Strange Synchronicities and Familiar Parallels in Asia Conference 2: Empires in Practice
Fri 3/6 • 9AM - 5PM PST
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
In the 2025-26 Core Program conference, historians of the Ottoman, Qing, and Mughal empires revisit the problem of comparison by considering synchronicities and structural parallels across Asia. The second conference, "Empires in Practice," 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. Organized by Professors Choon Hwee Koh & Meng Zhang (History, UCLA) and Abhishek Kaicker (History, UC Berkeley).