This dissertation examines the vital role of bronze in the political, economic, and cultural interactions in the southern borderlands during the period of the Zhou dynasty (1045-256 BCE) in present-day Hubei province, China. It shows how the bronze economy – the production, exchange, and consumption of bronze goods – transformed the borderlands landscape. It adopts a bottom-up perspective and argues that instead of controlling the redistribution of metal, the Zhou state competed and negotiated with the local powers on the acquisition of metal resources. The regional states and indigenous polities were not passively acculturated to the Zhou center but developed local bronze culture and casting technology. Through the economic perspective, this dissertation examines social interaction not in the traditional binary of center and periphery or the royal domain and regional states but in politico-economic zones transcending political boundaries. Based on textual, archeological, and paleographical evidence, it discusses how the indigenous people in the southeastern Hubei mining region joined a transregional economic network. It also traces metal exchange, bronze production, and technology innovation in the Sui-Zao Corridor, the crossroads connecting north and south throughout the Zhou dynasty. This dissertation uses archaeometallurgical method to examine the circulation of bronze-smelting knowledge between Sujialong and other mining societies. Statistical analysis of the Sifangtang cemetery makes it possible to reconstruct the changing societal organization at the Tonglüshan mines under different political powers. This dissertation argues that the bronze economy led to unique ways of social interaction and created transregional social networks, and thus shaped the southern borderlands of the Zhou dynasty.

This study examines the centralization and territorialization of state power in early China by analyzing the long-term developments in the sociopolitical structures, spatial organization, and political economy of the Qi 齊 state in present-day Shandong Province. It argues that the rise of the centralized and autocratic territorial states of Warring States China (453–221 BCE) was underpinned by the emergence of a particular matrix of sociopolitical and economic institutions that were, in a departure from the lineage- and kin-based power structures prevalent in the early first millennium BCE, predicated on certain principles of territoriality including direct infrastructural and administrative control over lands, populations, and resources. To demonstrate this shift, this study synthesizes a wide range of paleographic, archaeological, received textual, and numismatic evidence to offer a fundamental reassessment of the spatial and institutional dynamics of state power in Qi over the course of the first millennium BCE. Chapter 1 broadly examines the longue durée changes in the organization of the power structures and state institutions most prevalent across the Zhou world. It focuses especially on two main institutions: (1) the Zhou lineage system upon which the sociopolitical order of the Zhou ecumene was based until it lapsed into obsolescence toward the final few centuries of the Zhou period, and (2) the land tenure systems based upon the Zhou lineage order that correspondingly transitioned from one in which state lands were partitioned on the basis of aristocratic lineage settlements to one in which they were centrally reorganized into standardized and multi-tiered territorial-administrative units. Chapter 2 interrogates bronze inscriptions, archaeological data, and received texts to establish the geographic parameters of Qi territorial expansion from the initial Qi core region in present-day Zibo first across northern Shandong and then eventually into adjacent regions in eastern and southern Shandong. It identifies a notable shift in the strategies employed to incorporate Qi’s newly conquered territories around the sixth century BCE whereby instead of appropriating existing local kin-based power networks, Qi rulers began to implement more centralized and direct administrative control. Moreover, this chapter charts the long-term political, administrative, and spatial construction of Qi’s southern frontier in the late Spring and Autumn and early Warring States periods, the figurative and literal capstone of which was the construction of the Long Wall of Qi in the late fifth century BCE. Chapters 3 and 4 further scrutinize the territorial and administrative centralization of Qi by analyzing the internal institutional developments that occurred in Qi in parallel to its external wars of conquest. Chapter 3 investigates how the destructive internecine conflicts between Qi’s elite lineages fundamentally reshaped traditional lineage-based power networks in the state and enabled the consolidation of autocratic rulership, which the Chen lineage ultimately usurped from the old ruling house of Qi in the Warring States period. Chapter 4 examines concomitant developments in the structure of Qi officialdom, military organization, and territorial administration especially of the metropolitan region centered on the Qi capital city of Linzi by analyzing bronze and pottery inscriptions and the archaeological evidence for Linzi. Finally, chapter 5 investigates the relationship between the economic integration of northern Shandong and the centralization of state power in Qi by analyzing the evidence for salt production on the Laizhou Bay coast and the circulation of Qi knife coins to reconstruct the political economic networks of the region. This analysis suggests that state-led production and distribution of key economic resources facilitated the territorial and administrative integration of the Qi state in the Warring States period, thereby shaping Qi into a cohesive political space.