Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
The Legalist School of Thought and the Rise of the Qin State: China Unified as an Empire
Summary
This lecture will focus on the career of Lord Shang and his Legalist school of thought, the rise of the Qin state as the bastion of legalist policies c. 897 BCE and reforms (unification of writing, currency, roads), as well as book burning and the Great Wall.
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite teaches Chinese History, Middle Eastern and Islamic history, and sometimes Jewish history, at NYU. He is author of The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Harvard, 2005); The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford, 2009); He is co-editor of Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Culture, and Politics (Brandeis, 2013); The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept (Columbia University Press, 2017), and Time and Language: New Sinology and Chinese History, (Hawaii University Press, 2023).