framework of legal regulations, structured institutional mechanisms, and systematic…
Find out more »October 2026
Manufacturing Early China (MERCH): A Multi-disciplinary Investigation into the Rise, Development and Impacts of Mass Production in Early China
Register: https://tangcenter-columbia.org/october-9-2026/ While it is widely accepted among scholars of Early China that mass production characterized several industries, or at least parts of them by the end of the first millennium BCE, this fact has not been accorded the historical importance it deserves. Among economic historians, mass production is widely recognized to have played a role in sweeping economic, political and social changes but is also seen as strictly a modern, post-Industrial Revolution phenomenon. If mass-production did exist in Early…
Find out more »December 2026
Unified Variations: Reproducing Qin Imperial Edicts on Weights and Measures
This talk focuses on variations in Qin emperors’ edicts on weights and measures, which were installed and reinstalled on these objects to commemorate unification, mandate standardization, eulogize the dynastic progenitor, and affirm his successor’s authority. It argues that subtle differences among surviving examples expose a tension between the imperial center’s ideal of uniformity and local implementation. Although models of standardization originated at the center, their reproduction depended on officials and artisans in particular sites; the very objects that proclaimed uniformity…
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