My current project, titled “The Prince, the Jeweler and the Mogul”, is a historiographical experiment, focusing a book-length study on the interpretation of a single object, unpacking it layer by layer for a deep analysis of its multiple meanings. The object, one of the most extraordinary works of art in early modern Europe, is an elaborate multi-piece model of the court of the Indian mogul Aurangzeb that was purchased around 1700 for an enormous sum by the Saxon prince August the Strong. The historical topics that a careful interpretation of this object can illuminate could hardly be broader: namely, the meaning of absolutism in early modern Europe, and the global dynamics of cross-cultural exchange that informed it. Using both the history of the model in the context of the Saxon court and a close reading of its intricate and unprecedented details, this project will reveal the meanings of this model by asking a series of separate yet linked questions: questions about visions and fantasies of absolutism in the Holy Roman Empire in the age of Louis XIV (why was August attracted to a model of the court of the world’s reputedly most absolute potentate?); questions about the power dynamics of early modern court culture in Germany, and in particular about the role of the court Schatzkammer – the treasury chock-full of precious objects, a lavish exercise in excess – as a cultural-political institution; questions about the power of master craftsmen – like the jeweler who created the model and then persuaded August the Strong to purchase it at such great expense – in the courts of supposedly absolute rulers; questions about global exchange and Euro-Asian relations at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and about the production of knowledge through objects and through travel; and questions about the transition from Baroque to Enlightenment, the two main cultural configurations of the period.