Conference 1: Empires of Thought
The first conference looks at Imperial Ideology. How did early modern Eurasian empires conceive of and construct power and legitimacy? What were the bases of imperial ideologies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and who were their audiences? More fundamentally, what do we mean when we talk about Eurasian “empires”?
This conference challenges and broadens 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. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Ottomans and Mughals articulated ideas of universal sovereignty in millenarian terms that responded to and co-opted their subjects’ anxieties about the hijri millennium (1000AH / 1591-2 CE). Qing universal sovereignty was constructed as rulership simultaneously rooted in Confucian, Tibetan Buddhist, Islamic, and Shamanistic traditions and surpassing ethno-cultural differences. Rather than assuming a commonality in the aims of historical empires, we seek to understand how varying traditions of thought about power patterned the practices of rule.
Our prompt to participants of the first conference: What might sovereignty mean beyond the political context in which that idea was developed? How did actors conceive of the political order they were constructing, and how did such visions shape and constrain the particular forms of power and legitimacy? How did different visions of political order in turn shape different identifications of potential sources of threats, priorities of rule, and what was acceptable, or even conceivable, as viable policy options?
Organized by Choon Hwee Koh (History, UCLA), Meng Zhang (History, UCLA), and Abhishek Kaicker (History, UC Berkeley).