Well, we've just crossed 60, so I think we're going to make a start. Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Hamad Nasser, and I'm a curator, a writer and strategic advisor. I'm a senior research fellow here at the Paul Mellon Center, and let me extend a very warm welcome to everyone logging on to the Thinking Through Empire panel panel of London Asia art worlds. Thank you to our panel, and to you, our audience for joining us today. Now the London Asia Art World's program has been co-organized as a collaboration between myself, Sarah Victoria Turner, who's the deputy director for research at the Paul Mellon Center, and Professor Ming Tianpo, who's professor in the department of art history and an institute for comparative studies in literature, art, and culture at Carlton University in Ottawa, Canada. Ming is also the second holder of the London Asia Research Award. Now, some of you may be regular attendees at Paul Mellon Center events, but for some this event may be your first interaction with the center. The MC is a research institute and an educational charity, which is part of Yale University. Physically, we are based in Bedford Square here in Central London, where you can visit our library and archive. We have an ever-growing digital presence, and you can find out more about our program on our website, along with the details about our research collections, publications, grant and fellowship schemes, learning activities, and our future events. Many of you who've been with us right throughout the program just to remind you that this is the fifth week and the final week of London Asia Art World's. A multi-part program which has been taking place throughout May and June that reflects on the ways in which the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with and challenges histories of British art. This event marks five years of the Paul Mellon Center's London Asia project, established in collaboration with Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. The project is co-led by Sarah and myself. The Vida project is concerned with excavating the historical, as well as reflecting on the contemporary entanglements that link London and more widely Britain and Asia. It does this by focusing on three research strands, exhibitions, institutions, and art schools. The London Asia project questions the boundaries of national and regional histories and explores new models of researching and writing about the transnational infrastructures and networks that have shaped the histories of art. Now, before I hand over to Ming, let me walk you through the PMC's online housekeeping guidelines and tell you more about how this Zoom webinar will run. I'm sure we are all experienced Zoomers here. But just to point out that today's session is in two parts. The first will be a keynote paper for roughly 45 minutes, followed by a Q&A. And after a between a 10 to 15 minute break, let's see how we do with time, there will be three further 15 minute papers and a larger plenary Q&A session with everybody involved. But we would encourage you to put in your questions using the Q&A function as the papers are being presented. This online event is being run by the PMC's event manager, Shauna Blanchfield, and events assistant, Danny Congway, and they're on hand to answer any questions you have throughout this afternoon. Ming, over to you. Thank you, Hamad. Excuse me. London Asia Art Worlds is not just a conference.  It encompasses our conference, it encompasses various workshops, many different projects that have spun off of the London Asia Art Worlds universe. And today I'm going to spend a few minutes telling you about some of the art projects that have come out of London Asia Art Worlds. Indeed, these projects were projects that we chose out of the open call to papers, but surprisingly and interestingly, we received a number of artist projects. And so it was very exciting for us to then be able to commission those artists to produce new work for London Asia Art Worlds. The first project is Sophia Balaga-Muala's Whereabouts Unknown, which is a short film that deals with questions of translation, the circulation of objects, museums, colonialism, empire, and language politics. The second project, Mapping Memory, and you can see all of these projects on the website I showed you just now. And I believe that Danny will be putting the link into the chat as I speak. This is an ongoing, a collaborative project by Shaheen Ahmed Savakan and Taran Singh. And it traces the nomadic lives of earlier generations of artists within the spaces of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, and Britain. I'm sorry, not India, just Bangladesh, Britain, and Pakistan. And it was shaped by the movements of ideas, friendships, and conversations, some of which we have also been tracing through some of the papers that have been given during London Asia Art Worlds, such as The Sculpture by Nazesh Attaula, who also features very nicely in this project, which is also a 3D digital project, as well as being a 3D paper sculpture. There was also a project by, or is also a project by Mitu Sen that has been haunting us and will be revealed in the last day of the conference. Finally, there's also Queer Asia's virtualizing cartographies, which was a project curated by Annie Jail Kwan. This exhibition playlist of audio, moving image, and VR works is online, and you can access it through our website, but also through the Queer Asia's website, also includes a live online performance, which will take place this evening, around at 5pm British time. And the link to join the, to register for this performance by Sam Reynolds, entitled Spell will be in the Q&A or in the chat right about now. So you can see here, there's the work Carrier Bag Music by Sin Wai Kin, or Victoria Sin, which is a seductive and seemingly limitless soundscape of literary and musical motifs. There's also Yarlie Allison and Yin Lo's in virtual return We Can't Dehaunt, which is a virtual reality collage landscape of photography and neon palette drawings that are accompanied by queer childhood memories in Hong Kong, in British Hong Kong. There's Allison and Lo's a very educational bubble tea audio porn, which features both bubble tea and queer kink. Abudula Kurei, she's cruising other ways of love, a poetic and beautiful audio visual journey that traces through glimpses of memory, fantasy and beyond, through characters that he's taken from the Pakistani artist Anwar Said's work. There's Joel Tan, Strange Day's Journey and Joyful Noise, which are two experimental radio pieces that explore the grid of lonely spaces and the moist entanglements of tropical mangroves and thumping nightclubs. And finally, this evening, Sam Reynolds's Spell, a wonderful cabaret lip syncing hit, which will be taking place this evening, as I said, from 5 to 6pm in London, and will feature a number of meetings with all of the artists of queer Asia on air meet. And again, you'll be able to register on the website that is in the chat now. And then finally, although this is not a project that was commissioned by London Asia Art Worlds. I'd just like to mention Print Pals, which was a collaboration that emerged out of print, out of London Asia Art Worlds, a collaboration between the London, the Slade School of Fine Art and the National College of Arts Lahore. Over to you, Sarah. Thanks so much, Ming and Hamad. And I'm going to say just a little bit more about today's panel and integers are chair for the rest of this afternoon. And also fairly recently, the field of British art studies was notable for its near silence on the subject of empire. And this could be said for both histories that dealt with historic material, and those that were more explicitly concerned with modern and contemporary that were produced within context of decolonization. A recent wave of scholarship has worked to put empire and its legacies at the center, rather than in the margins or in the footnotes and we've heard a number of speakers address this already in the conference. Like all disciplinary and cultural shifts. This work is evolving and unfolding, often in response to global contemporary conditions. The London Asia Art Worlds program we want to engage deeply with reckoning with how imperial histories have shaped the structures of art making as explored particularly in the panels that we've already had on pedagogies. Also our other panel on bureaucracy and agency, as well as the circulations the encounters and the resistance produced by these contexts. The focus whilst being informed by the critically energizing and interrogative work of historians of empire in imperial aesthetic cultures also takes an expanded framing that is not restricted by the geographies of the British empire itself. And I think that is what is implied by the title of this panel to think through empire, or perhaps that should be empires plural. And through the London Asia art London Asia project more broadly, our aim is to pose methodological questions about the ways in which the art histories of Britain and Asia have been written, circulated and negotiated. And also, we're also asking questions of the Paul Mellon Center for studies in British art, which is hosting this project as an institution that sears the field of British art, and through a platform such as this conference, where we're seeking to engage the opinions and enter into conversations and collaborations with those who do not conventionally see themselves as it inhabiting such a field. In that note, it's my great pleasure to welcome our chair for this session, when he to when he's lecturer in modern and contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, part of the University of London, and her research centers on the art and visual culture of China and Chinese diasporas in transnational and global contexts. Prior to joining the Courtauld, she received a PhD in history of art from UCL and works at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai and Tate Modern. She's co-curated a beautiful disorder, an exhibition of 16 newly commissioned monumental sculpture sculptures by Greater Chinese artists at Cass Foundation, Cass Sculpture Foundation in 2016 in Chichester, and was an associate curator of, we have never participated at the H&M Sculpture Biennale in 2014. She is extremely busy as she has positions on the editorial boards of the Oxford Art Journal and the Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art, and was awarded, I'm very pleased to say, a Paul Mellon Center mid-career fellowship in 2020 to prepare a monograph on the Singapore-born British sculptor, Kim Lim, and she's also working on a book that explores the poetics and the politics of infrastructures in contemporary Chinese art. And so, when without further ado, I'm going to hand over to you to chair the rest of today's panel. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah, for that very, very kind introduction and for, and to the organizers as well for inviting me to chair this panel, which is the fifth in this brilliant series of events. So as Sarah mentioned, previous sessions have explored myriad forms of aesthetic engagement and experimentation, institutions and infrastructures that not only challenge the histories of British art, but do so in a way that presents a nuanced and complex picture of transnational encounters, negotiations and entanglements between London, Asia and the art world at large. So this panel continues these important discussions, but also seeks to deal with the elephant in the room, so to speak, to ask the question, what does it mean to think through empire. The papers you'll hear this afternoon trace art historical trajectories from the 18th century to the 20th and beyond, exploring circuits of knowledge between London as the key imperial metropole of the British Empire, and various geo bodies in Asia, including China and India, Pakistan, Japan and Taiwan. They each focus on relatively marginal artistic figures who have fallen through the cracks of our history, due to their ambivalent positions as mediators and interlocutors negotiating a place for themselves between various colonial and local interests. In this, the papers draw attention to how thinking through empire necessarily involves a certain cognitive dissonance, far from being a monolithic entity relegated to the annals of history, or merely the hegemonic imposition of economic and military power by one nation over the sovereignty of another. This is Alejandro Colas put in an ambivalent formation that involves particular combinations of coercion and consent, formal and informal rule. And one that also potentiates contact zones of knowledge making and artistic exchange. Keynote speaker today, Professor Rana Mitter, who I now have the pleasure of introducing will begin with a lecture titled steps to empire and beyond 1750 to 2021 that aims to recognize the conflict and violence inherent in empire. While taking a longer view of the complexity of the imperial encounter, asking us to consider how many of the factors that shaped an empire that supposedly ended half a century or more ago are still with us now. Professor Rana Mitter OBEFBA is a professor of the history and politics of modern China, and a fellow of St. Cross College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of several books, including China's War with Japan, The Struggle for Survival 1937 to 1945 from 2013, which won the RUSI Duke of Westminster's military literature and was named Book of the Year in the Financial Times and the Economist. His latest book is China's Good War, How World War Two is Shaping a New Nationalism, which was published by Harvard in 2020. He has also commented regularly on China and media and forums around the world, including at the World Economic Forum in Davos. His recent fascinating documentary on contemporary Chinese politics, meanwhile in Beijing is available on BBC sounds. He is co-author with Sophia Gaston of the report, conceptualizing a UK-China engagement strategy, and was the recipient of the prestigious 2020 Medley Co-Medal for Service to History awarded by the Historical Association. So as was mentioned earlier, there'll be time for questions following Rana's talk, so please put your questions into the chat box. Over to you, Rana. Thank you very much indeed for that introduction, very generous introduction. Hello to everyone. I know that we've got about 89, 90 people tuning in from various places around the world today, and it's great to have you here. So first of all, with brief thanks, if I may, to the Paul Mellon team who brought together this wonderful set of events, a very unusual conference and more than a conference of course spread over several weeks. And that will be Hamad, Sarah and Ming, very good to have the chance indeed the privilege to speak in the events that have been put forward here. Thank you also to Shauna for doing so much behind the scenes and thank you to Wendy for introducing and chairing today. The organizers of this event asked me to give a talk. I made the first protest which of course I have to give at this point, which is that this is an immensely distinguished event in art history and I am not an art historian, nor do I claim to be one and they were at pains to assure me that didn't matter at all. So I hope that that will be the case today. My point of course is that, although I'm not an art historian. I do very firmly believe that the production of art cannot, of course, must not be understood outside the context of a whole variety of other social and political forces that have shaped our own world, and that is our world over a rather longer stretch of time than just the immediate moment. So in the course of the next 45 minutes or so to give some thoughts give some indications as to how we might think about empire, not just in the classic sense of the modern empire and I will of course start there, but perhaps in