Strange Synchronicities and Familiar Parallels in Asia, 1600–1800:  Joseph Fletcher’s Plane Ride Revisited Conference 1: Empires of Thought

Conference organized by Choon Hwee Koh (History, UCLA), Meng Zhang (History, UCLA), Abhishek Kaicker (History, UC Berkeley)

Co-sponsored by the UCLA Program on Central Asia, Center for Near Eastern Studies, and Center for Chinese Studies

In this year’s Core Program, historians of the Ottoman, Qing, and Mughal empires revisit the problem of comparison by considering synchronicities and structural parallels across Asia.

This first conference, Empires of Thought, looks at imperial ideology, challenging and broadening the default understanding of empire as a large territorial state by focusing on how each empire upheld a normative universe within which particular kinds of political authority and legitimacy were articulated.  How did early modern Eurasian empires conceive of and construct power and legitimacy?  What were the bases of imperial ideologies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and who were their audiences? More fundamentally, what do we mean when we talk about Eurasian “empires”? Rather than assuming a commonality in the aims of historical empires, we seek to understand how varying traditions of thought about power patterned the practices of rule. Papers addressing these questions will be presented in four thematically organized panels: “Rulers and Plebeians,” “Testing Sovereignty,” “Temporal and Genealogical Order,” and “Scholars and Bureaucrats.”

The list of speakers, the conference schedule, and the registration form, is available on our website.

This event is free to attend with advance registration and will be held in person at the Clark Library.

Registration will close on Monday, December 1 at 5:00 p.m.

Capacity is limited at the Clark Library; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.