Twelve years after Professor Keightley published The Ancestral Landscape, which was a fascinating, elegant summary of decades of investigations of the Bronze-Age Late Shang dynasty, he has now published another wonderful book on the same era, under the title Working for His Majesty. As the title suggests, and as he recounts in a highly personal preface looking back at the origins of this work, he returns in this book to the topic of his doctoral dissertation on Shang labor (Public Work in Ancient China: A Study of Forced Labor in the Shang and Western Chou, Columbia University, 1969).

One key shift visible in this present work is, as is obvious already from the title, the move away from highlighting “forced labor” (as in slavery and related practices), to that of the “raising of men.” Keightley reveals that this concept of mobilization was the original spark of curiosity that triggered his research interest in the Shang period—when, in a Tokyo bookstore, he saw Shang oracle-bone inscriptions on the “raising of men” transcribed in Shima Kunio's concordance. This concordance became one of the key research tools that would help launch him onto his career deciphering and reading the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions for his own purposes. About ten years later he published his own comprehensive handbook-style assessment of the oracle bones, Sources of Shang History (1978; 2nd revised edition 1985).

The most recent book's title, that of Working for His Majesty, suggests that the labor mobilization that built the Shang kingdom need not have been at gunpoint, with the laborers in chains, but could instead have been obtained through a dynamic network of obligations, of course still aided by the threat and the use of force.

The longstanding controversy over the construction of the Egyptian pyramids comes to mind: many scholars now believe the pyramids were built not by slaves, but by obliged workers, working for their majesty in return for glory, recognition—and beer. Keightley rarely discusses general-comparative issues of this kind, but after reporting (53–58) on the various scholarly opinions of the social status of different Shang workforces (including people working in “slave-like conditions”), he concludes (58) that their labor was a “natural obligation” felt by them all (see, too, 240).

Keightley proposes (58) that we must add Shang China to Moses Finley's list of those emergent state societies (such as Babylonia, and others in the even more ancient Near East) where the kings' subjects were all unfree, but not slaves (except for economically insignificant minorities of true slaves). This is an excellent point of clarification, which can be taken further by drawing on Finley's distinction of societies with slaves (which would include all of the above, since slaves that lacked regular social rights and obligations and who were expoited as chattel did exist in all those societies), and true “slave societies” where the bulk of the wealth of the elites is drawn from slave labor (Rome, the USA, and a few other cases; Finley counts only five such abominations in world history). Finley's classic work Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology Footnote ¹ explicates nicely how those few true slavery systems only arose in certain economic conditions, driven by greed for huge profits from trade products that could be made by manual labor, which in turn was unavailable locally, but was obtained by way of the criminal-but-legal enslavement of foreigners kidnapped and then bred for this purpose.

Such were not the conditions in China. Instead, in ancient China (as in Egypt, etc.), as Keightley points out, labor figured within that dynamic of the state formation process in which the kings, working through their networks to both exploit and provide for “their people” (which was also created at the same time), created the fundamental mystification involved in the ideology of kingship: to make obligations to the king seem “natural.”

What we are witnessing in the late Shang world so painstakingly reconstructed for us by Keightley from the surviving inscriptions, is the crafting, on the one hand, of that ideology of the king's glory and the “natural” obligation for “his people” to uphold and add to it, and on the other hand, of the built material world of the kings that simultaneously embodies and reinforces that fantasy: the Shang palaces and fortifications; their temples, weaponry, and ritual paraphernalia; and so on, all forming part of the mysterious spectacle of kingship, complete with accompanying gestures of royal care for the people that would support it.

It seems to me that The Ancestral Landscape and Working for His Majesty are best read in tandem, with the former spelling out the building-blocks of the ideological framework, and the latter focusing on the construction of its material embodiment. This mutually reinforcing dynamic of state-making is what I myself once attempted to discuss with respect to the limited aspect of Shang royal hunting (graciously quoted by Keightley in his section on the hunt “as a form of dynastic work in action,” Working for His Majesty, 199), where the king took it upon himself to defend against wild enemies, and created himself as king in that very process. As Keightley emphasizes (Working for His Majesty, 5), at this stage the monarchy was still heavily dependent on the personal presence of the king himself in devising and mobilizing that “natural obligation,” in a characteristic “fusion of administrative and religious concerns” (4). For me, the key aspect here of those “religious concerns” would be the mystification of kingship itself as natural, and—in specifically religious terms—the king's claim to special access to superior deities, through oracle-bone divination and other rituals.

