Inter-Asian Connections IV Workshop -- Asian Early Modernities: Empires, Bureaucrats, Confessions, Borders, Merchants

Workshop Directors:
Kaya Sahin
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Indiana University
iksahin@indiana.edu

Hendrik Spruyt
Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations; Director, Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies
Northwestern University
h-spruyt@northwestern.edu

Call for Workshop Papers

The Inter-Asian Connections IV conference and specifically the theme of Connected Empires is a particularly rich and fruitful avenue for inter-disciplinary exploration by historians, political scientists, sociologists and related fields. We particularly welcome, therefore, proposals that explore the multitude of ways in which early modern Asian empires have interacted at the material, cultural and political level. Research that examines such connections in a comparative vein would be desirable.

This workshop proposes to discuss the dynamism of the Asian continent in the early modern period, between roughly 1450 and 1750. The scholarship on the “European expansion” often misses the fact that this period witnessed an “Asian expansion” as well. Our objective is to investigate the contours and contents of this pan-Asian early modernity. Our aim is to use Asia as a zone that produced its own brand of early modernity. Part of this Asian early modernity was created as an answer to European incursions into Asia; most of it, however, came into being as a result of internal dynamics.

Topics of particular interest might cover:

  • Mutual exchanges between empires, such as the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Russian and Chinese (Ming and Qing) empires and the Tokugawa Shogunate
  • The emergence of imperial and local bureaucracies as agents of management
  • The relationship between empire and confession building
  • Merchants and merchant communities as agents of interaction and exchange
  • Empire and state building
  • The regulation of international order across empires and regions