Silk Roads Programme Events

Abstract China is a vast, ancient and diverse civilization. Consequently, it is difficult to understand, especially for people from very different worlds. This book uses the work of a nineteenth-century missionary, Abbé Evariste Huc (1813 –1860), as a way of entering the Chinese world. Using Huc’s descriptive writings based on travels through China, Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet, and his analytic volume The Chinese Empire, Alan Macfarlane surveys how China has evolved and may develop in the future in various areas —economy, technology, politics, aesthetics and ideology. This book is a companion to Alan Macfarlane’s Understanding the Chinese: A Personal A–Z (2020).

About the speaker
Professor Alan Macfarlane is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He works in England, China, Japan, and Nepal, and also has research interests in Burma and India. He has done research on English society of the 14th to 19th centuries; the Gurungs of central Nepal; and the Nagas of the Burma-India border. He is interested in information retrieval systems and audio-visual media. His ongoing research includes the origins and consequences of capitalism in comparative perspective, individualism, and social theory. He is the author of over twenty published books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005).

Abstract In the autumn of 1295, at the grasslands of Qarabagh in Arran (modern Azerbaijan), Ghazan Khan ascended the Ilkhanid throne as a Mongol Khan (r. 1295–1304). Though he was converted to Islam, his coronation ceremony was arranged based on the Chinggisid tradition. As a Chinggisid ruler, Ghazan Khan married his father’s wife, Bulghan Khatun, who was a non-Muslim and once his grandfather’s wife and raised Ghazan Khan in childhood. His marriage was justified as legal (sharʿan) based on the Islamic ritual (nikāḥ). Ghazan Khan’s coronation and marriage ceremonies reflected his embracement of two different traditions. On the one hand, he was the Khan of the Mongols who should perform the Chinggisid commands (yāsā), and on the other hand, he was a Muslim king expected to be loyal to the Islamic laws (shariʿa). Moving between these two different traditions raises a fundamental question. How could he represent himself as a Chinggisid Khan and a Muslim king? Knowing the contradictions between the two traditions, Ghazan Khan initiated an intellectual project to sacralise himself as a divine king connected to the cosmos. The outcomes of his intellectual experiments are mainly reflected in Rashid al-Din’s Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh and Shams al-Din Kashani’s Shahnama-yi Chinggisi, two significant works conducted under his direct supervision. This project provided a space for the mythic complex of the Chinggisids, which was Islamicised and Persianised but retained many potent features, especially Chinggisid sacred kingship. The project used an Islamic framework but directly challenged the Islamic erasure of cosmic kingship by adding the Chinggisid idea of the Khan’s Heavenly supernatural origin and his sun worship. The chapter further argues that the Ghazanid sacred kingship project later allowed Muslim rulers, namely the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605), to follow him and engage the cosmos to sacralise himself. About the Speaker Said Reza Huseini specialises in Indo-Persian and Islamic history in the connected regions of Khurasan and North India over the longue durée, from Late Antiquity to the early modern era. His research is based on a wide range of documentary and literary sources in Persian, Middle Persian, Bactrian, Sogdian and Arabic. He completed his PhD Dissertation on Arab Muslim conquests of Bactria at Leiden University. He is currently working as part of King’s Silk Roads Programme, writing a monograph entitled The Mongols in Persian Discourse: Continuity and Changes 1252-1582. He has published various articles on the socio-political situation in late antique Bactria, fiscal system in pre-Mongol Khurasan and co-authored several articles on Neoplatunic kingship in Mughal India. His first book, The Arab Conquests of Bactria: Local Power Politics and Arab Domination (651–750 CE), will be published by Edinburgh University Press.

Rachel Mairs is Professor of Classics and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Reading, UK. She has previously held positions at New York University, the University of Oxford and Brown University. Her publications include The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014), Archaeologists, Tourists, Interpreters (with Maya Muratov, 2015) and From Khartoum to Jerusalem: The Dragoman Solomon Negima and his Clients (2016). In 2016 she founded the Hellenistic Central Asia Research Network.

Katie Campbell studied history and archaeology at Exeter and worked as an archaeologist and heritage manager for commercial and research institutions across Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia before completing an MSc in digital heritage at York and a DPhil in archaeology at Oxford. Her research has focussed on the archaeology and heritage of complex urban sites, with her doctoral thesis examining evidence for the Mongol Conquest of the 13th century and subsequent urban change at cities in Central Asia and the Caucasus. She is now a research fellow at King’s College investigating broader changes in these urban sites from the 11th to 15th centuries, a period when Turco-Mongol groups moved into the area. She has worked extensively in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkmenistan and led a field project with colleagues from the Otrar State Archaeological Museum and Archeoservice at the urban site of Otrar in southern Kazakhstan. She is currently working with the Rivers of the Silk Roads Project, based at the University of Lincoln, investigating how water shaped societies and empires in Central Asia over the past two millennia. This involves conducting fieldwork on palaeochannels, canals and other infrastructure for water management along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and integrating this with legacy data on settlement patterns, flooding and irrigation from the region.

