Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
The Fall of the Qin and the Rise of Han Dynasty: China’s First Golden Age
Summary
The fall of the Qin dynasty (206 BCE) in China led to widespread civil war. Out of this turmoil, the commoner Liu Bang rose to power, eventually establishing the Han Dynasty, which would go on to rule for the next four centuries, a period which saw the ascendance of the mandarin class and the establishment of Confucianism as the state ideology.
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).