Beijing and Beyond

The centuries following the Mongol conquest of Eurasia (circa 1200–1400) were marked by the emergence of numerous large land empires across the continent, including the Ming and Qing dynasties; the Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal empires; and the Romanoff and Bourbon courts, among others. From East to West Asia, South Asia to Europe, these states and their societies were shaped by a number of features of the age: substantial population growth; increased mobility, both within and beyond imperial borders; novel forms of centralized control; growing levels of economic interconnectivity; and new modes of information technology that helped transform the nature of communication within and across political and cultural borders. ¹ The coincident manifestation of these characteristics, in different cultural contexts yet often transculturally interconnected manners, has led many historians across a range of disciplinary fields and sub-specialisms to think in terms of a “connected early modern” period, stretching variously from circa 1400 to 1800—a period and periodization overlapping with, though distinct from, conventional definitions of the “Renaissance,” global or otherwise. ² While the “early modern” is a widely used (or, for some, passé) term across many fields, for many working outside European specialisms, the “connected early modern” has proved a particularly valuable formulation for at least two reasons: first, because of its origins in, and development through, scholarship on South and Southeast Asia; ³ and, second, as a result, its move away from Eurocentric teleologies of the “modern” toward theories of localized modernities that have their roots in a connected, trans-Eurasian early modern. ⁴