some other ways that involve rethinking how a more broad definition of empire might relate to some of the forces that we see in terms of the production of art, not just over the last 200 years. And that's really, as I've indicated very much in our present moment, and I suspect in the moment that's going to be with us for some time to come. I should give one other warning before I start for real which is that, again, when Hamad Ming and Sarah invited me, they gave me a sort of brief which said that you know the topic involves London Asia so could you bring London Asia into it. Or a historian of China so would you mind bringing China into it as well and one of course you're not an art historian you need to bring something that's relevant to the art history world so with all those together you only have 45 minutes. So with all of that together of course no pressure, and I will do my best to try and offer thoughts that may be helpful for the wider agenda. And to attempt to share my screen. See how we go with that. Good. Okay, I think that that's working fine and I will wait for any prompts for anyone just in case there's any reason why it's, it's not coming off, but I think that should be should be fine. Yeah, we can see you perfectly. Thank you. Okay, I will assume that's the case unless I'm told otherwise. I'm going to stop show so I'm in on the wrong. We know apologize the joys of technology. Let's see. Let's try this one. Yes. Let me start, if I may, with a moment that has become in some ways a sort of classic moment of shifts of power in the history of modern empires the British Empire and in this case although I will be speaking about other empires and in just a few few moments. But beyond that, a moment that I think is subject to a significant amount of reinterpretation I'm going to start with this moment, but come back to it at the end in a couple of contexts that I want to, to outline. So, let's take this moment, 1931, the visit of Mohandas K Gandhi Mahatma Gandhi to London at a time when the fate of British Empire in India, Indian nationalism was very much in the balance reforms were taking place within British India, and the reforms not moving fast enough, or broadly enough for the emergent and burgeoning Indian nationalist movement of which Gandhi was perhaps the single most symbolic figure but of course by no means, the only one involved. So this is a moment in a sense and this is one of the many photographs from that particular visit that I think do give the sort of sense of how worlds came came together that symbolizes the importance of London as a starting point for so many of these conversations. And that has of course this very contradictory role at this point of being both the hub of empire, perhaps along with Paris and Tokyo, the ultimate metropoles of empire at this stage in the mid 1930s and I had Tokyo because it is often forgotten in western circles that one of the major parts of the modern world, of course, was centered very much in Tokyo under the control of Japan, and we tend to think about that perhaps less than the French and British Empires unless we are Asia specialist so I do want to bring that into the into the hub. But at the same time, one of the other things that makes London such a productive site of resistance at the time is the ability of figures, not just Godly but many others to from Africa Asia and elsewhere to come to London and find opportunities to think about their own situation as imperial subjects in the transition in the conversion to becoming nationalist subjects. And there is I think, as I said, mentioning this photograph a great symbolism about this picture. There is something that's caused entirely performative about the way in which the voice and the person of the subaltern in this case Gandhi is heard and seen within the metropole and the contrast there of handwoven Kadi versus the linen or woolen suits being worn by many of those surrounding Gandhi here provides a very peak or image of the way in which the local and the global both cooperate and compete. It should not be forgotten that while of course gone these mission ultimately achieved of course was the liberation of India. In the context of the British Empire, he was seeking to use subvert appropriate and rethink the British Empire, even while pulling a little like his Cudi one of the threads to that would slowly unravel it and, as I say this is one of the moments why this 1931 moment I think has such power to it. Before I place that moment before you. Let me now take a moment to step back quite considerably and what I'd like to do in the next section is to step back to a moment when perhaps the emergence of the modern empires and Sarah made that point in introduction that you need to I think be thinking about empires in the plural and compare and contrast that brings us to this moment and some of the factors that underpin that. And to give a sort of pathway to give a grid through some of the ideas and factors that I would like us to consider and have in mind as we look at the framework for these shifts. So if me a seven here I'm sure I could have come with 17 or 17 I'm sure you could as well but these ones I think provide at least some useful stepping stones to frame some of these shifts in empire that underpins so many of the developments that have been important to this set of events in the conference. The second point I'll come back to that is industrialization the process of industrialization as divergence and here I am consciously using reference to Kenneth Pomerance's groundbreaking book from generation ago the great divergence between China and England and that point. The second point is the rise of empires as a whole and here of course we have a necessary I think examination of the fact that empires are by no means all the same and the cooperation but also the conflict between what might call the pre modern empire, the land based empire the empire based on a whole variety of norms that come from a different set of assumptions about the user unsatisfactory term the pre modern world need to be contrasted with the empires that emerge as a result of factor one industrialization. And linked to that we have number three the globalization of thought globalization is a word that can be used more or less carefully or carelessly in this particular case, I want to try and indicate that globalization and the dominance of the western world is for a while, have an awful lot to do with each other, but are by no means coterminous or exactly equivalent and I'll try and give some thoughts as to why that might be. The fourth point is about war and conflict as a an agent or change and I think that in this particular the importance of violent conflict as transformation, while clearly never a pleasant subject is also the one that inexorably underpins a whole variety of the wider factors that we have to examine today. I want to touch on modernism. Again I know a subject of immense expertise of so many people attending this conference today and I pretend no expertise on the art history of modernism in any way superior to those that you'll find in the papers here but seeing it as part of that wider process I think fits into our story rather rather nicely. I do then want to touch on economics as globalization the flip side or twin side of some of those other cultural developments and factor that clearly cannot and should not be ignored and the final note that I wanted to come back to is that you have technology coming back to technology over and over again in this period as a transformative factor in terms of the shaping of empires and what those empires can do, how they communicate with each other and how they also transform themselves because as I say, near the end of my comments I want to suggest that I don't think we are by any means at the end of the age of empires because empires have I think we converted reinvented themselves in ways that their originators might have found quite surprising. So let me start, if I may, in the mid 18th century when many many factors made their way across the Eurasian space if you want to include the whole of that geographical territory. And while there are many forces that clearly had both immense cultural and political influence during that period, I'll single out just the two here on the grounds that they provide an important point of reference and contrast, one being the spread that to some extent was reaching its outer posts of outer limits, you might say, of the Catholic Church. And the other one, indicated on the right here by the Emperor, of an order which we sometimes can identify by the short hand confusion, in other words, assuming a sort of order understanding about hierarchy and harmony that defines parts of East Asia. Even this figure of the Emperor provides some of the complexity within that as will be well known to many of you, the Qing dynasty, the last dynasty of China between 1644 and 1911 was in fact a dynasty ruled not by ethnic majority Han Chinese, but by mansions, who nonetheless drew on and absorbed a great many of the norms of traditional Chinese Confucian while of course also as we now know, maintaining a very powerful indigenous Manchu culture of their own at court. So in this particular contrast here you have two emergencies of two empires of power and thought and, to some extent, geographical territory and identity. The point of course about both the Catholic Confucian worlds is that they didn't necessarily stop at national boundaries. And these ideas of competing empires in the 18th century, I think, lead us on the path to how this world of contrasting empires adapts and changes. So we see the world in 1750 a slightly arbitrary chosen date and it gives us a sort of unique quarter of a millennium to look at which I think is a good chunk of time for comparisons and contrasts. Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America all find themselves on the eve of industrialization we of course have the benefit of hindsight and retrospect we are able to understand the astonishing transformations that came from the combination of industrial capacity and imperial ideology, but that was not by any means obvious at that particular time. It was also a time when circuits of knowledge interacted with each other, but nonetheless in many cases were broadly closed just going back to my previous image for a moment there. At that time, the Catholic world, if you want to put it that way, had a whole variety of intellectual, theological, and political ambitions. I think the same is true with a few tweaks but the same is broadly true of the Qing Empire that we see there. It is of course not remotely the case as you know huge amounts of recent work on the interactions between Qing China and the Western world has shown it's not remotely true that these two circuits of knowledge and understanding was separate from each other. But it is nonetheless I think fair to say that broadly speaking, the level of influence that one had on each one had on the other didn't necessarily fundamentally shift large numbers of the assumptions and underlying norms that shaped both of those networks or circuits of knowledge. The epistemology that was being created within them was broadly, indigenously generated while drawing, of course, in a whole variety of ways of ideas, thoughts from, from outside, and I'm just to flag up and drawing your contrast with the process that I think then begins to really accelerate in the following century. You can, if you wish to I think look at these two behemoths of thinking as rival superpowers, the Catholic Church in one case the Chinese Emperor, head of what Joshua Fergal amongst others is referred to as the Sino sphere of the words, the world that is not necessarily contained within the boundaries of what we think of as China, but rather an entity that shares a whole variety of thoughts and ideas and norms that are taken from a culture that originates in what is now we've come to think of as the Chinese Chinese space, shaped in large part the ethical, ethical norms of that era. So, that may have been the world in 1750 but we are of course all aware that it changes very considerably, continuous change, of course, in the 250 plus years that have followed by 270 by by now. And the divergence between those two is has been a subject of immense interest certainly for the last three or four decades I mentioned Kenneth Pomerance's, you know, epoch making book really in the field, the great divergence about why essentially England managed to develop China and China did, did not. And the core question of that book which has been debated and disputed and subjected to immense amounts of analysis in the last 25 to 30 years. The central thesis of that book, looking at why the Yangtze Valley in China and England which had in some ways similar economic output and similar profiles and prospects for growth in 1700 or so. Should be so immensely different by just a century and a half later in world historical time, a really very short gap between the, the two. And in exploration of those questions, we have come, I think, broadly speaking, particularly those who of us who look at global history to a whole variety of realizations and rethinking of how China and the wider world interacted in ways that wouldn't simply have been possible just a generational to ago when people tend to think perhaps more in the confines of national boundaries. So in terms of global training routes, China of course highly responsible for silk porcelain of course the 18th century immensely important export and again. I recommend those haven't seen it fantastic new book by the Warwick University scholar Anna Hadditson on Jing Dajian, the iconic archetypal place of production of the famous blue and white portal at porcelain and she has, you know, inserted in a kind of global economic and social history the production of that porcelain an immense amount of material of huge interest to historians of design and art as well. Much more unhappily, not perhaps in the same way on the station circuit but nonetheless the trading and sale of enslaved people, which we now know also to have been one of the grimmest but also most economically and socially transformative. In a negative way you might say, of course, but nonetheless, definitely to to be foregrounded and not ignored the trade and enslaved people clearly was an immensely important part of the way which the West used global training routes to increase its levels of profitability and growth and talking about the steam engine while ignoring the role of trained enslaved people is clearly a disbalanced way of looking at this question that it's important that that balance is now being restored. Let's think briefly about the way in which again summarize an immensely complex argument far too too simply. Why Kenneth Pomerance's thesis essentially found so much purchase so much valency, and it was I think his argument that in two important areas, summarized perhaps as coal and colonies, that England found a moment a world historical to build it to become at least for a century or more the dominant imperial power in the world. So coal, of course, essentially a shorthand for the ability to dig out of the ground with some ease fossil fuels that could then essentially be used to create an emergent industrial revolution that we spoke of, but also of course the emergence of column is the emergence of the exercise of imperial power and conquest as an absolutely key factor in the way in which Britain first and France also other European powers were able to operate during this this time. That being said, I think it would not do to ignore the fact that during the same period. There are an awful lot of factors that also contribute to Chinese growth, and these are taking into account to try and address this still intriguing question of why a very small Northwest European British maritime state essentially