Project acronym NEPOSTRANS
Project Negotiating post-imperial transitions: from remobilization to nation-state consolidation. A comparative study of local and regional transitions in post-Habsburg East and Central Europe
Researcher (PI) Gábor EGRY
Host Institution (HI) POLITIKATORTENETI INTEZET KOZHASZNU NONPROFIT KFT
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2017-COG
Summary The project’s goal is to provide a new, overall narrative of how the Habsburg Empire was replaced by nation states at the end of WWI and reconsider in the light of its results categories and concepts like state and statehood, local, regional and national, transition and transformation. A novel combination of historical comparison and histoire croisée enables the in-depth analyses of a set of local transitions in diverse regions (agrarian, industrial, commercial, urban, rural, multi-and mono-ethnic, borderland and mainland, litoral) and the combination of these results with the existing literature on other localities.
The team addresses four main themes: state, elites, identities and discourses. The focus is always local, the question is how these societies faced the momentous changes and found their place within empire and nation-state(s). It will look at interactions, cultures and especially rupture and continuity of people, norms, practices, institutional cultures in order to discover patterns of transitions and the social factors influencing them. Besides a typology of transitions, it also aims at gaining a new perspective on empire and nation state from this crucial moment of collapse and state-building.
The project is informed by New Imperial history, the idea of phantom boundaries, everyday ethnicity, integrated urban history. At the methodological level it builds on a symmetrical comparison of the selected cases and on an asymmetrical one with the existing literature, while the object of comparison is the transition that we conceptualize as an “intercrossing”. Through analysing this ‘transformation from below’ and connecting for the first time what has remained scattered both in historiography and in the social representations, the project aims to write a new history of modern Eastern Europe as a common legacy for an integrated European history.
Summary
The project’s goal is to provide a new, overall narrative of how the Habsburg Empire was replaced by nation states at the end of WWI and reconsider in the light of its results categories and concepts like state and statehood, local, regional and national, transition and transformation. A novel combination of historical comparison and histoire croisée enables the in-depth analyses of a set of local transitions in diverse regions (agrarian, industrial, commercial, urban, rural, multi-and mono-ethnic, borderland and mainland, litoral) and the combination of these results with the existing literature on other localities.
The team addresses four main themes: state, elites, identities and discourses. The focus is always local, the question is how these societies faced the momentous changes and found their place within empire and nation-state(s). It will look at interactions, cultures and especially rupture and continuity of people, norms, practices, institutional cultures in order to discover patterns of transitions and the social factors influencing them. Besides a typology of transitions, it also aims at gaining a new perspective on empire and nation state from this crucial moment of collapse and state-building.
The project is informed by New Imperial history, the idea of phantom boundaries, everyday ethnicity, integrated urban history. At the methodological level it builds on a symmetrical comparison of the selected cases and on an asymmetrical one with the existing literature, while the object of comparison is the transition that we conceptualize as an “intercrossing”. Through analysing this ‘transformation from below’ and connecting for the first time what has remained scattered both in historiography and in the social representations, the project aims to write a new history of modern Eastern Europe as a common legacy for an integrated European history.
Max ERC Funding
1 963 075 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-03-01, End date: 2023-02-28
Project acronym OTTOCONFESSION
Project The Fashioning of a Sunni Orthodoxy and the Entangled Histories of Confession-Building in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 15th-17th Centuries
Researcher (PI) Tijana Krstic
Host Institution (HI) KOZEP-EUROPAI EGYETEM
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2014-CoG
Summary "How and why did the Ottoman Empire evolve from a fourteenth-century polity where ""confessional ambiguity"" between Sunnism and Shiism prevailed into an Islamic state concerned with defining and enforcing a ""Sunni orthodoxy"" by the early sixteenth century? Recent historiography attributes this new concern with ""orthodoxy"" in the Ottoman Empire to the rise of the rival Shii Safavid Empire at the turn of the sixteenth century. However, the OTTOCONFESSION project is based on the premise that the evolution of Ottoman discourse on Sunni orthodoxy can be understood only in a longer perspective that spans the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that it was shaped by religio-political dynamics not only in the Safavid Empire but also within the Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe as well.
The project sets out to demonstrate that although the polarization between Sunni and Shii Islam on the one hand, and Catholic and Protestant Christianity on the other, resulted from the dynamics specific to the Turco-Iranian world and Europe, respectively, the subsequent processes of confession- (and in come cases state-) building were related and constitute an entangled history of confessionalization that spanned Europe and the Middle East. This entanglement resulted in particular from: the Ottomans' concomitant competition with the Safavids, Habsburgs, and Venetians, and the shared political theologies this entailed; the spread of various Muslim and Christian communities across imperial borders; and the Ottomans' permissiveness towards Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist missionary activities among the Empire's (mostly Orthodox) Christians. The project will investigate the evolution of the confessional discourses in the Ottoman Empire in both community-specific and entangled, cross-communal perspectives between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries by focusing on a) agents and strategies; b) textual genres; and c) sites of confessionalization."
