[Tentative Program]23 September 2011 Workshop on Empires and Networks: The Dynamics in Historical Asia
Tentative ProgramWorkshop on Empires and Networks: The Dynamics in Historical AsiaConvened by: Grant-in-Aid Research Project ‘Empires, Systems, and Maritime Networks: Reconsidering Supra-Regional History in Pre-19th Century Asia’ and the Research Group on Maritime Asian History (kaiikiken)Date: Sunday, 23 October 2011Venue: Student Commons Seminar Room 1, 2nd Floor, Center for the Study of Communication-Design (CSCD), Osaka University, Toyonaka CampusAccess: http://www.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/access/toyonaka.htmlSaturday, 22 September 201119:30- Welcome Dinner Venue: TBASunday, 23 September 201113:00-13:10 Opening RemarksFujita Kayoko (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University)13:10-14:10 LectureRudolph Matthee (Roshan Center for Persian Studies, University of Maryland) ‘Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan’14:10-14:20 Comment 1: Suzuki Hideaki (The Toyo Bunko Research Department)14:20-14:30 Comment 2: Yamashita Norihisa (Ritsumeikan University)14:30-15:15 Discussion15:15-15:30 Coffee15:30-16:30 LectureRavi Arvind Palat (Department of Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton) ‘Parallels between systems? Towards an alternate dynamic of state formation’16:30-16:40 Comment 3: Momoki Shiro (Osaka University)16:40-16:50 Comment 4: Ohashi Atsuko (Nagoya University)16:50-17:35 Discussion17:35-18:00 General DiscussionContact:1) Fujita Kayoko (Organiser)Address: Ritsumeikan APU, Jumonjibaru 1-1, Beppu, Oita 874-8577, JapanTel: +81-(0)977-78-1280Fax: +81-(0)977-78-1169 (CAP Directors Room)Email: fujita07@apu.ac.jp*This Workshop is subsidized by the Research Office of the Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University.?Abstracts and BiosAbstract 1Rudi Matthee, ‘Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan’The decline and fall of Safavid Iran in the early 18th century is traditionally seen as the natural outcome of the unrelieved political stagnation and moral degeneration which characterized late Safavid Iran. In my presentation I challenge this view. To do so, I first draw attention to the difficulty of harnessing resources in Iran, given the country’s physical environment, its tribal makeup and a small economic base. State-society interaction was thus characterized by a series of tensions between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies. To keep this balance tilted toward central control, even the strongest ruler was forced to engage in multiple negotiated alliances ranging from marriage deals with elites to tributary arrangements with peripheral tribal groups. In the late 17th century the forces of fragmentation began to prevail. The reasons for this include an increasingly detached, palace-bound shah who no longer patrolled his realm, giving rise to increasing levels of factionalism, corruption and oppression; a reduced inflow of money and the regime’s shortsighted way of dealing with this issue, which exacerbated rather than alleviated the problem; the regime’s neglect of the military resulting in the country’s growing vulnerability to outside attack; and above all weakening link between the capital and the, mostly tribal and mostly Sunni periphery as a result on a growing emphasis on the Shi`I character of the polity and an unwillingness to maintain tributary links with the people on the margins?the Lezghis, the Turkmen, the Baluchi, and, most fatally, the Afghans.BioRudolph (“Rudi”) Matthee is the first Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute Chair in Persian Studies at the Roshan Center for Persian Studies, the University of Maryland. Previously he served as the Unidel Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Delaware, where he taught Middle Eastern history, with a research focus on early modern Iran and the Persian Gulf. His books include The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900 (Princeton University Press, 2005); and the forthcoming Persia in Crisis: The Decline of the Safavids and the Fall of Isfahan. He co-edited, with Beth Baron, Iran and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie (2000); and co-edited, with Nikki Keddie, Iran and the Surrounding World, 1501-2001: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics (2002). He has also published numerous articles on aspects of Safavid and Qajar Iran. He serves as president of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies, 2009-2011. He received the 2006 Albert Hourani Book Prize, awarded by the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and won the Saidi Sirjani Award, 2004-2005, awarded by the International Society for Iranian Studies. He received his Ph.D. in 1991 from the University of California, Los Angeles.Abstract 2Ravi Arvind Palat, ‘Parallels between systems? Towards an alternate dynamic of state formation’In his impressively researched two-volume work, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830, Victor Lieberman draws several parallels between state forms in Asia and Europe. Despite some parts of Eurasia being subjected to constant nomadic incursions (the ‘exposed zone’) and other parts being insulated from such attacks (the ‘protected zone’), he shows that over time both zones experienced similar social, political, and economic trajectories. Yet, Lieberman never then explains why capitalism developed in one ‘protected zone’ and not in the other or in the ‘exposed zone.’ What then is the meaning of these parallels?strange or otherwise?This paper argues that despite these ‘strange parallels,’ the socio-historical dynamics of change in Asia were conditioned by very different geopolitical ecologies. Though both polities in China and India were exposed to constant waves of nomadic invasions, the political exchange between nomads and sedentary peoples were very different. In China, there was a series of liaisons dangereuses between successive Chinese and nomadic empires where the latter gave horses to the former in exchange for the gifts of sedentary civilizations. There was no similar balance in the Indian subcontinent where rulers obtained large quantities of horses through trade. Presence of several internal frontiers in the subcontinent also precluded the emergence of pan-subcontinental polities for any substantial length of time.Both China and the Indian subcontinent, however, had highly developed systems of wet-rice agriculture that fostered expansive circuits of trade and divisioning of labor. Though mainland Southeast Asia was shielded by its terrain from nomadic conquests, the same terrain precluded the development of wet-rice agriculture till the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence, here socio-economic and political relations took an entirely different form.From these optics, these developments did not favor the accumulation of capital?and hence they provide an alternate pattern of socio-historical change to the reigning orthodoxies that are extended by Lieberman’s Strange Parallels.Bio: Ravi Arvind Palat is Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has previously taught at the universities of Hawaii and Auckland and at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Capitalist Restructuring and the Pacific Rim and editor of Pacific-Asia and the Future of the World-System. His current research interests are in the fields of historical sociology and political economy.