Last Friday, December 5, on a beautifully crisp and sunny day at the Clark Library, we gathered with nine scholars who presented their work on the Ottoman, Qing and Mughal empires in the early modern period—topics closely tied to the theme of this year’s Core Program, “Strange Synchronicities and Familiar Parallels in Asia, 1600–1800.”
The three organizers, Choon Hwee Koh, Meng Zhang and Abhishek Kaicker, enthusiastically delivered the introductory and closing remarks, and facilitated the discussions by posing probing questions for each paper, highlighting patterns and connections in historical trends and across Eurasian contexts.
The day-long event featured four panels— Rulers and Plebeians, Temporal and Genealogical Order, Scholars and Bureaucrats, and Testing Sovereignty—each framed through a close comparative approach. The panels covered a wide range of topics, from criteria of identity formation, modes of rulership, ideologies of sovereignty, and concepts of imperial universalism to world order and beyond.
For many of us in the audience, the event resembled a true intellectual feast, with ideas circulating within and beyond three imperial realms of early modern Eurasia. Both panelists and discussants invited us not only to remain anchored in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century contexts, but also to expand our historical questions and their ramifications into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through both temporal continuities and spatial (dis)connections.
Together, they pointed to the possibility of tracing meaningful continuities into modern times, piecing together issues of identity formation, imperial expansion, and statecraft through a longue durée perspective, which still inspires contemporary thinkers and readers.
All this leaves us pondering: How can we best understand the “empires” of early modern Eurasia? Where and in what ways did they intersect? With these questions in mind, we look forward to the next episode, “Empires in Practice.”
-Jasmin Wai Tan Law, Ahmanson-Getty Fellow