Abstract This article analyzes the environmental entanglements of the Mughal Empire in terms of the role of nonhuman animals in its formation under Emperor Akbar. The article studies the roles of animals in three broad spheres: military processes, royal authority, and gift economy. It argues that seen through the lenses of these animal functions, we can identify two broad transformations that the Mughal Empire underwent during the second half of the sixteenth century. First, the changing patterns of mobilization and the use of certain animals point to the gradual sedentarization of the Mughal polity. Second, certain forms of engagement with animals help us trace the emergence of increasingly hyperbolic visions of kingship and ultimately the articulation of universal sovereignty. This article challenges the anthropocentrism of existing Mughal historiography by recovering, highlighting, and analyzing the myriad material and cultural functions of animals in the functioning of the empire.

Abstract This article argues that, while a variety of state priorities manifest in Remezov’s maps, it was the priority of communicating information relevant for travel that accounts for the wealth of details regarding the environment that are recorded in the atlas. This article posits a further assertion: despite the remoteness of the mapped area, the primitiveness of the techniques used, and the methodological skepticism required in reading maps, Remezov’s work is generally of such quality that this atlas does hold potential for better documenting the historical environment of Siberia, and even longue durée environmental change over time.

Abstract Rituals display, legitimize, and sometimes question existing power relations in public settings. At the same time, recent research has shown that ceremonies and rituals help various actors and groups establish and re-establish their roles in social and political systems. Indeed, rituals construct new power relations rather than merely re-affirm previously existing ones. As such, they constitute new social realities and establish new social contracts, fostering debates about political authority, religious belief, cultural identity, tradition, and history. The articles gathered in this volume draw on this latter strand of scholarship. They take political ritual as constitutive of political and social relationships and explore its relevance at a particular time and place, drawing larger conclusions about the social and political environment. Together, they investigate the work of ceremonies and rituals, with a particular focus on the early modern period.

Abstract Taking the Flemish-born artist Roelant Savery’s Das Paradies (1626) as a starting point, this essay explores the role of European artistic cultures and collecting practices in inciting the ecocide of the post-1492 Anthropocene Extinction. In particular, I explore how Savery’s celebrated painting of Adam and Eve consuming the forbidden fruit amidst a verdant landscape inhabited by animals such as the now-extinct dodo, endemic to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, became the pivotal foundation for scientific and cultural perceptions of the extinction of nonhuman life in colonial worlds as the natural outcome of European modernity’s global flows.

Abstract In the early eighteenth century, a palm-sized snuff bottle was produced for China’s Kangxi 康熙 emperor (r. 1661–1722). Made in the Qing dynasty court workshops in Beijing, this tiny object paired European-style enamels (if not also imported pigments) painted on copper with two insets of Japanese black and gold maki-e lacquer. Combining Japanese and European materials in Chinese court arts is highly unusual, especially in so small an object, making the snuff bottle an extremely rare and rather experimental example. Yet this self-consciously globalizing object, whose imperial approval is present in the Kangxi reign mark (Kangxi nianzhi 康熙年製) on its base, reveals more than creative innovation and technical ingenuity. By combining materials, techniques, foreign origins, object function, and representational styles, it demonstrates a wide scope of foreign engagement on the part of the emperor who laid the foundation for the entire High Qing period (1662–1799).