A period of commercialization, imperial decentralization, and colonial consolidation, South Asia’s long eighteenth century (c. 1680–1815) witnessed the fragmentation of India's Mughal empire, the formation of several provincial “successor states,” and the rapid transformation of the British East India Company into a subcontinental power. This day-long workshop examines how multiple strands of Persianate political thought in the late-Mughal world responded to and contoured these far-reaching changes. In particular, it considers how evolving and emerging ideas of sovereignty and statehood, norms of political ethics, and what might be termed competing imperial constitutions accommodated deep political and socio-economic change and laid critical conceptual foundations for Britain’s nineteenth-century Asian empire. In so doing, it offers a framework not only for comparing South Asia’s imperial reconfigurations with those taking place elsewhere in Eurasia but also for problematizing more precisely the meaning and substance of political modernity in a global age of revolutions.

Draft Schedule

602 Cathedral of Learning, Humanities Center.

9 am: Welcome by Holger Hook (Pitt)
9:15 am: Welcome by James Pickett (Pitt)
9:30: Opening remarks by Muzaffar Alam (University of Chicago)
10 am: Neelam Khoja (Yale University), "Najib al-Dawla and the Rohillas: Afghan, Mughal, and Maratha Relations in 18th c. India"
11 am: Nick Abbott (Old Dominion University), “Sarkār and saltanat: State formation, household-making, and the conceptual terrains of the late-Mughal empire"
1:45 pm: Mana Kia' (Columbia University), “Companionship as Political Ethic: Friendship, intimacy, and service in late Mughal visions of just rule”
2:45 pm: Robert Travers (Cornell University), "A Passage to Eighteenth Century India: an Indo-Persian historian's appeal to the British empire"
3:30 pm: Closing comments by Nick Abbott (Old Dominion University)
4:30 pm: Keynote lecture by Samira Sheikh (Vanderbilt University: "Looking out from Gujarat: The local and the cosmopolitan in South Asia's eighteenth century"
7 pm: Dinner at Legume

For more information, please contact James Pickett (pickettj@pitt.edu)