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...