This roundtable compares practices and discourses of governance in the Ottoman and Qing empires. Since the middle of the twentieth century, world historians have tried to compare and typify empires. Initially, their chief goal was to explain the “rise of the West,” to understand the distinctive characteristics of European empires which enabled their early-modern expansion. Since the 1990s, the premises of that project have come under criticism, as global historians and scholars inspired by postcolonialism successfully challenged the notion that Europe’s “rise” was a sufficient origin story for the contemporary world. The call to “provincialize Europe” has led, in the years after 2000, to a new set of inquiries into the comparative history of empires. Scholars have asked not only how but why non-Western empires differed from their European peers, and also where and why their practices, ideologies, and structures converged. It has also led to different kinds of comparisons, with an emerging comparative literature exploring practices of empire in early-modern Asia and Eurasia.

This panel contributes to this longer historiographical trajectory by bringing together scholars of Ottoman and Qing history for a discussion of methods, sources, and approaches. Its key interest is to explore the relationship between ideas and practices in imperial governance, highlighting the processes through which formal laws, norms, and institutions were created. By reading sources such as bureaucratic proposals, position papers, pamphlets, and private writings, we reconstruct the realm of political contestation that shaped policy outcomes. In doing so, we highlight the diverse ideas which animated imperial governance and political economy. Reconstructing this social and intellectual background enables us to understand the internal logics of imperial governance, helping explain how and why policies evolved. The panelists draw on their specific research to examine some of the issues which divided and animated stakeholders in the Ottoman and Qing polities, discussing taxation, monetary policy, discourses of legitimacy, and local policing. In our conversation, we will share findings, compare methods, and invite the audience to participate in a wider conversation about the comparative study of early modern empire, its practices, and its institutions.