Comparative studies of Greco-Roman antiquity and ancient China have garnered increasing attention over the past two decades. The volume under review originates in a workshop held in Montreal in 2017. Framed through a comparative lens, it brings together specialists of Greece, Rome and early China to explore how ‘place’ and ‘performance’ interacted to shape political culture, social identities and lived environments across the three major ancient civilisations. The editors’ introduction (1–16) sets out a conceptual framework: that imperial cultures were marked by simultaneous tendencies toward ideological uniformity and persistent local diversity, and that performances in varied forms and settings were central to the ways in which such multifaceted landscapes were navigated and made meaningful.

The book is divided into four parts. The opening chapter, by Russell, begins with the essential differences in the physical layouts of the cities of Rome and Han Chang’an, but quickly moves on to highlight their underlying conceptual similarities in urban spatiality. By locating these commonalities within elite intellectual constructions of the city as a microcosmos, she clarifies that the cosmological order articulated in later texts (e.g. Varro, Livy, Kao Gong Ji) represents retrospective ideological ascriptions rather than faithful accounts of earlier urban practices, and shows how such analogies became closely intertwined with the formation and expansion of empires. Habberstad’s comparison of Ban Gu’s Dili zhi with Strabo’s Geographika likewise focuses on points of convergence, exploring how imperial consolidation prompted both authors to conceive and represent space. His emphasis on the integration of historical narrative into geographical writing, and on the authors’ shared concern with the historical and administrative dynamics underlying physical geography, makes his chapter one of the most analytically coherent in the volume.

Part II, consisting of four chapters, turns to the performances of imperial power. Terpstra’s chapter considers how official dress, insignia and titulature expressed authority in the Han and Roman empires and offers fresh insight into salient differences in bureaucratic culture. Yet it seems to me that he devotes too much space to outlining broad background contrasts between the two entities at the expense of sustained engagement with the specific texts and materials under analysis. Totten’s exploration of agricultural labour as performance is notable for its wide evidentiary range. Her comparison between the Han emperor’s ritual ploughing and the disparate role played by his Roman counterpart in grain distribution is illuminating, underscoring the fundamental differences in performing imperial power in the two empires where agriculture was regarded as the backbone of the state. Yet in contrast to the more nuanced and textured picture revealed by the Roman case, the Chinese is at times framed through categories such as ‘rigidity’ or ‘one-size-fits-all’ structures, which can risk flattening the complexities of Han agrarian governance. In the following chapter, Zhou approaches the material from a fresh angle, offering a compelling comparison of the ritualised performances through which Emperor Wu of Han and Nero received surrendered foreign rulers. Particularly fascinating is the contrast she draws between the Han historiographical tendency to mute foreign voices and the Roman literary practice of giving Parthian royals a more active and articulate presence. The final chapter of this section, by Giroux, draws on specific cases in the works of Plutarch and Sima Qian to argue that both authors sought to present themselves as exemplary figures whose narratives served as mirrors through which readers can examine their own conduct.

Part III (‘Urban Places’) shifts to a micro-spatial scale, exploring neighbourhoods, roads, waterworks and gardens in four free-standing chapters. Abrecht applies Lefebvre’s theories on space and urbanism to the neighbourhoods of Rome and Chang’an, investigating rhythms of daily life and sociability that shed light on the dynamic qualities of urban space. Mohr’s contribution on ‘sacred roads’ draws together Greek, Near Eastern and Chinese evidence to highlight structural parallels in the ways ceremonial routes shaped political and religious landscapes. Chapters by Christopher and Fu on hydrological infrastructures and imperial gardens likewise illustrate how engineered landscapes served as stages for imperial ideology and elite performance. Together, these four chapters succeed in illustrating the range of spatial forms through which power was displayed and exercised, whether in analogous or divergent ways.

Part IV turns to peripheries and funerary contexts. McAuley and Sanft both examine distant frontiers from complementary angles. McAuley traces the transplantation of metropolitan models to cities and client kingdoms in the Hellenistic East and the Han Western Regions, while Sanft treats imperial borders as projections of culturally encoded imaginaries through close readings of the Vindolanda tablets and the Jianshui Jinguan dossiers. Though I found McAuley’s claim (following Chang Chun-shu) that these frontiers generated no distinctive ‘philosophy of life’ (362) less persuasive, the argument overall remains stimulating. Turning to rituals of death, Tian and Selbitschka’s closing chapters illuminate how mortuary coins, funerals, and tomb display articulated power and identity in divergent ways. Particularly tantalising is Tian’s discussion of private funerary associations (dan) in the Han society (428), which opens an intriguing, as-yet-unexplored avenue for comparison with the collegia funeraticia in Rome. Taken together, the four contributions emphatically demonstrate how frontiers and funeral spaces functioned as productive zones for probing the imperial performance and space through a cross-cultural perspective.

A further merit of the volume is the inclusion of helpful abstracts, keywords, and lists of Chinese characters for each chapter. Despite a few minor slips, like the occasional missing or miswritten character (e.g. 李 for 郦, the omission of 理 in dili in ch. 2, 聂嫈 absent from the character list and Huang Yang reversed as Yang Huang in the bibliography of ch. 6), they hardly detract from the volume’s substantial achievements. Overall, the book successfully demonstrates that ‘place’ and ‘performance’ are effective lenses for interpreting early empires from a comparative perspective. It is to be hoped that this impressive volume will galvanise scholars to undertake further comparative work on ancient empires with the confidence and openness that the field urgently needs.