Paperwork Before Paper: Law and Materiality in China's Early Empires (221 BCE-220 CE)

xThis dissertation examines the role of law in the formation of China’s earliest empires (221 BCE-220 CE). Using thousands of manuscripts written on bamboo and wood which have been excavated in China in the several decades, I argue that legal practice was central to the formation of imperial identity. Building on theoretical insights from the anthropology of paperwork, as well as from recent studies of manuscript culture, I argue that legal manuscripts can be read not only as representations or records of social conditions, but as material objects whose production and circulation itself constituted new forms of sociality. Eschewing a conventional law and society approach, my dissertation follows a diverse array of actors —women, servants, magistrates, foreigners and family members— as they use practices of writing and law to lodge claims of status, identity, kinship, and property. In linking newly excavated manuscripts with discussions of law and materiality, this dissertation aims to challenge multiple orthodoxies derived from notions of European legal and bureaucratic modernity. Accounts of early law have long cited certain types of legal text, such as penal statutes, as evidence for the idea that early law was informed by the rationality of state and directed at social control. By locating legal practice not in state sanction but in the circulation of legal manuscripts, I am able to reframe this persistent debate to take account both of newly discovered manuscripts and also to interpret receive sources in new ways. My dissertation thus complements and provides crucial context for revisionist trends in the historiography of imperial China that query the central presumption of despotism and legal orientalism. By linking law to material practices, I am further able to sidestep teleological narratives of rationalization and state control, and to provide a plausible explanation of why imperial legal culture could persist both beyond the geographic reach of the imperia