Empire and religion in early modern Inner Asia, 1650-1800

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This project aims to re-examine China’s imperial expansion from the perspective of the Qing dynasty’s chief rivals in Inner Asia—the Junghar Mongols. Stretching from Siberia to Afghanistan, their nomadic empire linked the steppe with the Silk Road, and the Buddhist and Islamic worlds. Grounded in multilingual research in Chinese and Russian archives, and wide reading in Inner Asian chronicles and hagiographies, the project seeks to elucidate the micropolitics of the Eurasian borderlands, and the non-Chinese narratives that accompanied the creation of China as we know it today. By offering a new account of early modern Inner Asian history, this project expects to advance the fields of Chinese, Inner Asian and imperial history in Australia.