Workshop One: Empire and Imperialism in Early Modern Asia

9:00-10:00 Governing the Ming Empire: From the Perspective of Song-Yuan Legacies

Jinping Wang (NUS)

This presentation examines Ming imperial governance in light of the legacies of the two preceding dynasties: the Chinese Song dynasty and the Mongol Yuan dynasty. Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming, claimed in an edict that the Ming was determined to rid China of its Mongol influence and restore Chinese civilization that flourished under the Song Dynasty. In reality the Ming inherited many Mongol-Yuan models of governance, including an autocratic emperorship instead of the Song political idea that the emperor should govern the world together with Confucian-educated literati. By highlighting the connections between Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, recent scholarship has challenged the conventional concept that Ming and Qing constituted of a late imperial period distinctive from the previous medieval period. Positioning itself within this new historiography, this paper discusses how the Ming blended both Song-Chinese and Mongol-Yuan traditions into a new model of imperial rule.

10:00-11:00 The Excluded middle: the role of the Jesuit intermediaries during the treaty of Nerchinsk

Frederik Vermote (California State U., Fresno)

As Rowe states in the most recent overview of Qing history (published as the sixth and latest volume in the Belknap Harvard University Press series of China’s empires since the Qin dynasty), one of the latest paradigm changes in Qing historiography – the so called “the Eurasian turn” - has taken inspiration from a world history approach in studying the Qing empire as one of the rapidly expanding land-based Eurasian empires during the early modern world (1400? – 1800?). Following this “new vision of Eurasian unity”, scholars now study the Qing empire in comparison with the Ottoman, Mughal, Safavid, and Romanov empires. In the case of the Qing, one of their first encounters with another Eurasian empire, the Muscovite empire, took place around the mid seventeenth century when Russian settlers engaged with Manchu settlers in the Amur basin. The Qing quickly recognized that an understanding between the Muscovite and their own expanding empire could avoid great conflict. Additionally, a non-interference treaty with Moscow would ‘close up the space’ between both empires in Central Asia, and would thus outmaneuver nomadic people caught in the middle with their own desire for empirical expansion in that region. My contribution will examine the role of the Jesuit (and Mongol) intermediaries in establishing the treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) between the Qing and Muscovite empires. While the Jesuits as trans-imperial subjects sought to improve their own position at the Qing and Muscovite court (and gain further access, especially for passing through these expanding empires) by brokering a treaty between both empires in this frontier-zone, they were unable to exploit their position as both empires moved in to stabilize the frontier and to fully control the movement of peoples across these borders.

11:00-11:30 Tea/Coffee break

11:30-12:30 Mercantilist Empires

Peter Borschberg (NUS)

This presentation will examine why European states (including, at times, the Iberian powers) persistently used chartered companies and limited partnerships as their primary instruments for acquiring and exercising imperial control in Asia. At first glance, such reliance is puzzling as these companies were only intermittently profitable – primarily when they were able to exploit conditions created by famines, wars or socio-political unrest - and all of them proved woefully inadequate to the tasks set for them. Still, as the history of Asia from 1600 to c.1800 clearly shows, chartered companies were founded time and again, and for many European imperial experiments proved to be the institution of choice. My paper at the workshop will survey the two main survivors - the EIC and VOC – as well as their many failed competitors in order to gain a clearer picture why chartered companies became the institution of choice. It will also identify some of their most distinctive common features (such as standing capital, tradeable shares, and quasi-sovereign powers), and assess the extent to which markets or government policy/ interference ultimately sealed their fate or success.

12:30-2:00 Lunch

2:00-3:00 Iberian Empires

Anthony Disney (LaTrobe)

The Portuguese and Castilian Empires in Asia and East Africa were both fundamentally seaborne entities, linked to their respective metropolises by single communications routes – the carreira da Índia and the carrera de Filipinas – without which they undoubtedly would never have come into being. In each case, the carreras fed into and sustained what have traditionally been classed as ‘empires’, although this is not necessarily the label contemporary Portuguese and Castilians themselves would have used to describe them. In this paper, after briefly reviewing the roles and importance of the two carreras, I intend to discuss four aspects of the two empires to which they gave rise, and which they for long sustained. First, I shall review the empires as networks of maritime trade and communications. Secondly, I shall consider them as a series of conquests and settlements. Then, thirdly, I shall look at them as frontiers of military confrontation and cultural interaction. Fourthly, I shall present them as products of imagining, particularly as expressed in maps and verbal formulae. In conducting this broad-ranging review my endeavor will be to show that both empires were dynamic entities that evolved and changed over time. Finally, I intend to discuss how the two Iberian empires almost combined into a single entity in the early seventeenth century and why this project in the end failed.