This is what Jonathan Friedman, in his theorization of the development of early Chinese kingship, saw as the key element: the royal monopolization of supreme deities as a scheme of mystification that can detach the dynasty from the rest of society.Footnote ² The dynasty was thus located above all the other numerous and locally powerful hosts of feasts and labor that populated the pre-state late Neolithic, including even some remaining contemporary contenders to the Shang. Here Keightley does not much discuss the forging of a special status of dynastic ancestors, one component of the separation of royalty from the rest of the population.Footnote ³ He does, however, make more explicit notice of the difference (predicted in Friedman's scheme) between such ancestor-deities and the un- or non-ancestral character of Di, their god on high (cf. Working for His Majesty, 154, 157, 288). Di “belonged” strictly to the king (that is, to the monarchy, cf. 177; also see The Ancestral Landscape, 100), and helped above all with agriculture (Working for His Majesty, 134, 161) and warfare, another key venture of the emergent-expansionist state (177), and Di was even transferable to and coopted by the conquering successor-dynasty Zhou (288) as a supreme deity that appears decisively separated from “ordinary” kingship, and this forms such a break with the past that some have drawn parallels with similar Babylonian terms (289 n. 22). Exactly! Whether or not it was borrowed from afar is less interesting than the similarity in the role of such a kingly deity, and how it would predictably come to be invented for the same function, at the Shang stage of the making of the monarchical state.

In the perspective of kingship and state-making as a process of ideological mystification that breaks with past practices, the elevation of the royal dynasty as something above and apart, and with particular access to higher deities, is exactly the key element of what Keightley in his felicitous formulation describes as how the Shang

—that is to say, successfully making that exploited labor seem to the laborers like a “natural obligation” to the royalty whose “people” they would now become. And in this sense, the ubiquitous anxiety reflected in the oracle-bone texts about the outcomes of the projects raised there may itself reflect the tenuous success of the royal ruse, in the early stages of its enactment. It seems that only later, in the early empires, do monarchs fully realize Friedman's prediction, “Instead of representative of the community to the gods, he becomes the representative of the gods to the community.”Footnote ⁴

Both Keightley's booksFootnote ⁵ provide a marvelous wealth of materials for thinking about big questions such as these, including the emergence of the Chinese state in global-comparative perspective, and the fashioning of the ideology of kingship on the North China plains, in the late second millennium b.c.e.

The “handbook” style of both books also makes them at the same time invaluable guides to the Late Shang materials for the next generations of researchers. In Working for His Majesty, which includes the words “Research Notes” in the subtitle, no fewer than 117 pages are taken up by two useful appendices: first, Appendix One, Inscription Glosses (to those quoted in the text); and then, a dense 92-page “Glossary of Shang Terms and Phrases” (Appendix Two) which builds on and supplements the best Chinese and Japanese guidebooks, with particular attention to the use of terms as they appear in the body of inscriptions mobilized for this book. This forms a highly valuable updated reference, including also on such terms as “king” and its etymology of the king as “the one who goes” (Working for His Majesty, 340–41)—once more suggesting the king's purposeful spectacle of omnipresence, firstly in person (in war, hunting, inspections of fields, and so on), and then, as a result, in the spellbound minds of the obligated.

The main body of the text in Working for His Majesty aims to identify and discuss every aspect of “work,” both the king's work to make himself (in war and so on), and in everyone else's “working for his majesty.” There are separate chapters on craft workshops (for bone working, pottery making, and other industries) and on the artisans that staffed them, including on different identifiable kinds of laborers and “occupational lineages”; also (chapter 5) on those whose “work” it was to die as sacrificial offerings, such as prisoners of war. This chapter, and the next one on labor mobilization, which opens by noting that the verbs deployed for “mobilizing” are the same as those used for procuring human-sacrificial offerings, could probably be even more explicitly tied to the spectacle of state-making, which both kinds of actions must have fuelled. There is a brief chapter on the Shang quantification of the work of state-making; and one on the scheduling of the work of the court diviners (in a way, another category of “occupational lineages”).