became a very large overseas empire, and China already a very large land based empire at that time, did not expand beyond those boundaries. One of the questions comes again from that globalization of agriculture and economy with the new world crops that come starting in the 16th century but accelerating in the 17th and 18th from the new world to China as I mentioned potatoes and maize here, which provide the opportunity to grow crops in the kind of wider penumbra of China's territory that were essentially harder and more able to grow than was the case with traditional crops, millet, rice, and, and grain. In addition, one might mention chilies again if you want to annoy your Sichuan friends then it's always worth pointing out that the chilies which adorn their cuisine so noticeably are of course products of new world importation in the early modern era and not obviously Chinese at all, just as in fact, of course many other aspects of fully embedded Chinese culture from religion to cuisine to to costume are in fact of course drawn from a whole variety of very diverse and different cultural traditions. In addition, just going over the this this sort of picture of how the global empires interact with these wider these widening forces. We should know the role of global finance and silver in particular from South America contributes to an economic boom which turns into an economic bust, during much of that early modern era into the Ming in China itself, again, setting up some of the factors that eventually will lead to an economic crisis in China itself which is another reason why it became vulnerable to the strength of the industrialized Western empires. And last but not least in this particular list and again bearing in mind you know we're looking at this divergence question you know why does the Chinese land based empire and the British maritime empire end up diverging so fast and so far over 150 years. Technology, of course, does play an immensely important role. Again, the work of many people, not least the great Cambridge biochemist Joseph Needham over decades on the rise of Chinese science and technology reminds us that technology doesn't just run one way. At the same time, the particular products of industrialized technology during the era that we're talking about cable, allowing immensely speeded up communications, which can, well, which essentially, you know can be seen over the sense of the kind of sinews of the growing modern empire, the growth of chemical technology which allows everything of course superior weaponry at least as a superior that perhaps a slightly overly optimistic word to use what it means extension of killing power but nonetheless, a lot of the interesting work that's been going on. In terms of looking at the expansion of European empires in Africa points out that not only was the chemical development of greater weaponry important in increasing Europeans capacity to coerce, but also helped to fuel rivalries between different African empires in that particular period, some of which that may be one example, I believe, where I have access to more modern firearms and the chemical processes attached to them than other people's managed to to have. And finally, but by no means least in this this list of binomens exhaustively, we see of course the emergence in the late 1930s 20th century of the internal combustion engine, and also linked to that I should point out to I should have added that the steam engine as well. It's impossible to imagine Joseph Conrad's Congo and the changing of the way in which Belgium's empire emerged in that period, without also taking into account the growth in the technology of the steamer, which was essentially able of course to penetrate much dark, further into what Joseph Conrad with that huge ambiguity in the title of the content referred to as the heart of darkness, he of course used it in a deep ironic way. Unfortunately, many of his followers seem to take it rather more, more literally, but certainly the use of technology and everything from the ability of steamers to enter into the riverine systems together with the industrialization of the plants. That were that we used to essentially grow raw materials and crops for the wider empire, along with the capacity to coerce we know now of course that of many of the crimes of the European empires, what happened in the Belgian Congo was amongst the most egregious vicious and in horrific in terms of the treatment of indigenous laborers so all of these factors coming together at this time, technology of course playing an immensely important role in this combination. We notice another turning point here, just to say that certainly generations of British school children have learned about the battle of classy and the pacification or whatever term is generally used as a euphemism in India during this this period, but I bring it up as a moment when of course Robert Clive and his use of not only British force but also of course collaboration with Allied forces in India brought about essentially the control of Bengal in particular, again setting the stage for another one of the immensely important stories of India in this case, but again, I'm summarizing, perhaps overly but nonetheless making that wider point there, the story of opium opium very much a product of empire, grown in poppy fields in Bengal, protest in a process in Singapore and what these days I'm glad to say get into great trouble of course as part of Singapore's emergence as a port city, and of course famously shipped into China, forced into China at a moment when the Chinese Empire desired to ban its sale within the territory of the of the empire, and then finally of course used essentially as a sort of battering ram for the wider entry or Western imperial power into China in the 1830s and 1840s in a way that would not be at least formally ended until about a century later in the 1940s at the end really of World War Two. Let me use some of those sorts just to bring together, if I may, some of those, those, those thoughts before we move on to the next section by the mid 19th century, I would say that we are looking at a world of empires and again it's, you know, in a sense a common know that the 19th century in a sense is the height of modern empire as a historical phenomenon, but it's just worth remembering quite how widespread this is, as well as some of the interesting exceptions so just sort of go down this for a for a second. The rise of empires as I've said here from pre modern to modern I mean there's a problematic terms I'm aware but I'm trying to sort of get a short hand here for some points that I think are necessary. And that would include, of course the Ottomans, the growth of the Russian Empire which moves eastward in a big way during this period. The empire which of course comes under attack from the west at this point but of course is a growing empire in its own right in the 18th and 19th century, particularly in its western territories. Spanish Portuguese empires very early on in the game now cause perhaps more struggling to stand still so, again, the shift in terms of technology and industrialization certainly shifts the balance of power in terms of those empire. Empires as I mentioned, Clive and Bengal are a sort of turning point I think in terms of the emergence not least of the East India Company and sort of one of the vehicles of imperialism that happens at that time. And of course also in terms of Britain's domestic policy the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 changes Britain from being a country that is essentially stuck on its own cut off from the rest of Europe united under a particular charismatic ruler through sword as well as through goodwill I have to have to point out, and instead opens up the continent and the world beyond for Britain to be able to exercise the benefits of the industrialization and the imperial ideology I've mentioned, unburdened by having to fight a war on the continent itself. Although, there are the other elements of the story that remind us that empire in its classic form doesn't simply dominate in the right way. I mean, I've actually used a slightly sort of over the strong term here but I'll put it down anyway, using the term home of freedom, Latin America of course going this stage through an immense number of revolutions and reconstitutions into sovereign republics. And while these republics were not homes of freedom, going get to my own phrase there for many of the indigenous populations of these countries and certainly not for many of their women. Nonetheless, we do see a different model from the overall arrival and growth and complex and conquest of European Empire. Again, worth noting and I think here at the work of many scholars, it comes to mind Toby Green with his some wonderful book Fistful of Shells, a couple of years ago, which looked at early modern West Africa, and pointed out how rich and thriving its many societies were with a strong commercial culture, plenty of interaction and links in fact to other parts of the world, including South America before the arrival of European imperialism. And the idea that there is no sense either of there being a history of indigenous empires in Africa before the arrival of Europe is highly misleading. And I think that has been one of the very important turns in African history in the last few decades. As I've said, that is worth noting partly because the mid 19th century does see that scramble for Africa to use the classic phrase now I've mentioned Joseph Conrad in the Belgian Congo. But of course beyond that, we have a whole variety of figures who changed that story into one that is much more about the focus, exercise and use of all of those capacities that the British and French and other immigrants are able to exercise after the the defeat of Napoleon and the growth of European empires and their outward movement during the decades of the 19th century. And one of the important elements of that is the emergence of not just the technology, not just the weaponry of conquest law that is very important of course in terms of shifts and dynamics during this this period, but also of the globalization of particular sorts of thought. And this is where I just sort of want to flag up briefly that of course, many things emerge and globalize during the 19th century ideologies of Empire of Social Darwinism and liberalism of a whole variety of strands of thought that emerge from particular types of thinking within the European space in the 18th and 19th century. But it is also worth noting that, although many things emerge and become powerful that time. I'm not necessarily thinking that has was was entirely unfamiliar in that sense either I bring up here just one example of one sure from the Song Dynasty in China, one of the first thinkers on the way in which economics and markets operate in ways that would seem very familiar, had he known about them to add the Smith who's often thought of as the father of the, of the marrying of ideas of market economics and morality, while Smith's ideas were highly original and influence is absolutely undeniable. And it is worth I think just reminding ourselves that these are not ideas that purely emerge in one particular cultural place or context, even if one particular formulation may have emerged and and spread much more widely. So let me use that thought if I may to take on why some of these ideas I think shape this particular era of Empire so strongly. But going back just to what I said right at the beginning of my comments, the idea that there are separate circuits of knowledge different sort of epistemological conditions and ecologies you might almost say that have some connection with each other in many ways but in the end are identifiable and to some extent closed within themselves. Well this era of course marks the opposite happening the convergence of these circuits and the globalization of thought, which is usually summed up even today, and I've done it in this lecture but it's really hard to find other ways to phrase this even though we know it's unsatisfactory about what it means to be modern about the growth and penetration of ideas of progress and the capture of global minds elite minds in particular, even those pushing back very strongly and it's the purveyors of this form of modernity. Still, so often phrase or express or frame their ideas about what the alternative is, in terms that are defined by that type of idea or modernity as growth as progressive as a way of understanding how hierarchies can be flattened in the world and societies can be in some way or another improved. One of the reasons why I flagged up Wang Anshu just before is that when we turn to some of the ideas of Adam Smith David Ricardo and so forth and the rise of modern economics. It's important to to acknowledge that similar ideas emerged long before any of these gentlemen had the influence, but we do that in nonetheless the reality under the reality of the fact that in the 19th century, the growth and power of European empires enabled those ideas and norms and ideas about markets to spread very, very widely indeed. And these of course came to affect a whole variety of different circuits of knowledge and understanding in East Asia, amongst other regions, Japan and China being important examples of that of course, Korea also could be added to the list, when it came to ideas of governance. In other words, the ideas of Chinese governance that had come from Confucian norms from the immense impact of non Chinese rulership under the Mongols and the medieval period under the Manchus and the Qing period of the early modern to late modern period. All of these came together in the knowledge of this much more disruptive, in many ways highly transformative sets of Western derived but globally oriented types of thought on everything from economics to governance. And in doing this, some of these ideas caught on more than others and I offer you what's now become the kind of classic pairing of 19th century European politics being dominated by Marx and Spencer in the shape of Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer. The ideas of class and race become immensely important in East Asia, in particular, in terms of shaping ideas of nation and identity, and taking pre existing categories Confucian categories you might say, and reinventing them. And again, if anyone doubts the importance in China, at least of the penetration of the idea of class, in particular, then I would refer you to the late months ago. I can assure you that he cared very much about the idea of class he founded actually a very powerful construct which adapted to the reality of what he saw as the realities of Chinese rural life could be a very powerful tool. And whatever you think of the results that emerged, he clearly found it a category that was immensely transformative in terms of the political project of liberation that he wished to pursue in terms of race. Social Darwinism became essentially one of the if not the dominant way of thinking about the Chinese and Japanese political predicament of the late 19th century. One of the most powerful and discriminatory ways of thinking that emerged from the rise of the European empires, but the indigenization and acceptance of social Darwinist norms in the East Asia of the late 19th century is yet another example of how the globalization of the emergence of thought that emerged in East Asia at that point could be drawn into very indigenous debates about how these societies were going to react to the emergence of this sort of Western thought and power, and use it to project back a new model of the post-Western liberated Asia was going to look like. And that led essentially to the, you know, to use our cliché phrase but it was good one the Empire striking back, a rise in hybrid non-Western thinking and again. These are unsatisfactory terms, you