3:00-4:00 Tsardom and Empire: Muscovy, Russia, and Imperial Practice in (Eur)asian Space, 1300-1796

Paul Werth (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)

Covering the period from the emergence of Muscovy in the early fourteenth century to the death of Catherine the Great, this paper traces a grand arc featuring Moscow’s subjugation of neighboring East Slavic principalities, its intrusion into the lands of the Golden Horde, and its transformation into a self-proclaimed “empire.” I begin with the problem of defining “Asia” in Russian history and consider the utility (and drawbacks) of the category “Eurasia,” positing that Russia occupies an awkwardly liminal position in relation to both Europe and Asia—and their respective historiographies. Beyond matters of “pure” geography—the difficult task of drawing a meaningful boundary on a landmass that constitutes a single entity—I consider the diverse legacies on which Russia and its rulers drew for their cultural development and political legitimation. In this regard the legacies of both Byzantium and the Golden Horde play a critical role, as does Russia’s adoption and fierce defense of Orthodox Christianity, a religious orientation that set Russia off sharply from its neighbors to both east and west. Similarly important is the problem of titulature, which in the Russian case features a parade of distinct but often overlapping conceptions of political authority—khagan, sovereign, (grand) prince, tsar’, and emperor—that have various implications for the concept of empire. But in addition to these “softer” dimensions of imperial rule (ideology, imagination, mentalities, etc.), I turn also to the “harder” practices that were the ultimate determinants of imperial success: Russia’s successful engagement in steppe diplomacy, economic exploitation of Siberian resources (furs, etc.), the construction of lines of military defense, and campaigns of outright conquest. This focus allows for at least some consideration of Russia’s interactions with neighboring imperial polities: the Mongol Empire, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and China. I underscore two major points by way of conclusion: first, that viewed from the standpoint of imperial history, Russia’s story is one of striking success; and second, that the five centuries in question accordingly saw a substantial evolution in Russian consciousness about the imperial character of the country.

4:00-4:15 Break

4:15-5:15 The Periodization of Empire in Asia

Brian Farrell (NUS)

‘Early Modern Asia.’ The term ranges across any number of different historical studies of time and place, usually referring to a time span between the 14th and 19th centuries CE. But the term does not come from Asia or the study of Asian history, and is used much more often than defined. It lines up alongside a number of concepts as European exports to the study of the Asian past. Does it fit? How, in fact, can one periodize the study of Asian history per se, let alone the experience of ‘Empire in Asia’? To do this, we must engage still larger questions, two sets in particular. One set includes questions about connections and intercourse between different areas, but these questions reveal an empirically more viable concept: Eurasia. The other set involves the concept of periodizing history in general, and when studying empires in particular. The first set suggests we might be able to put aside exhausted notions of West and East, to allow a more penetrating look at a more complicated and intermingled experience. The second, however, suggests that familiar models of studying the Asian past might again have something to say. The most common approach to periodizing Asian history is to subdivide the concept of Asia into regions, defined by discrete empires--and then to track their ability to project governance across space, and impose patterns within that space. Examples include the focus on dynastic cycles in China, defining South Asian history by such labels as the ‘Mughal period’, or identifying the broader experience of ‘gunpowder empires’ as a basis for understanding change over time. Far from being obsolete, this approach might well be a foundation from which to search for a larger periodization--not of Asia, but rather of Eurasia. This chapter will explore a hypothesis: if we try to periodize the broader experience of ‘Empire in Asia’ by synthesis, by placing more recent questions about connections between spaces alongside an older tendency, to define change over time by analyzing imperial trajectories within spaces, we will encounter a history that cannot be labelled either ‘early modern’ or ‘Asia.’