Violence and Scandal in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia

The UCLA Center for 17th & 18th Century Studies presents a talk on violence in eighteenth century Eurasia as a part of the core conference "Moralism, Fundamentalism, and the Rhetoric of Decline in Eurasia, 1600–1900."

Violence and Scandal in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia
Chair: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, University of California, Los Angeles

Abhishek Kaicker, Graduate Student, Columbia University
Popular Violence and the State in Eighteenth-Century Shahjahanabad

Fariba Zarinebaf, University of California, Riverside
Urban Rebellions and Violence in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul

Janet Theiss, University of Utah
Lessons from a Scandal: Sex, Corruption and Social Ferment in China’s "Flourishing Age"

*This talk is Session 1 of a three-session conference organized by Clark Professors Andrea S. Goldman and Gabriel Piterberg of UCLA. Register here by February 1st, 2013. All students, UC faculty and staff may register via e-mail by sending their name, affiliation and phone number to c1718cs@humnet.ucla.edu. Complimentary lunch and other refreshments are provided to all registrants.

The Clark and Center core program for 2012–2013 explores responses to crises and upheavals in early modern landed empires, with special focus on the Ottoman and Qing empires. In particular, we will investigate the perceptions of temporary collapses of state power in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Detecting tendencies toward moralism and perceived decline in elite discourses and state policies, we will look at the ways such concerns were expressed in the domains of institutional and educational reforms, sexual mores, and cultural representation. We will also examine how social boundaries were both rigidified and contested at such moments of transition. We hope to discern shared patterns across Eurasia as well as trajectories specific to each political entity.

This conference will examine various social and literary expressions of discontent in the main urban centers across these landed empires.  Topics may include urban violence, sexual mores, literary lampoons, as well as states’ responses to such challenges to their authority.