know, hybrid suggests that you've got to hybridize between various, various things. And non-Western again is sort of defining things as a negative, but it is a sign of the domination of course through the mechanisms of empire of these ways of thinking. But nonetheless, we think about someone like Kanye Way, one of the most prominent Chinese political thinkers of the late 19th century, a man who did everything from setting up a Chinese not very successful Chinese attempted colony in Mexico to announcing a policy that suggests that all marriages should be renewed or not renewed on an annual basis, a policy that might seem somewhat advanced even even today. Or indeed Gandhi who mentioned for again when one thinks about people like this who are very very much part both of the, the specific cultures from which they emerged in China or India, and also very very important in terms of the project of integration in their own societies, and yet nonetheless are clearly products of that very complex environment in which empire and the ways of thinking that it brings with it interact with political projects of great urgency. And of course, we've done a great deal of thinking so far or great talking about the importance of the importance of thought in this slightly abstract way. I think this is an important moment to point out that coercion is an immensely important part of what makes empire powerful. It is I think a great mistake to think that coercion is the only thing that makes empire powerful it has much more subtle and much complex elements of interaction with the societies that that it changes, but nonetheless, it would be immensely misleading not to point out that conflict and war in particular is an immensely important part of that shift as well and while I've not wished to endorse them in other ways. This was one of the insights that there has to figure them many now and of course, in terms of his understanding of how capitalism would eventually fall victim to its own contradictions. The long 19th century could perhaps be regarded as post Napoleon, the West outsourcing war to the wider world people talk about the long European piece of the 19th century. A, it's not entirely true, you know, Crimean war, Franco-German wars and so forth, there are other examples you can think of. But nonetheless, the relative piece during that century between 1815 and 1914 is not remotely matched in Asia, Africa and other parts of the world where there is an immense enthusiasm on the part of empires to conquer territory by by force. And that I think then sort of leapfrogs us into the way in which war continues to inflect empire over the period that follows the great war 1914 to 1918 the first war of course is an ideological economic turning point in all sorts of ways, including of course, the first articulation in an organized way of the idea that empires having been established over the past, whatever 150 years, now have to begin to come to an end to the idea that is only quite incipient at that point, but nonetheless the emergence of the League of Nations as an entity which essentially provides the first mandates that formally authorize the bringing of people who are essentially colonial subjects into a state of a state in which they are at some point when it's felt by the imperial powers worthy of doing so will be allowed to actually govern govern themselves and this process but gets much more underway after 1945 but even then there's a tremendous amount of difficulty and pushback in terms of those empires actually letting go so seeing that process is something that's much more complex over that period and which certainly emerges in that post World War one moment. I think is an important, important turning turning point. We should also note the great war as an important turning point in terms of gendered aspects of political involvement. I'm also noting that in different ways, many of the major powers imperial otherwise, begin to turn towards more formal involvement of women in politics quickly through voting France, sorry, Britain and the United States being amongst them, and yet other follow at a rather varied pace, often a right rather unexpected order right always think it's it's indicative of something interesting that France didn't actually let women back to 1946. China actually formally gave in 1947 under the Chinese nationalist government and Switzerland famously not until 1971 Switzerland being the only country that had not been through a major war during that particular period. During that era, there's also tremendous debate over different types of empire and this is where we get the kind of contradiction but nonetheless a necessary contradiction between the idea of the liberal empire I use the word obviously with some quotation marks around it the British and the French the idea that somehow the enlightenment to you to empire, and the very explicit emergence of empires that turn towards a kind of fascism, the continental European empire of Nazi Germany being one important example, of that, but also the still controversial question in the Japan history field about whether the Japanese Empire should be regarded as fascist or not. Certainly the emergence in 1940s of a great debate amongst the Kyoto School of Philosophers led amongst others by the great philosopher Nishita Kitaro about Chokoku no Kindai the overcoming of modernity suggests a disillusionment with the kind of classic definitions of modernity that I think would not have found equal equally powerful intellectual expression in the influence or Britain of that time, even within those, within those empires. And just skipping to the end of this part so we can move it on. The emergence then in the Cold War of a rather different sort of empire by proxy, you might say in which two different models of the enlightenment to sort of Soviet inflected socialist one, and American dominated liberal one by for across the globe, with of course, a long piece being created by the new and terrifying thought of a nuclear war. And here is the part where I think there is so much expertise on this zoom, generally there's this conference that I will only speak lightly and move on but this is a huge amount of what's been going on during this conference and more broadly in conversations about global modernity has been so important. The idea in other words of metropoles places like London but also Paris as hub and diffuser for global modernity as refracted through empire. How much does empire create the conditions that force artists as well as politicians into projects of resistance and liberation, but at the same time create a network that didn't previously exist, by which people from India from Rhodesia and all of these other imperial confessions could find their way to London to study to to plot in many cases, and to find essentially a hub through which the anti imperial project could be articulated. Art of course is one of the immense, immensely important parts of the way in which empires were able to globalize a whole variety of means of expression during this, this period, and modernism of course being one of the dominant forms during this period is also very much in the minds of those who are seeking to use that global imperial moment to make their own statements. I'll give you a quick quotation here from, I think, to those who work on China I think at a familiar poem but nonetheless I think a very interesting one. This is all heavenly hound by the romantic Perk or more from 1924, I think, these lines, I am the sun, I am the moon, I am x ray, I am the energy of the entire universe express a whole variety of the kind of complexities that sit in the writing of Chinese romantic and traditional Chinese translation but x ray and energy sit in the original poem in English language typography they're providing that kind of element of turning, you know, making the West exotic in the in the Chinese production. And you can see influences there everything from the Chinese form to the influence of to go and get entirely which of course been so globally influential during this period. And beyond that, even that be before that stretching into the poetry of Whitman, and the idea of the individuated self and the ego as being central to self expression, all elements of which modernism of course has had an immensely complex and rich relationship during this period. So, let me use that to bring us towards what I think will be my conclusion here so that we can then have some discussion with when he and I do encourage anyone to you know put some questions or thoughts into the chat function so that we can all, you know, be sharp on on screen if you feel brave enough, so that we can have a bit of a discussion about some of these, some of these thoughts. Some of the areas that I think, when we think about the importance of London in all of these stories and you know London has been this important driving theme through so much of what's happened over the last few weeks in this this conference is to think of it of course as a dominant economic force. It becomes visible, you know it's illegible in the streets of London, even today actually but certainly then, in terms of the imposing buildings you know the Neo Roman that's a neoclassical columns of the Bank of England, these sorts of symbols of financial power. One of the things that has, I think that's been less noticed but remains very relevant is the changing way in which in that aspect London has kept and adapted many aspects of its imperial power, even while losing so many of the others over time with the, the disappearance of the former empire after the Second World War. So, if one thinks about version 2.0 of empire immediately after World War Two, the emergence of the Bretton Woods system in which new trade and finance will financial rules essentially were spread around the world. There's a moment in which London essentially loses a great deal of its, its role the dollar becomes dominant currency around the world. And if you're not in the American block, then the, the Soviet vision of the planned economy, then becomes a really important part of the alternative ways about thinking economics and that in a sense of dominates again speaking very crudely between, let's say the late 1940s and early 1970s, a time when actually it's often assumed that London is a city in decline, not perhaps during the kind of brief moment of swinging in the 60s but nonetheless, the decline is story about London is overall quite visible one certainly into the 1970s and early 1980s, but then comes along the global neoliberal moment, and that is a moment for London. And for good or ill, what can argue, certainly both ways, but it is clear that actually a new capacity for London to take advantage of some things that are, you know, nobody could credit London but not to its dispensary either such as it's placing in a convenient time zone between New York and Tokyo between North America and Asia, and also the actions of the then Robert Thatcher government to essentially use Britain as a cheerleader for liberalization of economics and international finance. As I've said, the, between the Big Bang of 1985-86 and the global financial crisis of 2008, there is quite a long gap, but it is a gap in which London and the finance that operates there and the huge pool of capital that operates there to this day are absolutely central actors so when people speak of the decline of the British Empire, I think you might want to look at the way in which Empire gets to find along those, those lines where it's useful where it's not. And that enables us then to think perhaps in the last 10 years or so this is now a very recent recent phenomenon about China's rise. One of the things that I think has been considered, you know, ad nauseam is the question of whether China is building a new empire, you know, is it's Belt and Road Initiative in Africa and Empire or not. I don't think that Empire is necessarily the most helpful way actually to think about what China is doing or the idea that it is running a technology based globalization, in which installing, you know, not setting up reading stations, but installing 5G capacity in a whole variety of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia is a very important play when it comes to controlling economics and controlling strategic, there's just thinking a question about that. But what has been less observed and what I think brings some of the themes of this conference together I think it's a very important ways are the following. One, China is doing more and more about itself, but it's still immensely interested in London as a an internationally recognized center for international finance and law to frameworks, both of which emerge from that British imperial moment of the 18th century, both you know the founding of the Bank of England in 1690 later after that, in terms of the growth of financial markets over centuries, but also the growth of a recognized system of commercial law that still operates in a whole variety of jurisdictions, you know, when he's Singapore, Hong Kong, many parts of the the former British Empire in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. In other words, that imperial legacy still remains not only important, but actually a framework which until it becomes yet more powerful and I think it's got a way to go, China is still curiously dependent on to achieve its own much greater economic goals. So, again, while it will be an exaggeration to claim that London is at the heart of all those developments, don't underestimate the way in which the growth of that empire, that British empire, that we know and have examined in so many ways over decades, still sits as actually I was going to say goes to but it's much more like a very powerful sort of framework around a very different story of rising power in the present day, in which China of course is a an active actor, but it's usually the United States alone, which is regarded as being the other interlocutor. And I think that as we finish off here, remembering at the end that these are questions that I think are going to essentially decide the history of who if anyone gets to be the new imperial hegemon and what may stand in their way. The question of who controls technology in the 19th century it was the British there is no doubt about that in many areas. The Chinese in 21st century will see the question of mass production China itself is moving away from simple mass production to higher value added again, does that mark a similar sort of difference war and technology. Again, I don't think you need me to tell you about the dangers and the possibilities of conflict in terms of these major powers interacting with each other in the world. The revolution and the leader of the, the internet green revolution here I'm using more in the kind of old fashioned sense of food production something on which China is again making a great deal of its own growth dependent in a recent years food security has become a tremendously important issue and not just for China and the lure of the internet on the grounds that being connected everything from social media to payments are absolutely the heart of where new empires and maybe the empires of the tech majors between China, the United States and perhaps Europe will either cooperate or battle it out. And then finally of course the ultimate globalization the one question on which none of us can hope that national boundaries will have any effect whatsoever, which is of course the battle of the climate change, whether or not this is something where our neo imperial powers can get together and sort out what's happening, whether essentially the zero sum nature of the conflict brings everyone together in a mutually assured destruction to use a cold war term is an argument that we are having right now during the course of COP 26 later this year, we will have it again. And there is, unfortunately, no preordained happy ending to that particular question. A sobering reminder I think that the history of our empires and where they are taking us in the future continues to be a very important question, not yet resolved. There are many different sorts and plenty of people to pick apart and push back against and agree with or disagree with I hope I will leave that thought there for a moment so I can turn to our discussant and any questions that come in thank you very much for listening, and thank you for being part of this conference when he over to you. Thank you so much Rana that was just, you know, a really exhilarating talk and I just, it's incredible how you've managed to really kind of synthesize these complex not at histories together in, you know, meeting the challenge of what what you put forward in 45 minutes which is just tremendously thought provoking to hear. I'm just going to give the audience a few more minutes perhaps to raise some questions or to think about what they questions they might have for you, Rana and I wonder if we might begin by, you know, going back to this idea that you mentioned a few times on, you know, circuits of knowledge but also kind of close circuits right so close circuits something mentioned quite a bit in the sense that there is a kind of diffusion or, you know, sort of further contact zones between what might be seen as kind of contrasting clashing empires and so on. And yet, the contact and influence doesn't necessarily reshape narratives or cause, you know, kind of stimulate anything that that is that productive and I wonder if you feel that that this has changed at all today.  