"Heaven is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China's early empires (221 BCE-9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The monotheism of the ancient Mediterranean, in which the cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome's authority across geographical and social boundaries and the emperor embodied both the timelessness of social hierarchies and the universality of Rome's rule, is often used as an analytical template for studying other ancient empires. Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (141-87 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults; he was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsili reinterprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and non-canonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial re-assessment of religion before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic notions of 'divinity,' 'myth,' and 'ritual' to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities."-- Provided by publisher.