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Zhiwu Chen | Iron Technology and the Birth of Axial Sages in Early China

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Lecture

Mon, Oct 5, 2026

4:30 PM – 6 PM EDT (GMT-4)

Please select a time slot

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room A71

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Details

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How did technology affect human history? What roles did new technology play in China’s evolution to its present state? We address these questions by going back to the Axial Age (approximately 800–200 BCE) when Eurasia witnessed the simultaneous emergence of foundational philosophical and religious traditions—from Confucianism and Daoism in China to Greek philosophy, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Buddhism. While the temporal coincidence of these intellectual revolutions has long fascinated scholars, there is still a lack of systematic evidence based on large samples of data. Using early China (1046 BCE–9 CE) as the setting, we propose and test the hypothesis that the military adoption of iron technology was a key driver of the Axial Age’s philosophical innovations. Drawing from the China Archaeological Database (CADB) (covering 51,352 sites) and biographical data on 507 early philosophers, we construct a panel dataset with 487 grid cells (100 × 100 km) spanning four historical periods. Our results show that grid cells with more iron weapon grave goods are significantly associated with more native sons becoming Axial sages from 770 BCE onward. We identify three mechanisms through which iron technology led to the boom in philosophical innovations: (1) iron weapons escalated violence, both interpersonal and military, which increased demand for new governance ideas; (2) the increased war threats due to the new technology drove population agglomeration (for collective defense), creating more urban centers that worked as intellectual incubators; and (3) the increased lethality of iron weapons led to the formation of increasingly larger states, calling for ever-demanding governance ideas and strategies. The intellectual response to the governance challenges posed by the then-new iron technology shaped China’s sociopolitical and institutional foundation that has survived to this day. Our study provides important quantitative evidence linking technological change to one of humanity’s greatest intellectual transformations.

Where

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room A71

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Speakers

Zhiwu Chen's profile photo

Zhiwu Chen

Chair Professor of Finance and Cheng Yu-Tung Professor in Finance

University of Hong Kong (HKU)

Zhiwu Chen is Chair Professor of Finance and Cheng Yu-Tung Professor in Finance at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and directs the HK Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Centre for Quantitative History. Prior to joining HKU in 2016, he was assistant professor of finance at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, associate professor of finance at Ohio State University, and professor of finance at Yale University. Chen’s research covers finance theory, the sociology of finance, economic history, quantitative history, emerging markets, as well as China’s economy and capital markets. Around 2001, he began to expand research beyond mature markets by investigating market development and institution-building issues in the context of China’s transition process and other emerging markets. In 2013, he started the annual Summer School for Quantitative History cum International Symposium on Quantitative History at Tsinghua University and continues to organize them at Peking University, with the goal of promoting quantitative research on the history of China and beyond. Recent Chinese books include Assessing China’s Economic Growth of the Past 30 Years (2010) and the two-volume Logic of Civilization: How Humans Have Innovated to Deal with Risk (2022). Chen received his BS in computer science from Central-South University, his MS in systems engineering from Changsha Institute of Technology, and PhD in financial economics from Yale University.



University of Hong Kong (HKU


Sponsors

Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China. No image description provided
EAS. EAS

Hosted By

Center on Contemporary China | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Center on Contemporary China (OWNER)