LRCCS Noon Lecture Series | An Act of Imperial Generosity: Remaking the Social Order in first century BCE China

The period of relative stability following the death of Wudi (r. 141-87 BCE) ushered in complex changes to Western Han society, in China proper as well as in the borderlands. This talk will use an act of generosity of 62 BCE to examine how the social order was rethought and remade during this period. By exempting descendants of noble families of the first century BCE from tax and labor services, Xuandi (r. 74-48 BCE) helped engineer the constitution of a sub-elite around the capital, a sub-elite that was linked, through ties of memory and descent, to the great noble lineages that arose after the Han founding.

Griet Vankeerberghen is a historian of the Western and Eastern Han dynasties. An Associate Professor at the Department of History and Classical Studies of McGill University (Montreal, Canada), she graduated from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium (1986, 1990) and of Princeton University (Ph.D., 1997). She is author of "The Huainanzi and Liu An’s Claim to Moral Authority" (SUNY Press, 2001), and editor, with Michael Nylan, of "Chang’an 26 BCE: An Augustan Age in China" (University of Washington Press 2014). She has published articles on several Western Han texts and their social, political and material contexts, including the Huainanzi, Shiji, the "Four Lost Classics" and "Shangshu dazhuan." She is currently engaged in a research project on Western Han Chang’an, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. With Hans Beck, she is co-director of the Global Antiquities Research Network (globalantiquities.org). You can reach her at griet.vankeerberghen@mcgill.ca.