And I'm also, you know, thinking in terms of scholarship right so the dominance the continued dominance of global English. Yeah.  Unfortunately. Yeah, would you would you like to kind of expand on that. It's a really important question when Ethan thank you for for that. Well, I mean, first of all, I think that it's very clear that there is still a great deal of what you might call a sort of you know, intellectual hegemony of particular modes of thinking, even in linguistic systems that are not those of the Anglophone world, which as you say has essentially become dominant over this time and I was alluding to that when talking about another globalization of thought. Of course, most of it's getting globalized in English to some extent French, the European languages. But if you look and I know that you do because of the work that you do and certainly different part of that forest. I, too, looking at a great deal of what is discussed in China today, intellectually, a lot of it still seems to be essentially taking these frameworks that emerged in the 19th and 20th century so you know I joked before about marks and Spencer, but actually Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer are very visible in awful lot of what's being talked about today in China actually give you a third philosopher. I've written about this elsewhere and people who instead of welcome to look online and find some recent things I've written in prospect magazine and the But to me one of the things that's very interesting is the concentration on the German theorist and fascist essentially called Schmidt, who's become a really sort of hot topic of conversation amongst philosophers and lawyers at some of China's major universities. Now, I hasten to add this is not to say that these are people who necessarily share these views. And in fact, many people on the left have drawn on Schmidt, in my view, I think they're playing with fire in various places that that's that's a different argument. But the point is that this is a thinker who still seems in some way having something to say to the contemporary Chinese condition. That then of course gets combined in a really interesting way with some of the ways in which some thinkers are drawing on pre modern thinking and using them for a whole variety of fields including ones that seem highly modern like international relations. I think you're someone like professor yet you're told of China University, who writes about very contemporary US China relations, but draws deeply on an indigenous repertoire of benevolence, virtue, you know, and righteousness, these sorts of quite confusion terms to do so. And what I think is now hard to identify, but I'd love to have it identified is whether, you know, in the moment, since the 19th century really, that all of the circuits of knowledge in some way have taken on board norms and assumptions that you know to use that term I've used to encompass the modern. I mean, even if they're pushing, you know, if you're overcoming modernity, like the school in Tokyo in the 1940s, you're still acknowledging that it's a factor, it's, it's, it's the obstacle over which you've got to jump. And so you're basically taking it on board, acknowledging the importance by saying that you have to have to overcome it. This, you know, Chinese political discourse, which is an astonishing mixture of, you know, Confucian norms, Marxism, Leninism, you know, certain things that are drawn from a variety of particular sorts of economic thinking of the, of the neoliberal era are sort of, or in a sense illustrations I think of that wider battle to try and burst through those modes of understanding those epistemologies, but I'm sorry it's out in a slightly depressing note. The difficulty of finding any way actually to do it, but I don't know how does it seem to you when I mean maybe is, is perhaps cultural production, maybe art is the way in which you, you get to that maybe language is too difficult, a framework through which to burst force and of course it involves, you know, a certain assumption of linguistic categories that people want to use in the first place. That's a, that's a really great point right now I think art, you know, the question of modernity and it's kind of diffusion in China and also how that, you know, extends to contemporary artistic practice especially within China itself I think it's something extraordinarily complex and I'm not sure if it's necessarily any more legible on the basis of that, although you know there is a kind of, you know, as you say that what may seem like a lack of reliance on English would seem to further kind of accessibility in some sense but then again, there is also a tendency to draw from what might call broadly kind of Western frameworks and Western historiography, historiographies and means of thinking. And I think that's part of what, you know conferences such as this one applied to do with that picking apart the scenes of history as a discipline and its methodologies as well but we have a question actually from Sarah Turner Sarah do you want to switch on your camera and ask Yeah hi hi Rana thank you for that paper and I was just thinking about the teaching of histories of empire and there's been a lot of discussion in the press recently about the absence of imperial histories and histories of empire within the British school curriculum and of course as an educator yourself as someone based in a British university you have an angle on the appetite for among students for thinking about studying the histories of empire at university and for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, and I just wondered whether you could sort of perhaps you know sort of bridge some of the, the comments that you made in your in your wonderful paper with a sense of you know what is the appetite amongst a younger generation of students coming to to university to think through, you know, sort of empires and its histories whether that's, you know, studying with you up and thinking about China or Britain I just think you know I wonder about the status of it within the teaching of history at the moment. Absolutely. Well let me give a two sort of quite specific points and then perhaps just a slight afterthought to to broaden it. The two specific points are this one is something I mentioned only briefly at the beginning and partly because of the brief that you mean and have I gave me an order to obey orders but I always think the occlusion the exclusion of the kind of, you know, placing in the shadows of Japan's modern empire is one of the great missing links in terms of a total understanding of modern empire and you know we want to say I'm going back to your point when you about language you know the majority of work on the Japanese empire is done probably in Japanese or Chinese. You know it's a very rich bibliography in English and there's no excuse not to have it on those grounds but you know it is less. So that would be my contribution to how we can make you know the study of empire more kind of wide ranging that it is at the moment. And beyond that actually what's the other specific point is that when we think about empire British empire sort of turning what Sarah's point. We tend to put it this way. I asked you know if you ask people I do sometimes ask students. Great cities, so it's a limited term but I think it's fine. Great cities of the British empire you know people might mention Cape Town or Calcutta or, you know, Bombay or, you know, London indeed, but very few people mention Shanghai, even though actually it is you know one of the at least in its waterfront one of the most British places in terms of formation and its economic basis and of course the British international British run essentially international settlement that dominated over a century. So knowing about that, even Hong Kong is perhaps better known than the Shanghai as a city that's immensely shaped by the experience of empire in that in that sense so there's more of it around them people necessarily assume or or think, what's the wider point that I want to make that there is huge. I think there's huge interest and enthusiasm for the study or empire among students have been the courses that you know put on here and I think other universities to are always immensely huge interest in, you know, Northwestern history in general China and Japan courses also always packed out and that's great to great to see. I think what we need to avoid as historians as opposed to as historians I think just put it put it that way is is sort of reversing what was the case perhaps a generation ago into what there's a danger of becoming now generation or more ago. There was if there's any mention of empire at all it was basically about you know kind of the glorious conquest of the natives by various figures like Clive of India being the one I mentioned briefly and he's certainly one I remember from much earlier school days myself. If we go where you sometimes see students perhaps sort of with enthusiasm going the direction which is the idea that actually the only way to understand the impact of empire is about coercion and violence, which is an immensely important part of it. It cannot must not be ignored. It squeezes out all the things that actually make it such an extraordinarily odd and unusual and historically specific form of both governance and creation of power relations, the, you know, the ability of empire to both co opt, as well as to co worse is a really significant part of that that that nexus, but it's much harder to explain without kind of doing the work and actually, you know, showing how how these things operated, operated in practice so I think historians please on any subject is to make sure that if you have a view that suggests that you know, you know exactly who the good guys the bad guys are or you know what's right and what's wrong. You're probably doing theology, not history, and you might want to rethink where you're going so that's where I hope the study of empire is is going to be a lot more thinking writing. Thank you. That was a really interesting answer. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for I think that you know I one of the interesting things I think we, I don't know how are we doing for time actually. I think we probably should break a bit over and just give people the screen. And then we can, maybe if we take 10 minutes break and then we can come back for the next panel and continue discussion after those papers. Yeah, thank you so much. I know I think that this, you know, your brilliant lecture will be super useful for the conversations that will follow on in the papers this afternoon. Thank you so much to be here and I hope the conference goes really well. Very much enjoyed being with you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so we're going to break now for 15 minutes and and continue with the rest of the papers this afternoon at quarter to three. But please everyone join me in thanking Rana very much. Welcome to the second part of our panel today of our session today. I'm going to now introduce our three speakers this afternoon and there's been a slight change in the running order. The first speaker will be Toshio Watanabe, a professor of the professor for Japanese arts and cultural heritage at the University of East Anglia at Sainsbury Institute for the study of Japanese arts and cultures. Toshio is the professor emeritus of history of art and design at the research center for transnational art identity and nation of the University of the Arts London. He founded the research center for transnational art identity and nation train at the University of Arts London in 2004. And his recent publications include East Asian art history in a transnational context, edited with Eric Tomizawa K in 2019 and collected papers by Toshio Watanabe edited by Christopher J. Our second speaker today will be Diti. Diti Kira, the associate professor in art history and and the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. Diti is a scholar of early modern South Asia with interdisciplinary training in art history, museum anthropology and architecture, and her research and teaching integrates long-distance perspectives and Indian Ocean and Eurasian geographies for grounding art histories remaking of colonized and racialized pasts. Her recent book, The Place of Many Moods, Udaipur's Painted Lands and India's 18th century, published by Princeton in 2020, was awarded the Edward Cameron DeMock Junior Prize by the American Institute of Indian Studies. Her collaborative work with Rajasthan's museums has led to conservation exhibition and digital projects, including co-curating with Deborah Diamond, splendid land paintings from Royal Udaipur, which will be opening in November 2022 at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art. Our final speaker today will be Gemma Sharp, a post-doctoral research associate in art history at the Graduate Center City University of New York, where she also completed her PhD in 2019. Her post-doctoral research examines the development of modernism in Pakistan in the context of Cold War internationalism, modern arts of X relationships who post-colonial nation building, with a particular focus on medium and works on paper. Between 2010 and 2014, she taught art history at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi, where she was also a coordinator at Vessel Artists Collective. She is an MFA in art writing from Goldsmiths and has published numerous articles, catalog essays and reviews internationally, and recently co-edited an art margin special issue on art institutions and internationalism with Chelsea Haynes. So after our three speakers present, we will have a Q&A session, so please feel free to type in your questions straight into the chat box as the speakers are speaking. So I'm going to hand over now to Toshio, who will be presenting a paper titled Watercolor Landscapes of Japan in Victorian London, Meiji Tokyo and Colonial Taipei, Shifts in the Canon. Over to you, Toshio. Thank you, Rene. I tried to get into my screen. Right, worked. Okay. In this paper, I should like to think the issues of London, Asia, art, world through not just one, but two empires, the British and the Japanese, and show how these two