From the perspective of China's political elite, the late Tang dynasty was a period of great change. The civil service examinations were gaining in prestige and significance. Newly established provincial governments were spurring the emergence of regional elites. And the expansion of commerce gave merchants a growing position in society. Remarkably, however, the old aristocratic clans succeeded in maintaining their near total political dominance for well over a century despite these changes. How did they manage to adapt and survive? By exploiting database information on over 30,000 individuals, Professor Tackett will explore how a better understanding of the Tang political elite's social networks can help resolve this question.
Nicolas Tackett is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2006 and received postdoctoral fellowships from the Getty Research Institute and Stanford University. He recently completed a monograph that utilizes a large biographical database to explain the survival and demise of the medieval Chinese aristocracy. He is working on a second monograph that will look at how unusual social, political, and geopolitical factors during the eleventh century drove China to develop a new sense of its place in the world.