“Status: Developing a Category of Analysis for the Early Global World”, Conference by Sixiang Wang & Choon Hwee Koh

This workshop invites participants to develop status as a category of analysis for the pre- and early modern world by investigating categories of social practice that were current in the past. Interested participants should be prepared to share a specific, concrete case study from their area of research between the 3rd and 19th centuries (roughly 200 C.E. – 1800 C.E.) that sheds light on how societies ordered individuals and communities in different contexts. Examples include, but are not limited to, knowledge and inscriptional practices, ceremonial or ritual protocols, salary lists, and status categories in premodern diplomacy, bureaucracy, or law. Works that connect the cultural, social, diplomatic, economic, and political are welcome and we especially encourage those working on regions outside of western Europe and the US to participate.

What are the stakes of understanding status in the early modern world? We argue that understanding status is key to understanding how pre- and early modern societies organized collective interdependence and coexistence. In turn, understanding premodern social orders may provide a generative foil to understanding the inequalities and injustices in our world today–all the while historicizing both concepts and bearing in mind that our expectations of what constitutes inequality and what constitutes an injustice did not always hold in the past. This project is the chronological converse of attempts to investigate the “birth of the modern world,” the “great” and “long” divergences, the “worldmaking” projects of internationalisms and anticolonial nationalisms, the “carbon democracies” and the origins and histories of capitalism. (Pomeranz 2000; Bayly 2004; Kuran 2010; Sewell 2010; Mitchell 2011; Hilt 2017; Getachew 2019 etc.) We turn our analytical gaze backwards instead, in the opposite chronological direction. We believe our findings can be brought to bear on these rich historiographies of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, which have inspired our growth as scholars but also left us wondering about the older world these centuries had left behind.