State Power in Ancient China and Rome

Walter Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of fourteen books, including Rome and China and The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean.

• Contributors ; Chronology ; Maps ; Introduction ; Walter Scheidel ; 1 Kingship and elite formation ; Peter Fibiger Bang and Karen Turner ; 2 Toward a comparative understanding of the executive decision-making process in China and Rome ; Corey Brennan ; 3 The Han bureaucracy: its origin, structure and development ; Dingxin Zhao ; 4 The common denominator: late Roman imperial bureaucracy from a comparative perspective ; Peter Eich ; 5 State revenue and expenditure in the Han and Roman empires ; Walter Scheidel ; 6 Urban systems in the Han and Roman empires: state power and social control ; Carlos Norena ; 7 Public spaces in cities in the Roman and Han empires ; Mark Lewis ; 8 Ghosts, gods, and the coming apocalypse: empire and religion in early China and ancient Rome ; Michael Puett ; Bibliography ; Index

To close, this is a fascinating and persuasive depiction of two of the most important empires of the ancient world. In providing such a detailed analysis of both, this book allows not just for an implicit defence of comparative history but demands that we as scholars ask new questions about familiar topics and subjects. The different approaches to comparative history here, by scholars writing together, or leaning is important, but so too is the wider concern, that the language and practice of empire must be reclaimed by historians.