SUNY Press has published Liang Cai's new book, Witchcraft and the Rise of the First Confucian Empire, in its prominent series on Chinese Philosophy and Culture.

Professor Cai's exhaustive and careful reading of texts and archaeological sources spurred her to reassess the grand macronarrative that places the supremacy of Confucianism as an imperial political ideology in the Han dynasty (141-87 BCE). Cai demonstrates that such a date would have been too early and provides a new account of this transformation.

A hidden narrative in Sima Qian's The Grand Scribe's Records (Shi ji) shows that Confucians were a powerless minority in the political realm of this period. Cai argues that the notorious witchcraft scandal of 91-87 BCE reshuffled power structure of the Western Han bureaucracy and provided Confucians an opportune moment to seize power, evolve into a new elite class, and set the tenor of political discourse for centuries to come.