There follow four rich chapters on the key other activities in which laborers contributed: Agriculture, Warfare, Hunting, and Construction. The chapters on agriculture and war are, appropriately, the most massive. Keightley explains (124) that in these four chapters he does not intend to recapitulate what is already laid out on these topics in The Ancestral Landscape, published twelve years before. Rather, he seeks to focus on how labor was raised to complete the tasks involved in them, who did what, when, and so on; their tools, such as fire; and how the workers performed rites and divinations associated with farming, fighting, and the like. Still, there are many new insights and fresh re-visits to old issues (such as Wittfogelian irrigation). For me, as a student of “headhunting” in more recent history, the section on “penetration” warfare (184–87) reads as a description of headhunting expeditions to capture symbolically appropriate victims for spectacular public killings designed to instill both fear and awe, and to further the ideological project of kingship.

The chapter on Construction likewise provides a certain amount of updated discussion of recent discoveries, everywhere with rich footnotes that the reader can pursue. Finally, Working for His Majesty also contains a chapter on “Geopolitics and Culture” and a concluding one on the “Legacies” of the Shang in the ensuing Zhou dynasty, which destroyed the Shang and yet also in many ways usurped it (in a manner that would be repeated in later “restorations” of the “Central State”). These fascinating pages are bursting with insights, such as in the notes on how the strenuous “work” of the king himself (enslaved to and imprisoned in his new role, we might say), counter the self-serving charges of the Zhou conquerors who in some texts berated the late Shang kings for their purported laziness and wastefulness. Yet it is also something of a regret that Keightley here leaves further excursions into comparative history to others, who will have to go on with the enterprise of comparing the Shang with the state-making in early Mesopotamia, Egypt, Harappa, and so on. Very few such comparative efforts have been made, and the few that do take up this challenge (for example Yoffee 2004; Maisels 2010Footnote ⁶) are not even cited here, and that's a pity, too.

All those who take up this challenge or other aspects of Shang studies will, of course, have to delve deeply into, and always refer to, Keightley's work. This equally applies to the preceding book, The Ancestral Landscape, which at 223 pages (compared to 534 for Working for His Majesty) may be more easily accessible, especially for those who seek a superb, brief but comprehensive summary of the Shang world based on sources up to about the year 2000. But as I have said, the two books could also be read in tandem, if we think of The Ancestral Landscape as contributing above all a picture of the ideological framework within which the labor involved in working for his majesty was carried out.

Thus, when Keightley explains how the Shang calendar was organized so the time's movements were arranged as a schedule of sacrificial rituals honoring dynastic ancestors (The Ancestral Landscape, 37, 47–53), he is also revealing how calendrics were harnessed to reinforce the rising monarchy, by placing the monarchy itself at the center of the world (as an aside one may wonder whether they, like ourselves, got their units of sixty from the Sumerians). When he describes the organization of the world around the Shang center and four cardinal directions, he is describing the proto-version of the imperial Chinese cosmology placing the emperor as the “natural” central node of the cosmos and the human world. And so on. The book also includes a wealth of information on the natural environment, agriculture, plants and animals, and the like: the world of things, appropriated and reinterpreted for the king's purpose—a treasurehouse of information that extends well beyond the limited perspective of royalty.

A final thought on the matter of ideology and how it guides action, as in the emergent Shang ideology of monarchy. Keightley's work has a certain affinity to my own discipline of anthropology, which is concerned with the general human condition, and focuses on how humans make and navigate their world through their fantasy or imagination of what this world is, or should be: Keightley's deep explorations of what the Shang kings and their people “thought that they were doing” as they engaged their world, can and should be read as major contributions to this general endeavor.