Focusing on Tabriz, the city in north-western Iran where the Ilkhanid Mongols assumed as a centre, this talk aims to disrupt dominant narratives about the Mongols and their arts, or non-art, if seen from the narrow perspective of nomadic ways of life. Ordinarily, few know that Tabriz became the global centre of commerce, diplomacy, and scholarship in the period between the middle of the 13th century and the 1330s, and of the continued pivotal role the city played in the Afro-Eurasian world. The Mongol-Ilkhan Hülegü (d. 1265), a grandson of Chinggis Khan, devastated Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258, thanks to the caliph’s refusal to surrender. He then chose Tabriz as the commercial emporium and political hub of the West Asian (Iran and Iraq of today) part of the yeke Mongyol ulus, the ‘nation of the great Mongols’. Tabriz about which travellers from near and far, including the likes of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, wrote in awe of its cosmopolitanism, its marketplaces, and monumental foundations, was unlike any of the great cities of the Mongols or the worlds of Islam and Christianity. Dadu of Yuan China, Kashmir of India, city states like Florence, Papal Rome, Mamluk Cairo and Byzantine Constantinople are all prominent in the annals of world history, but Tabriz was then the only place among them to be connected to all of them. This talk roams through the conception of an exhibition on the artistic outpouring of a culture in which difference, not selfsameness, was recognised for its efficacy for innovation. This is where art of Mongol Tabriz offers a model of analysis, for art history in particular, beyond the national style, singularity and distinction, but also beyond intercultural or exchange models for dealing with art. In navigating the effects of ‘recognised difference’, Tabriz becomes the centre for the making of world historical art.

About the speaker
Sussan Babaie is Professor in the Arts of Iran and Islam at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she has taught since 2013. She has many years of experience teaching at Smith College and the University of Michigan in America, and as the Allianz Visiting Professor at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Ludwig Maximilian University, in Munich. Prof. Babaie is a specialist of the arts and architecture of the early modern Safavid period, with topics on urbanism and empire studies, on sexuality and social habits of ‘seeing’, and on transcultural visuality and notions of exoticism. Most recently, she has been developing a book-length project on Food/Art and the link between taste and seeing. A university-trained graphic designer, she writes and lectures on the historiography of the global contemporary and its implications for the arts of Iran and the Middle East. Her research has been supported by grants from the United States National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright (for research in Egypt and Syria), and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

This paper is a preliminary experiment in a long-term Indian ocean history which is attentive to the travels of small things as illustrative of how humans and nature have interacted over centuries. It points to the uncertain pathways through which humans travelled in this oceanic arena of early globalisation; the unexpected natural things which proved durable in forging global economies; how the control of nature required the taming of the human body; and how human senses and human imagination played a role in the triumph of romantic, enlightened and reasoned imperial science. In focus for this paper, though this indicates the possibilities of a whole range of objects for related historical study, are stitched boats, cowrie shells, ambergris and sea cucumber. By attending to the trick, substance or fragment, arising through engagement with nature, the paper attempts also to dislodge a way of writing Indian ocean history which begins with superstructures like capitalism, imperialism or the push and pull of migration. Rather it scales up from these precarious, uncertain and highly evocative moments where humans and the marine interacted in the environmental context of the Indian ocean.

About the speaker
Sujit Sivasundaram is Professor of World History at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He previously taught at the London School of Economics, and has also held visiting fellowships in Paris, Singapore, Munich and Sydney. He was the Sackler Caird Fellow, 2015-7, at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. In 2012, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for History. In 2023, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Having initially trained as a graduate student in History and Philosophy of Science, his writing now engages with Imperial History, History of Science, Environmental History, Cultural History, History of Race, Indian Ocean History and Pacific Ocean History.

This paper considers the cross-cultural evolution of tamga (also tamgha, tamoga) across post-Mongol Eurasia, between the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Tamga, which had first denoted a stamp or seal, came to also signify a tax – charged primarily charged on exchange – that allowed the Mongol khans to profit from trade. My focus in this paper lies in how tamga was fashioned across different cultures in western Eurasia: while it was embraced by Muscovite rulers as more moral than a pre-existing due, myt, under the Timurids it was increasingly castigated as contrary to ‘just’ political norms. Tracing these contrasting fates, I suggest, underlines hitherto neglected intricacies of the post-Mongol world – of the khans bequeathing not a ‘single’ legacy, but a range of institutional models for their successors to employ.

About the speaker
Angus Russell is a research fellow in the Silk Roads Programme at King’s College, Cambridge, where he works on the history of late medieval and early modern Eurasia. His primary interests lie in the relationship between the Mongols and Muscovy, and on the global modalities of ‘Russian’ history; he is currently preparing a monograph on institutional change between Rus, the Black Sea, and Iran.