got intertwined. Perhaps some of the issues raised by our keynote speaker, Rene, I should like to investigate the circuits of knowledge and recover memory, which was lost with the demise of these empires. Then put these recovered memory into new and different contexts and attempt to create a new knowledge structure, a kind of shift in the canon. Perhaps a two ambitious aim for a 15 minutes paper, but let us see how it goes. Okay. Here it goes. Here are my three protagonists of today's story. Alfred Parsons, Miyake Kokki, and Ishikawa Kinichiro. One Englishman and two Japanese, all wonderful watercolor painters and active during the period of late 19th to early 20th century. The stage is set in three cities, London, Tokyo and Taipei. The main examples are watercolor paintings of Japanese landscape, all painted not in a modernist but in a rather naturalistic manner, a type frequently overlooked in the discussions of the art of this period. Let us start with Alfred William Parsons. He was a Royal academician and was perhaps better known as a virtuoso watercolorist, becoming the president of the Royal Watercolor Society in 1914. He was also a successful garden designer and an illustrator. His network of friends and acquaintances was amazingly wide, including both conservative and progressive artists and writers, including Sir Lawrence Armatadema, Lord Layton, William Morris, James McNeil-Whistler, Henry James, and also Okakura Kakuzo. He traveled to Japan in 1892 and stayed there for about nine months. Once back in London in 1893, he showed the watercolors he had painted in Japan at the Pioneer Society in Bond Street. This was one of them. The exhibition, which must have been arranged before his Japanese trip, was called Landscapes and Flowers in Japan and included about 100 paintings. Let us examine the venue of the exhibition, The Fine Arts Society. This gallery set up in 1876 was an undisputed center for the art of Victorian Japanese. Japanese in London. However, as far as I can see, Parsons' paintings did not show any Japanese stylistic traits nor Japanese motifs before the trip. The first puzzle is why Parsons, not an artist with Japanese credentials, wanted to go to Japan. And the second puzzle is why did The Fine Arts Society as a commercial dealer risked a major exhibition of Japan by such an artist. Evidences for the tentative answer to these questions could first be found in what might be called horticultural Japanese, which was raging at this time. During the second half of the 19th century, many British intrepid front hunters roam East Asia activities which could be framed under the conditions of empire. And these has also been discussed within the context of colonial exploitation. This period of late 19th century and early 20th century was exactly the time that professional nurserymen, such as James Herbert Lach, traveled actively and widely to secure new plans for their businesses. Japan was particularly popular. My second point is that during this period, the English garden design went through a radical change, a shift in canon. From a more formal, often geometrical design with large bedding systems to a more informal, naturalistic and even subtly color coordinated garden design. First spearheaded by William Robinson, and then perfected and popularized by Gertrude Gertrude-Jicke. For William Robinson, garden design was high art, as it presented nature directly. John Ruskin was an occasional contributor to Robinson's periodical garden, and Ruskin's idea of aesthetic closeness of nature and art was directly expressed by Robinson in his promotion of the wild garden. Alfred Parsons combined these two elements. He was not a plant hunter, but still could be called a botanical tourist. His notes in Japan published in a book form in 1896 after his return is in fact rather a strange travelogue. He devoted an unusual amount of space to simply Japanese plants. Parsons himself a garden designer was also very close to William Robinson. In fact, he provided nearly 100 illustrations for the second and subsequent editions of Robinson's most famous and groundbreaking book, The Wild Garden. Coming together of the more nature oriented garden design and the gently naturalistic landscape painting during the late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain is very much part of the zeitgeist of the period which Unhelm Reich has characterized as English garden designs, dichotomy of recreating the ideal English past, while utilizing new materials and technologies provided by the empire. Very much chiming in what Rana was saying. Now how Japan played a role here is still to a large extent unexplored and the new knowledge structure needs to be worked out, to which a further exploration of the relationship of these with a so-called Yokohama photography, Yokohama Shashin, would also likely to play a part. Let us shift the stage to Tokyo. And I like to introduce the second protagonist, Miyake Koki. Japan during our period was an empire, but it could also be argued that most of this period, it was in many respect under the umbrella of the British Empire. A situation often called an informal empire. For our period, the field of painting in Japan was roughly divided between Nihonga, Japanese style painting and yoga, western style painting. For the latter, oil painting was a dominant form and watercolor played a mere subsidiary role. However, a radical change was triggered when Miyake Koki encountered the watercolor paintings by no other than Alfred Parsons. Who put up an exhibition of nearly 100 works at the Tokyo School of Fine Art in 1892 for just one day. Probably shortly before his departure. Miyake heard about this and rushed to see it and was overwhelmed specifically by the watercolors. He explained, I quote, I lost my interest in life drawing completely, was mostly absent from the morning art class and fervently immersed myself only in watercolors from nature. End of quote. This short quote indicates three important elements for the future. First, the rejection of academicism in art education. The emphasis on plenarism, that is painting nature outdoors. And third, the preference for watercolor over oil painting. These were all crucial components for the ensuing watercolor movement, which flowered during the first two decades of the 20th century. Mr. Togiro, who was the leader of this movement, wrote several times about the importance of his friend Miyake's encounter with the watercolors by Parsons. Miyake was clearly the most prevalent proselytizer of Parsons' watercolors. The Journal of the Watercolour Movement, Mizue, literally Volca Mizue painting, featured Parsons repeatedly, and a translation of his notes in Japan was serialized in this periodical. The history of Japanese modern painting of this period has tended to be seen as divided between Nihonga, Japanese style painting in yoga, western style painting as I just mentioned. Some examples here. However, more recently, I have argued to see the watercolor movement as a separate third force in modern Japanese painting. And I'm also involved with a research project headed by the Tsukuba University of Tsukuba in Japan on this issue. I have argued to see the watercolor movement as a separate third force in modern Japanese painting. So there is not enough time to go into details today, and so I will just point out four of their main achievements. First, the Japanese watercolor is focused on British and not French art. And so in British watercolor painting, the ideal artistic means to express modern landscape painting. Second, they thus pioneered in establishing modern landscape painting in Japan. Third, the established watercolor painting has a distinct artistic category of its own in Japan. And finally, they contributed to the democratization of the art of painting in Japan. Let us now change the stage to our third venue. Which was the capital of the first major colony of the Japanese Empire. During the main period, Britain was perhaps the most prominent model for the construction of the modern nation. And as a British example has amply shown to gain a colony was a major component of such a modern empire. Here we have the third protagonist Ishikawa Kimichiro, who met Miyake in 1892, the year of Miyake's Yurika movement. Ishikawa was also a friend of Oshita and became a key person for the Japanese watercolor movement. Ishikawa first came to Taiwan as an interpreter, a personnel of the Japanese army, very much in the role of a colonizer. But once in Taiwan, he started to get involved heavily with the art education there. He spent non-periods in Taiwan and taught many Taiwanese artists. Ishikawa clearly loved the people and the landscape of Taiwan. He encouraged the Taiwanese artists and assisted in the setting up of the Taiwan watercolor society, as you see here in the left. You can see his eagerness of leaning forward. Because in Taiwan also watercolor painting gained the position of being a third force in modern painting than Ishikawa. In conclusion, we have seen that the English painter Parsons, who was at the center of a new type of a more intimate and plant oriented landscape painting in Britain, became a catalyst for the birth of the Japanese watercolor movement, which then traveled to Taiwan, creating a third force in modern painting there as well. You could see the dynamics operating here simply as a Fukudian power relationships cascading from the heights of London down to Tokyo and then to Taipei, a kind of variation of a Syedian orientalist domination. When we are thinking of the power structure of empires, the inequality of the power dynamics is undeniable. As for example, you could see that the landscape painting of a colonial Taiwan was not just that of Taiwan, but also part of the empire, thus Japanese landscape in quotation marks. However, however, all the three cities, London, Tokyo, and Taipei, but also significant contact zones where other forces were at play and these were not always one directional, taking Rana's point of not to see empires just as violence and coercion. And so let's us try to recover, but we're squeezed out by this view of empires. None of the three artists, Parsons Miyake Oishikawa, are canonical figures, but they all contributed positively, almost against the grain of these colonialist dynamics prevailing in other empires. Perhaps we need to shift our canon. Thank you. Back to Rene. Thank you so much, Tokyo, for that brilliant paper that resonates, I think so beautifully with a lot of what Rana was talking about in his keynote lecture. So our next speaker today will be Gemma Sharp. And her, her paper is titled The Order Story Equal Geoffrey's London. Whenever you're ready Gemma. Hi, thank you. Thank you also to Ming and Sarah and Hamad. And everyone working on this project over a number of years, I think I'm not the only person who's had various aha moments in my own research, thanks to thanks to this project and being able to think alongside it. So let me just share my PowerPoint. Okay. Great. Right. So, on the 12th of September 1968 between the usual notices for Portuguese language classes and second hand pianos and unusual announcement appeared in the ad section for the Times of London. It was named Sayed Iqbal Geoffrey and qualifications in accountancy and law before moving on to a series of notable accolades and award the Paris biennial commendations from her to her but read among others various upcoming books and work for the United Nations, all completely yet the ad goes on. Geoffrey solemnly declares that he came to GB from Pakistan in January 1960 at age 21, and since October 1960 has been registered for any job with the city professional and executive register. No look yet. So the artist laureate of the UK is now going on national assistance after eight years of agonizing dignity in defiance of technical truths. And now it's time to ask ethics. Well, what to make of this public announcement that Iqbal Geoffrey the artist lawyer was going on the dole. Is this an artwork. Is he serious. For an answer. We might look to Rashida Ryan's presentation of Geoffrey's career in the 1989 exhibition the other story, certainly the most important vehicle for Geoffrey's recognition and reputation in histories of black and Asian art in Britain today. The exhibition as part of a section titled taking the bull by the horns in his room which he declared a one man show called the other story from which I take the title of this paper included a number of his abstract paintings from the 1960s. A wall of collages from the 1980s and various conceptual sculptures. So Ryan presents Geoffrey as something of a trickster who delights in contradiction and sabotaging the institutions of art, along with art itself. We come away from the essay with the impression that Jeffrey is also something of a drifter bouncing from one side of the Atlantic to the other, before that finally settling in Lahore Pakistan in the in the mid 1980s. Perhaps even more unfavorably, a Ryan presents Geoffrey as somehow more English than the English. As a rival in London in 1960 we learn, Geoffrey lodged himself in a flat in Belgravia dressed himself in several rose suits and rub shoulders with societies across proclaiming himself the best dressed young artist in London. When he met Queen Elizabeth the second Orion goes on, she expressed surprise and joy that he gave up Lauren accountancy in order to paint and had won such a claim in England. Realizing Jeff Iran's implicit critique, which is telling in its own way, I want to recuperate Geoffrey from this rather skeptical account and tell another story or indeed an order story about his time in London and work more broadly. I also hope to loop round to some of the conversations surfacing in this conference around the risk of re inscribing London as a hedge monex center in histories of Asian art, and the power of institutional bureaucratic histories have to underscore that risk. To bring Geoffrey's example to bear to on these dilemmas and recast London as there to be claimed as part of a colonial inheritance, and therefore to think of it as equal Geoffrey's London. I also want to contrast a Ryan's reading of Geoffrey as a trickster with Geoffrey's own work and his philosophy of praxis or what he calls S ethics. Going back to the times out of 1968 note the striking last line farewell to ethics. The compound of ethics and aesthetics as ethics, a bit of a mouthful has grounded the multiplicities of Geoffrey's career since he coined the term in 1958 while still a teenager living in Pakistan. As ethics represents a commitment to truth, most of all, and justice at all costs, be that truth in art in life in law. It is through the rubric as ethics rather than art strictly that we can understand an object like this times out. And a quick note. Jeffrey is quite insistent about the different elements of his career being quite different. It's not all art, although it is all ethics and maybe that's something we can talk about more in the discussion. The ethical truth of this ad is that racism in Britain was preventing Geoffrey from finding a job and violating his human dignity. A buzzword of civil and human rights discourse during this period and something that he would have well known and is using quite deliberately as a former UN officer here. So in defiance at the lies or technical truths that he and his fellow colonial immigrants were being told about their place in British society, Geoffrey here is speaking his own ethic truth through this act of his fundamental right to be in Britain. Geoffrey's ad stages the discriminations of the so called color bar in Britain that prevented and still prevents black and Asian Britons from equal access to jobs, homes, social mobility, etc. So in defiance that when Jeffrey posted the ad, the question over whether or not this discrimination should be made illegal was then being debated in Parliament. In fact, just a month