A Commons Approach to Violence and Inequity: Public goods, Enchaining, and the Reconstitution of the Shang Kingdom under Wu Ding

Summary

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In Chinese archaeology the question of how large-scale political collectives came into being is usually understood under the rubric of “state formation.” In addition to the issue of the potential reification of an anachronism in the state concept, early complex polities are generally imagined in terms of political and economic centralization with the focus on first occurrences. The implicit assumption is that once “states” have formed, a new era has dawned and the rest is just politics. This perspective tends to obscure the fact that every polity is both a novel experiment and a continuation of historical precedent and that inflection points and structure changing events occur at multiple scales and temporalities. I will focus on the Shang kingdom centered at Anyang during the reign of king Wu Ding (ca. 1250-1200 BCE). I will analyze Wu Ding’s institutional innovations as a set of solutions to the problem of establishing and maintaining a hierarchical political community against a backdrop of diverse elite and non-elite interests. It will be argued that a commons perspective enables an understanding of how prestige practices were re-coded as public goods allowing both for their expansion and redeployment in the service of enhanced inequity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38205.0