Summary
"How and why did the Ottoman Empire evolve from a fourteenth-century polity where ""confessional ambiguity"" between Sunnism and Shiism prevailed into an Islamic state concerned with defining and enforcing a ""Sunni orthodoxy"" by the early sixteenth century? Recent historiography attributes this new concern with ""orthodoxy"" in the Ottoman Empire to the rise of the rival Shii Safavid Empire at the turn of the sixteenth century. However, the OTTOCONFESSION project is based on the premise that the evolution of Ottoman discourse on Sunni orthodoxy can be understood only in a longer perspective that spans the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that it was shaped by religio-political dynamics not only in the Safavid Empire but also within the Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe as well.
The project sets out to demonstrate that although the polarization between Sunni and Shii Islam on the one hand, and Catholic and Protestant Christianity on the other, resulted from the dynamics specific to the Turco-Iranian world and Europe, respectively, the subsequent processes of confession- (and in come cases state-) building were related and constitute an entangled history of confessionalization that spanned Europe and the Middle East. This entanglement resulted in particular from: the Ottomans' concomitant competition with the Safavids, Habsburgs, and Venetians, and the shared political theologies this entailed; the spread of various Muslim and Christian communities across imperial borders; and the Ottomans' permissiveness towards Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist missionary activities among the Empire's (mostly Orthodox) Christians. The project will investigate the evolution of the confessional discourses in the Ottoman Empire in both community-specific and entangled, cross-communal perspectives between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries by focusing on a) agents and strategies; b) textual genres; and c) sites of confessionalization."
Max ERC Funding
1 987 187 €
Duration
Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31
Project acronym POLBUSNETWORKS
Project Political and Business Networks
Researcher (PI) Adam Gyorgy SZEIDL
Host Institution (HI) KOZEP-EUROPAI EGYETEM
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH1, ERC-2016-COG
Summary I explore the role of networks involving firms---networks between firms and politicians, and networks between firms and firms--for economic outcomes. I focus on two broad questions. (1) What are the determinants and implications of political favor networks? Although political favoritism affects allocations in many countries, its mechanisms are not well understood. I develop a new model based on the idea of trust embedded in favor networks, and test in Hungarian data the model's implications about how political centralization shapes favoritism. I also quantify the welfare cost of misallocation created by favoritism. My results help understand how political institutions shape economic outcomes. (2) What is the impact of supply chain networks on firm performance? Inputs from suppliers account for the majority of firm sales, yet we know little about the contribution of suppliers to firm performance. I use a field experiment in China to measure the causal effect of suppliers and the underlying mechanisms. I then use observational data from Hungary to quantify the contribution of differences in suppliers to differences in firm performance. The results help understand how supply chains and their misallocation shape firm and aggregate productivity. My approach to both of these questions emphasizes the role of trust embedded in firm networks and how these trust-based networks create misallocation of resources. A key component of this research is the development of original datasets. Beyond documenting and explaining facts, I also hope to obtain policy implications on reducing favoritism and improving firm performance in developing countries.
Summary
I explore the role of networks involving firms---networks between firms and politicians, and networks between firms and firms--for economic outcomes. I focus on two broad questions. (1) What are the determinants and implications of political favor networks? Although political favoritism affects allocations in many countries, its mechanisms are not well understood. I develop a new model based on the idea of trust embedded in favor networks, and test in Hungarian data the model's implications about how political centralization shapes favoritism. I also quantify the welfare cost of misallocation created by favoritism. My results help understand how political institutions shape economic outcomes. (2) What is the impact of supply chain networks on firm performance? Inputs from suppliers account for the majority of firm sales, yet we know little about the contribution of suppliers to firm performance. I use a field experiment in China to measure the causal effect of suppliers and the underlying mechanisms. I then use observational data from Hungary to quantify the contribution of differences in suppliers to differences in firm performance. The results help understand how supply chains and their misallocation shape firm and aggregate productivity. My approach to both of these questions emphasizes the role of trust embedded in firm networks and how these trust-based networks create misallocation of resources. A key component of this research is the development of original datasets. Beyond documenting and explaining facts, I also hope to obtain policy implications on reducing favoritism and improving firm performance in developing countries.
Max ERC Funding
1 833 214 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-05-01, End date: 2022-04-30