after he posted it and motivated in part by Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood Speech, the 1968 race relations act criminalized racial discrimination in Britain. It wasn't especially effective but I think everyone here would have guessed that. So Geoffrey's ad deploys another instrument of legal instrument of belonging at his disposal, the doll. For as a citizen of Britain, Geoffrey was then at least just as entitled to the social safety net as everyone else. However, reluctantly he might need to use it. Geoffrey's declaration that he was going on the doll on national insistence in fact represents a paradoxical statement of belonging, a testing to his legal status as a citizen, whether the Times Reader, future employer or Enoch Powell supporter wanted to recognize it or not. And so where did that status come from? Well, from Empire of course. When Geoffrey first arrived in Britain in the winter of 1960 he was part of what Stuart Hall has called the first wave of black and Asian artists in post war Britain. But these artists, interestingly accepting FN Sousa who was a Goan Christian came on a Portuguese passport, arrived under the auspices of the 1948 British nationality bill. The bill conferred citizenship on Britain's living inside the country, but also within current and former colonies. And while this might sound nice and liberal, the goal of the act was actually to bolster the post colonial Commonwealth citizenship as a tool. As Connecticut Perry emphasizes in her stunning history of this period, essentially the British Nationality Act represented a means to redress the fading image of Britain's imperial legacy through the institutionalization of a transracial trans regional citizenship category that bolstered the perception of imperial and Commonwealth in uniformity. And along between the act passing and it's inevitable reversal in 1962, the artist who came to Britain from the Commonwealth did rather well however. In his own first three years in Britain, Geoffrey took part in 12 group and 11 solo exhibitions and became one of the first Asian artists in the take collection. Geoffrey's work epitaph painted in Pakistan in 1958 brings together Geoffrey's interest in the clogged painterly language of unformal, especially walls and South Asian references including the mandala and gouged contours of the Indus Valley clay seals. Geoffrey's works on paper, like this one here on the right were painted more instinctively inspired instead by the watery landscapes of Japanese Zen painting. The incant case in work on paper yourself, for example, is a cursive tangle of drips crosses and handwritten lines of Urdu that taunt non readers and the orders just up above the the cross on the top there. The taunt non readers with their foreign alphabet and Urdu readers with their deliberate lack of meaning. Geoffrey thus forged what if the cardadi has called a cosmopolitan calligraphic modernism that merged modernist abstractions, Islamic ornaments and the traditions of a home. Critics raved over Geoffrey's paintings. He had the capacity to lean from one civilization to another without losing his balance, John Russell. He will emerge as one of the most significant painters of the East a bridge between two cultures says Dennis Sutton and Sir Herbert Reed here. Geoffrey's art proves if that were necessary that there are no barriers to race or tradition in the contemporary art world. Geoffrey's experience in Britain inevitably was not as positive as this reception suggests. In 1961 an outbreak of smallpox among the growing Pakistani community of Bradford increased anti-immigrant anti-immigrant and Pakistani sentiments in particular in Britain. And but was the case for the aforementioned Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 that effectively closed the doors on Commonwealth immigration into the country. The art world also began to shut on this first wave of Afro-Asian art in Britain in a trend that would hold until at least the 1980s.  So when the Huntington Hartford Foundation offered Geoffrey a fellowship in California in late 1962, he relocated to North America instead. He traveled widely and found success through exhibitions, sales and his legal work, Harvard training, UN job and more. With these credentials in hand, he went on to claim his place in the American melting pot and his status as an American artist. A Dutch born immigrant like Willem de Kooning, he argued in his many letters, could become a famous American artist the moment he arrived in the country, then so could he. Yet as Lisa Lowe and others have argued, despite its claims to a universally assimilated polity and more perfect union, American national identity like British is fundamentally as defined by whiteness and by limits on immigration rather than global access. Indeed, when Jeffrey first arrived in the US in 1962, naturalization quotas from South Asian nations, including Pakistan, were still kept at just 105 people a year. In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act radically expanded these quotas, but much like the earlier British Act, merely as a means to buttress US imperial ambitions and improve its Cold War image. And while the act did raise quotas, it also elevated the hurdles that potential immigrants had to jump over to get to the country. Even after its passage, Jeffrey remained in a constant state of precarity. For every shift in his circumstances for every new job or educational endeavor, he needed a new visa and he regularly traveled wait for it to British overseas territories include usually in the Caribbean to process his new American visas, which brings us back to his time at the result of Jeffrey having traveled to London to renew his US visa that was refused, stranding him in the city and preventing him from returning home to his wife, paintings, many of which were lost in a teaching post at Notre Dame College in Indiana. Jeffrey did eventually find work in London as an accountant for line international films and his then wife who was born in Hong Kong so under the same visa rules as he is a Commonwealth immigrant was able to join him in the city shortly afterward. After a stint in Pakistan, his family returned to the US in 1970 a whole two years after Jeffries refused visa in 1968. On his return to the US, Jeffrey doubled down on his claim to an American identity, using the recent passage of the Civil Rights Act and a generalized atmosphere of cultural activism to large discrimination cases against institutions including MoMA in New York for not recognizing his work or his status as an American artist of note. As he stated in his ultimately and I think he knew inevitably unsuccessful lawsuit against MoMA. White artists who have received far less recognition have been actively supported and given the advantages and facilities of the museum. Moreover, and again that if a Dutch or a German is an American artist the moment he lands, then so could Jeffrey be. As a supporter to the then governor of New York and MoMA trustee Nelson Rockefeller, I will now fulfill my American dream by showing these people what the dignity and dignity of mankind means. So to wrap up, what does all this mean for how we think about empire Asia and London. How do we reckon with reckon with Jeffrey's triple claim to British Pakistani and American identity. Well, through empire, in fact through two empires.  The very emblem as Mark Matzawa has argued at 19th century colonialism becoming retooled as liberal internationalism and the triumphal nation state. And against this backdrop as Jeffrey knew there are truths, and there are technical truths. The terms of belonging to the British motherland and the American melting pot turned out to only be technical truths foils for the promotion and maintenance of both countries colonial powers and maintained by laws immigration regimes and bureaucracies of nationalism and internationalism. And Jeffrey knew this well, and he wanted as interlocutors be they Rockefeller family members or times of London readers to know that he knew. Jeffrey's track trajectory is in many ways the ideal and the nightmare for what we like to call global modernism today. His work reaches across the split registers of artists lawyer and ethic crusader, and brings the institution, a site of constant worry within our history as we know from this conference, productively though often uncomfortably interview. His tactics are likewise often quite uncomfortable, bringing humor, raw ambition, hope and even sometimes pleasure into the very real difficulties of his situation. At the same time, and I think productively Jeff, Jeffrey's artworks rise beyond all this, claiming that the ultimate truth of modernism is in detachment and universalist transcendence, they search often quite literally for a more ideal landscape. And they also give us glimpses of their makers divisive relationships to opportunity and obstruction against the shifting grounds of mid century empire, where claims to belonging a toggle to nations and refused on their behalf, where the British color bar meets the global color line, and where symbols as innocuous as postmarks and airport logos speak not to circulation in and of itself, but to those spaces where circulation gets halted briefly, and where it can be put back into check. Okay. Thank you so much Gemma for that absolutely fascinating paper. So, our final speaker today is the carer, and she'll be presenting a paper titled from the streets to London Stevenson way, sensing historical moods between the visual world and archived words of Gazi Wolfenden and Todd. Please join me in welcoming you. Can you see my screen. You can see it and we can hear you. Great to have you on the date. Thank you. Thank you for your patience and thank you, any two for chairing this session, and my sincere thanks to everybody at the Paul melon sense, especially the staff are shown up lunchfield Ella Fleming and Danny one way for all of their work, and to the London Asia art world world spin vener's hammered main and Sarah for this opportunity. I've really appreciated how these gatherings have created the space for conversation with rigor and respect across a range of art and research practices and I don't think I'm alone in feeling that the range of disciplines and locales and institutions you brought together. That for me first and foremost has invoked an ethic of care and justice that seems to be at the core of this project. So I will think through Asia, think Asia through empire today from New York City, which occupies the land of the Lenape people past, present and future. And I will touch upon many of the teams that have been discussed over various sessions that have been of interest to me. Sociality and affects circulation and encounter potential histories and potential agencies and aesthetics and ways of knowing the way many of my colleagues us doubt silences and stories in a way reveal decolonization and action and exhibition and pedagogy and contemporary practices at distinct temporal moments and locales. I think what was not lost on me was how they showed these continuities between colonized pasts and presence, in fact, constantly bursting the temporal or troubling the temporal ground bounds in each instance. And I would be remiss not to mention the ever sophisticated art and critique of our zoom bomber the unhistoriographer terror artist who presented themselves as the post colonial bugs that are rebooting the system. I hope we will return to a conversation with them as well. So in a way for me as I think through some of these questions, what I'm really interested in talking about today is the thinking about the archives in the genres we dwell in to think Asia through empire to sense murmurations the term in book here on many instances. For me something that is suggestive of something that's hard to hear, but impossible to ignore a kind of an ambient noise or a mumbling voice, or almost like a subversive utterance that can get under your skin. And again, which has given me a lot of food for thought for later. Let me turn to some of the itinerancies and imaginations, historical authorities and authorial erasures by turning to this engraving titled as the mahar as the maharana theme sync Prince of Odaipur. This impressive front of space opens the original volume one of the animals and antiquities of Rajasthan published in 1829. James star the first colonial administrators in Northwestern India, who was based in Odaipur from 1799 to 1822 wrote the annals which went on to become one of the most influential history of the region. This engraving is labeled as drawn by Captain war engraved by Eve Findle beam saying is portrayed riding his horse and smoking a hookah, as he embarks on a journey a safari accompanied by his entourage or courtiers who hold the fan with the striking and striking son emblem related to the kings regional court of may bar thoughts assigning of credit for the engraving of teams into war and not acknowledging that the image was based on the painting of a native artist and Indian artist is of course misleading. Indeed, Finden's engraving was based on a watercolor by a professional British artist, which in turn had been used, which in turn was based on a portrait of being seen by Ghasi, that was a source what you see on the left. One of these the original of their portrait in opaque watercolor and gold on paper and the CPA copy on card by the professional artist Thomas Trothart who worked with Edward Finden, I included in Todd's collections. This front is peace lays bare the journey from a therefore streets to London's Royal Asiatic Society on Stevenson way. Todd became the first librarian of the society upon his return to London, and that was where he deposited the collections he amassed in Rajasthan. This front is peace reveals the entangled visual worlds created by artisan artworks that traverse this journey. It creates noise, or at least murmurs based on how we wish to hear view the silences in the archive words of James stored, and how we make sense and construct the Ghasi's agency. On the level of political symbolism, the British artist and engraver, eliminate the golden halo that signals beam sink skinny authority within Ghasi's painting. Besides elongating the bodies, the use of shading and tinting and adapting the postures to indicate movement. The professional artist also transform the landscape setting. Ghasi's painting and his entourage appear against a sparse background, whereas Ghasi attempted to create the ambience of a moonlit sky with rolling almost roaring monsoon clouds. Over the entire landscape of rugged earth, plants and stones and green and bold, the suggestive of a lush territory fed by rain water. Over in in startups version it is substituted with a tiny set of coconut trees and two human bodies or stuff that you can see in the distant background the standard features of a picturesque landscape from this time. This particular stylization of Northwestern India's landscape inserts beam sinks procession in a very different time and space. Ghasi's agency remains but a shadow in the printed annals, it emerges in whispers in some instances and is untraceable in several others. The effect of the portrait's displacement from Odaipur's painted lands and its emplacement into a distinct scenic landscape is further enhanced in findings translation of the watercolor into an engraving. It gestures to travels and an entourage movement which in motion, excuse me, which Dodd describes in the annals but in the context of his own journey through the region. Dodd evocatively described the landscape of Odaipur's lakes and valley, noting the inability of his words to match its real beauty. Dodd's assistant agent Patrick Waugh, an amateur artist on their expeditions rendered a picturesque watercolor. Here you see that how the water merges into bushy outcrops and the lakes almost seem right out and Dodd's expresses first