The year 2026 marks half a millennium since the foundation of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857), the last great precolonial power, which governed most parts of the Indian sub-continent. In its heyday, the Mughal dynasty ruled over a population of more than 100 million subjects. The Mughal Empire has remained at the centre of major debates in Indian historiography on issues as diverse as the nature of political and administrative institutions, fiscal and economic systems, literary and artistic cultures as well as inter-religious cohabitation prior to colonial rule. The international conference commemorating the 500-year anniversary of the empire’s foundation critically engages with various historiographical approaches while proposing potential avenues for future research.

Inscription

Inscription obligatoire jusqu'au 25 mai 2026.

Programme

Wednesday 3 June  2026

(Main Hall)

9: 30-10 Introduction and Welcome Remarks

• Romain Huret, President, EHESS
• Naveen Kanalu, EHESS-CRH

10-11:30

• Keynote: Absolutism or Condominium? The Mughals and Modes of Power-Sharing Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Distinguished Professor of History and Irving & Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles

(Salles BS1_05/BS1_28)

13:30-15:00 Conquest and consolidation of empire

Chair: Jean-Frédéric Schaub, EHESS-Mondes Américains

• The Mughal Conquest of Gujarat: A Reappraisal Jyoti Gulati Balachandran, Pennsylvania State University

• Mughal Delhi under Akbar and Jahangir Corinne Lefèvre, CNRS, CSH Delhi

15:30-17:00 Governing the imperial space 

Chair: Olivier Bouquet, Université Paris Cité-CESSMA

• Routes of Regulation: Transit Permits, Everyday Life, and the Afterlives of Mughal Archives Subah Dayal, New York University

• The Mughal Information Economy: Coordinating the Imperial Grid of Governance from Southern India (ca. 1690s) Naveen Kanalu, EHESS-CRH

Thursday 4 June 2026

(Salles BS1_05/BS1_28)

9: 30-11:00 Islam in practice 

Chair: Anna Joukovskaia, CNRS-CERCEC

• Juristic Habitus orJudicious Kingship? Revisiting the Crisis of 1579 via Islamic Legal Theory S. Shiraz Ali, University of California, Berkeley

• Law and Social Communication in Mughal India: State-Society Interactions in Legal Spaces Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi

11:15-12:00

• Spectral Conversions: Becoming Muslim in Mughal India (c. 1658-1707) Munis D. Faruqui, University of California, Berkeley

13:30-15:00 Economic life: peasants and merchants 

Chair: Catarina Madeira-Santos, EHESS-IMAF

• Peasants as Hunter-Gatherers in Mughal India Ali Anooshahr, University of California, Davis

• “Without a king’s farman it is difficult to negotiate here”: The Dutch East India Company Factory in Mughal Agra, 1621-1730 Maarten Draper, European University Institute, Florence Mike O’Sullivan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

15:30- 17:00 Frontiers of empire

Chair: Marc Aymes, EHESS-CETOBaC

• Revenue Collection in the Border Provinces of the Mughals and Marathas in the Eighteenth Century Michihiro Ogawa, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo

• Courting the ‘Other’: Occult and Political Culture beyond Mughal Hindustan, 1720-1750 CE Samyak Ghosh, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru

17:00 Final Discussion