Sovereign by Design

My project at the KHI “Sovereign by Design” compares and situates the role of collections within the political structures at the courts of the south Asian Mughal emperor Jahangir and the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. It contributes to his dissertation project, based at Leiden. The dissertation begins with a survey of Mughal and Habsburg dynastic rhetoric, strategies, and (material) culture created for specific political situations over the long-term—these are interpreted as holistic cultural structures designed to produce clearly defined political outputs. Studied together, these components and algorithms suggest the cultural language and code specific to each dynasty.

At the KHI, I intend to examine in detail how these dynastic codes— whose characteristics simultaneously empowered and limited the actions of the two dynasties—were designed for the political and cultural circumstances specific to Jahangir and Rudolf II. The two sovereigns adapted, designed, and employed the Kunstkammer and the court-khazana, producing innovations in forms of European and south Asian collections respectively. These innovations were moreover in development by theorists, who provided quasi-algorithmic schemes for relating and exercising knowledge, material culture, and political objectives. I argue that these collections were carefully configured to (re-)produce dynastic dominance. This project connects workshops, laboratories, and libraries to the well-studied collections to holistically define the cultural apparatus of the dynasts. I argue that these together with the court itself were centres of expertise where abstract ideas were collaboratively encoded into material, textual, spatial, and visual media, genres, artifacts, rituals, and symbols in politically efficacious ways, i.e., to produce desired political, military, and economic outputs. Finally, correlating (foreign) sources and destinations to courtly cultural products and to political events demonstrates how the algorithms shaping such “Coded Objects” produced outputs and how they were adapted to changing circumstances.