enumerates the undulating mountains, the scented lake waters and the lake palaces and then dams its royal patrons for voluptuous inactivity. He underscores the shift in moons from prosperity to exuberance to decadence to decline. The British often deployed picturesque landscapes as evidence for orientalist accounts of India's 18th century decline and thus these, you know, and thus you have the narrative about that these were lands in dire need of rescue. The moods of India's long 18th century matter to two groups of people. The first were the British who from the early 1700s to the 1830s, the years following the death of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb began to establish forms of colonial economy that would eventually lead to the establishment of the British colonial state by 1858. The second group of people who were really invested in the moods of their enderons at this time were India's regional courts and communities. For both politics and culture, the grounds for loyalties personal friendships and representation had shifted by the late 17th century. The Mughal authority was largely restricted to its capital in Delhi. For instance, court cultures flourishing in the cities of Jaipur and Lucknow, reimagined their place in distinctly local and urban ways through painting, poetry, cartography and city building. Therefore, painters and patrons led by the King Amar Singh II realized the potential of their city's unique local microclimate and natural resources to hold new political communities together. With its lime washed palaces overlooking the lakes of the city, Jaipur was established in the mid 16th century as the Mewar courts capital. As a site it evokes the imaginary of an oasis within the dry desert landscape. Unlike Todd's dismissive descriptions, the work of the airport's painters represents an art that passionately praised the moods of places. The upward path, the feel, the mood, the emotion of a place as a rich layered category to perceive and for us to think with. My recent book, The Place of Many Moods, shows that the elevating of moods within monumental artworks such as the one that you see on the screen created the potential for objects to perform a variety of affective and efficacious work. However, they are revealed ultimately less as documents and more as effective means of recalling the moods of historical times. The longing for ephemeral atmospheres of idealized times when the lakes are full, the monsoons are there, the spring season is there. There are certain times related to certain devotional journeys that are being celebrated and they celebrated the bonding of urban men and women with these lands. These kinds of artworks reveal an art history that was synchronic with Eurasia's own interest in establishing sociability in the creation and representation of circumscribed assemblies, pleasure gardens and coffee houses. Over the course of the long 18th centuries, these artworks confront and overturn British visions of territoriality, temporality of declines and indeed of landscape. The artist Ghasi, who was trained in these traditions, crossed courtly and colonial worlds. Between 1820 and 1834 Ghasi painted under the patronage of two kings and one British agent, Todd. In the early years of the 19th century, he painted smaller portraits of Bhim Singh like the one you saw earlier and which you see on the screen now. When he traveled with Todd, Ghasi also made several small and large drawings of the elevations and architectural details of temples, deploying fine watercolor outlines on watermarked European paper. He also employed the Toboy of processions from Udaipur court paintings to portrait Todd and his diplomatic encounters. And from 1832 to 1835, he painted the Udaipur King Javan Singh in several large scale cloth and paper paintings, picturing him with an expansive architectural environs of temples, palaces and camps. He participates in this consistent proclivity to enhance the affective power of empirical expressions, drawing readily yet precisely the deeper from deeper temporalities, panagyric traditions into this historical present of 1830s post the My broader work based on this material examines the double movement between Ghassis and Todd's endeavors and thereby the relationship between picturing the moods of places and asserting epistemic and political authority in different genres. Todd's essay on the geography of Rajasthan in the annals, along with the collections he amassed, revealed that Todd himself deployed a range of place centric representations and multiple methods of surveying. Today, I will restrict the discussion to Ghassi in order to and you know, but I'm kind of in the broader work I have talked about how this assumption that Ghassi would have received his training in architectural drafting under Todd's supervision is something that just doesn't hold together. It implies that Ghassi as a painter did not acquire any learning from the court workshop, where in drawing the architecture of real places while capturing their ambience had been very well established since the 1700s. Ghassi's ways of knowing architecture and making large scale paintings, displayed in intermediary stages of drawings prepared for their post court and Todd's documentation projects, thus provide a very thick and circumscribed archive. Within the longer history of depicting place, although therefore court Ghassi's artistic practices, especially after Todd's departure in 1822, open a critical space, first for thinking comparatively about how Todd co-opted Ghassi's drawings within a narrative of decline and ruination, and second more proactively for rethinking how Ghassi employed the vocabulary of some of the drawings from the annals within pictorial idioms of courtly praise. It is critical to remember that Todd's efforts of political negotiations, land surveys and documentation of princely genealogy, contributed not only to the eventual publication of the region's most influential history, but also to the proclamation of the history of indirect British rule in northwestern India in 1818, and ultimately to the holding of the 1832 Indo-British Darbar. This large scale painting in Bhuvash on cloth, almost six feet tall, commissioned by the other court, Ghassi visualizes British India's first imperial Darbar, that is a formal ceremonial assembly held at Ajmer to declare British territory in 1832. How do we interpret this visualization of the emergent empire, which has captured the political mood of this time in subtle and subversive ways, even if its commemorative role may seem singular or self-evident to us on first glance. The artist has deployed red cloth of the tent to frame the Darbar. He has depicted seated officials on both sides, along with the bounteous gifts presented by the king of the Udaipur court, to Lord William Bentech, British East India Company's Governor-General at Delhi. The painter has centralized the portraits, both the Udaipur ruler and the Governor-General are depicted as equals, yet the painter emphasizes Javan Singh's Kingly status with a green halo and unmistakable visual court that sets their status and authority apart. The 1832 Darbar led to palpable changes in the nature of British control in northwestern India. The British inability to arbitrate between the various regional courts when they were in conflict, that is, its inability to assert its paramount role led government Bentech to embark on a tour of the region. Upon Bentech's arrival from Delhi in Ajmer, a town that had been recently brought under British rule on January 18, 1832, he commenced a month-long Darbar and met with various regional kings who the British designated as princes. By February 24, Bentech instituted the Rajputana Agency, and in the minds of the Rajput kings and their courtly audiences, it's key to know that Ajmer, a key pilgrimage town, was centrally associated with the Mughals and the political and ceremonial contexts in which they interacted. By holding the 1832 Darbar in Ajmer, Bentech asserted his territoriality, the British territoriality, and his ceremonial conduct, thus putting himself directly at the helm of these princes. A preliminary drawing, slightly smaller in size, which was most likely completed by Ghazi on site, shows that the drafted composition of the tent was part of the original conception. The peripatatic nature of camps held by Mughal emperors and regional kings had been the subject of earlier paintings, as you see in the 1734 example. Here you see how the red tentages used to depict the various thresholds, the setting inside is more intimate, and you have along with this painted Kalamkari tent you have this emphasis that is placed on tiny clumps of petals, which are constantly being freshly sent from outside to keep the setting inside fresh and fragrant. In comparison Ghazi's composition lays claim to the complete pictorial claim. Gone is the itinerant nature of camps. His painting lends the Darbar a mood of stationary containment. It relays the loss of intimacy and the pleasures of blonding. Dreams of political correspondence record how the East India Company and the Udaipur court dwelled on the court's concern regarding how they would be seen in the Darbar. The correspondence written by the court secretary insists on protocol. The question-answer exchange on seating instructions is pertinent. The court insists that European chairs must be provided for the governor General and Javan Singh. In the version in the regional dialect, the words used for the notion of rendered equal are maharana sahib ki aur unki baraabri nahi dikhagi. That is the equality of the Udaipur rulers and the court nobles will not be seen if chairs are used only for Javan Singh and the governor general. The response from Bentech's office to this request states a separate elevated seat will be prepared for his lordship and the maharana. By this arrangement, the dignity of the maharana will be preserved from the appearance of being reduced to at par with his nobles, but it is the custom of the governor general's Darbar that all who are entitled to sit shall have chairs. This kind of anxiety about how the Darbar would be visually perceived may have served as the impetus for Ghasi's travels with the royal party and thus for this detailed visualization in a very large cloth painting. It shows that ultimately the governor general's custom was reinstated, everybody sat on chairs, and the king and the governor general share a longer throne like a ceremonial seat that you can see here. The artist has centralized the portraits depicted them as equals, even though there are certain norms of hierarchical placement of the nobles that are followed over here. Ghasi's practices do not simply tell the story of the co-production of knowledge but more so the contestation of moods and memories in equally generative epistemic images commissioned by the court and company. Political correspondence between the Udaipur court and British officials at Delhi about the Udaipur king's pilgrimage journeys further suggests that many of these paintings that you see on the screen were commissioned at a comparable size and scale within two years of the 1832 Darbar. They were a way to assert the court's territoriality to align them with important temples and pilgrimage journeys beyond what could be seen in the city of Udaipur. And so it could, you know, within the colonial archive all you get with regards to these journeys is that it wasn't that they were an evidence of Javan Singh's lack of interest in politics. Aside from the concern about authority and appearance, which drives Ghasi to strategically combine realist and anti-illusionist idioms, another distinct visual focus is created by the painted grid of gifts that preferred by the Maharana to the bentx party. The outlines of the rectangular gifts are barely visible in Ghasi's preliminary drawing. It is in the painting that you see the bright colored cloth wraps that their material form, the material form of the gifts is fully realized. The display's geometric and abstract pattern disrupts the symmetry of the tangent space, forming a block seemingly floating off the planar space. It signals the formalizing of a new, I'm sorry, the beller's ringings but I'll just keep going. It signals the formalizing of a new political arrangement but remains disconnected from both the parties. If Ghasi's large-scale Darbar commemoration was an artwork the Maharana meant to present to the Governor-General, then this picture of shared authority accorded greater power to the gift-giver than the receiver. To decolonize art history, not simply in metaphoric terms but material terms, demands reimagining the limits of our archives and concepts and remixing our sources. My discussion of Ghasi's practices and agency and mobilities are related to deeper genealogies of moods within image making, thus drawing long and short distance mobilities and passionate localizations and modes of knowing, drawing, composing across mediums onto the same privileged ground. What does it mean to mobilize the knowledge of native artists like Ghasi or rather the pictorial ways by which they asserted their knowing in colonial India within global art histories? How do we entangle the affect and form of disparate genres of memorializing politics at time or mood in telling teaching histories of art? I have on the right a painting that most of you know from Benjamin West, which are the kinds of images that are often used to tell the history of this time. Who finds their way into archives separated? So the question becomes that how do we entangle the affect and the forms of disparate genres of memorializing the politics at time, who finds their ways into archives separated by subfields, linguistic divisions, historical genres to question ways of knowing? This is the first time I must be in a panel where I am also ending the talk by asking you to think about who gets to enter archives, who gets to enter countries. Indeed, who is subjected to the arduous bureaucracy, expenses and denials of visas and travels to get into the archives in London, UK and Asia? London is centered via its archives, who gets to access these archives, who gets to cross the borders of Asia to enter the art worlds of London. This kind of working through empire, working Asia through empire, which is most often not acknowledged, but as the time one spends in the bureaucracy structures and hierarchies of colonization leads to an elongating of colonial time, and to a shrinking of decolonizing time, quite literally to the constant finding of more resources and more time. So I want to end at this point because I think that these are some of the infrastructures that we still don't take into account as we think about not just the question of archives, but the question of temporality of the images in the past and in the present. Thank you so much, Divty. That was absolutely rich and wonderful paper and you have tremendous powers of concentration despite the ringing. So I think we could begin this, we've got about 20, 30 minutes for Q&A. And so while we give the audience some time to kind of process these brilliant papers, perhaps we can begin with the discussion by referring to actually the provocation that Divty just raised at the end of her paper, you know, about, you know, questions of access, questions of privilege in a way, and think about our own kind of, you know, perhaps complicities within structures of power and so on. And I think, Gemma, you mentioned in your paper that a kind of politics of, was it a politics of exception? Is that the term you used? I think also, sorry, I think you're on mute, unless you're not speaking. That, you know, really chimes I think with what Divty mentioned. Yeah, I think it was, and I think I extracted it actually from a version, but it's like a politics of, and I've forgotten the word that I used. But like a politics of Geoffrey's claims and