Humanities

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...