This dissertation consists of three studies of social cohesion in Early China. The past century of research has shown that the past is far richer than we had imagined; not only are there many cultures not mentioned in the historical texts, but the categories and social patterns are richer and more complex than anticipated. The studies here are inspired by works that understand these ancient worlds in terms of their constituent actors and their decision-making in the context of overlaid networks of interaction and exchange instead of at the scale of constructs such as “class” or “ethnicity.” The first of these studies decouples the lexical terminology surrounding political cosmology and geography from the Sinological historiographic tradition by performing a lexical study of key terms from the Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. The result is a murkier conception of what it meant to be part of the Zhou world and the hint of a struggle to control the ceremonial center. In the second study, we examine the distribution and style of Shang and Western Zhou period nao and yongzhong bells, which were played in sets, as a way of examining networks of influence and exchange in these periods. We also examine the claim that these objects were part of a centrally impelled or ideologically driven, Zhou network wide ritual reform, the Western Zhou ritual reform. I do this through a corpus driven approach, aided by GIS, PCA, and Cluster Analysis. We find their adoption into Western Zhou ritual assemblages depends on geographically conditioned social networks. Furthermore, we see evidence of large networks south of the Yangzi. In the final study I examine the social policy of the Early Empire. Building on work that questions historiographic traditions of a totalitarian Qin, top-down structure that emphasized ideological homogenization through imposed cultural behaviors in the style of 19th century Imperialism, I examine theory, administrative practice in excavated texts, and archaeological reflexes of policy implementation in the lens of rational actor theory. We find that directed self-interest, not ideology, forged the Early Empire. Together these studies present insight into the decentralized, local processes, whose aggregate effect shaped Early China.