Professor Andrew Meyer

And from that point forward, these seven great states, they begin to treat with one another as sovereign peers.

and they begin to conduct a kind of very robust diplomacy that resembles kind of what we see going on between diplomats even in the 21st century.

We know a great deal.

One of the things that's changing most rapidly and most intensely is the nature of warfare.

And of course, one of the monumental testaments to this is this text that many people in the English-speaking world are familiar with, The Art of War by Master Sun.

The Art of War.

It's really an artifact of the warring states, and it really, in effect, encapsulates the

many of the biggest sort of changes to the culture and the political economy of the warring states.

During Confucius' lifetime, the transition was already beginning in the sense that at the founding of the Zhou Dynasty, warfare was an aristocratic affair.

That was sort of the basis of aristocratic power was that the only people who really had the skills and the means to conduct war were aristocrats.

Generally, the most powerful combat units on any battlefield were these teams of charioteers,

So learning how to drive a chariot required leisure that common people didn't have.

And then the material to construct a chariot was something that only the wealthy could really bring together.

So in this age of aristocratic chariot warfare, engagements tended to be much smaller.

They tended to be limited in scope and impact.

But as the competition between these states became more and more zero-sum, each of the regional leaders began to experiment more and more with deployments of infantry.

And if you're trying to protect yourself from chariots, the best kind of infantry that you can deploy are archers.

And, you know, with archers, the more archers you put on the field, the better, right?

How much training you're going to be able to give any of your archers, how accurately they're going to shoot, right?

So the more, the better.