Strange Synchronicities and Familiar Parallels in Asia, 1600–1800: Joseph Fletcher’s Plane Ride Revisited: Conference 3: Empires of Things

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.

The third conference looks at Society, Materiality, and Knowledge.  Increased mobility and commercial activity across the early modern Eurasian space heightened imperial concerns about the effectiveness of political control over increasingly assertive and unruly subjects. Anxieties over a changing social and economic order engendered a new momentum in cultural production, reflected in literature, in legal codes that tried to reinforce status hierarchies, and in new religious and spiritual movements. In what new ways did merchants trade, how did artisans and craftsmen organize themselves, how did guilds transform, how did the pious communicate with each other, how did common subjects live, how did spatial imaginaries change? This conference follows the currents of social, material, and knowledge movements–across local, communal, oceanic, or trans-imperial space–that propelled, supplemented, paralleled, superseded, or completely ignored the agenda of the empire. Rather than assuming a dichotomy of state and society as the norm, this conference explores different modes of mutual interactions in various arenas of power.

The list of speakers, the conference schedule, and the registration form are 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, May 4 at 5:00 p.m.

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