Strange Synchronicities and Familiar Parallels in Asia, 1600–1800: Joseph Fletcher’s Plane Ride Revisited Conference 1: Empires of Thought
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library 2520 Cimarron Street, Los AngelesConference 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...