Strange Synchronicities and Familiar Parallels in Asia, 1600–1800: Joseph Fletcher’s Plane Ride Revisited: Conference 2: Empires in Practice

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 second conference looks at Imperial Operations. How did empires work? What did the everyday operations of imperial rule look like? Early modern empires confronted the same “great enemy” of distance which severely constrained all actions, from government communications to tax collection. The systems for delegating authority and distributing tasks that the Ottomans, Mughals, and Qing developed to address these common problems shared some essential features despite their autonomous development and local variations, and reveal a level of organizational sophistication often overlooked. By examining these and other areas of imperial operations, the conference aims to build a conceptual framework that explains both shared features and distinctive approaches without privileging any single model as universal.

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, March 2 at 5:00 p.m.

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