Organized by Choon Hwee Koh (History, UCLA), Meng Zhang (History, UCLA), and Abhishek Kaicker (History, UC Berkeley)
Friday, March 6, 2026
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
TBA
The second conference looks at Imperial Operations. How did empires work? What did the mundane, 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 solutions that the Ottomans, Mughals, and the Qing developed to address these common problems shared some essential features despite their local variations. For imperial communications, each empire had their version of a relay postal system that relied on horses, human-runners, or a combination of both. For the problem of tax collection, each empire distributed tax farming privileges across extensive networks of local intermediaries. Scholars have suggested that empires devised comparable systems of delegating authority and distributing tasks that had more organizational sophistication than previously recognized. Given that such systems of communication and tax collection were apparently autonomously developed in each empire, it is remarkable that these institutional solutions came to acquire significant resemblances with each other. Investigations into these and other areas of imperial operations will lay the foundation for a conceptual framework that might account for both their commonalities and differences and work equally well for these different regions without presuming one type of institutional response as being a universal ideal.
Our prompt to participants of the second conference: How did administrative, tax, or legal innovation overcome the problems of imperial consolidation in the empire of your study? How did they change in this time period compared to previous eras? Is there a particular imperial operation that you have examined in this time period? (This could be a process of resource extraction, of recruiting or managing personnel, of integrating ethno-religious minorities, of instituting new laws, etc.) Is there a question you have for experts of other empires on how this same imperial operation worked there? How might that knowledge help you better understand the empire of your focus?
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies