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A Brief History of Ancient China By Edward L. Shaughnessy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 416 pp. £81 (cloth), £26.99 (paper)

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A Brief History of Ancient China By Edward L. Shaughnessy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 416 pp. £81 (cloth), £26.99 (paper)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2024

Michael Nylan*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley, United States

Abstract

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Type
Book Review
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Yang, Lei, Narrative Devices in the Shiji: Retelling the Past (New York: SUNY Press, 2024), 51Google Scholar.

2 Anyone familiar with the complexities of correlating of different pre-imperial calendars must be in awe. For another ancient world, see Feeney's, Denis Caesar's Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Christopher Cullen's impressive body of work, for the Han.

3 Fischer, David Hackett, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (London: Routledge, 1970), 1015Google Scholar, 29–33, 69–77, 95.

4 For details see Nylan, Michael, ed., China's Early Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), chap. 10Google Scholar.

5 Keightley wrote of the Chinese distaste for depicting bloodshed, in a number of places, perhaps most famously in his essay, Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How It Became Chinese,” in Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, edited by Ropp, Paul S. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1554CrossRefGoogle Scholar.