ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

What made the early Islamic empire so successful and have we missed the story by neglecting crucial evidence? The 7th-century Arab conquests changed the socio-political configurations in the Mediterranean and Eurasia forever. Yet we do not really know how the Arabs managed to gain dominance of this vast, ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse area which had its own, long imperial traditions, and to make this a sustainable enterprise. What built the empire, and what held it together? Scholarship to date has overwhelmingly relied on ‘literary’ sources in Arabic (e.g. chronicles, legal treatises, theological tracts), composed centuries after the conquests and shaped by court politics at their time of writing. This has created a false impression of the embedding of Muslim rule as a top-down process, directed from the centre, built on military coercion and control through administrative systems. Now, however, ‘documentary’ sources in multiple languages on papyrus, leather and paper from all over the empire (e.g. letters, contracts, fiscal accounts, petitions, decrees, work permits) are becoming increasingly available, with the PI in an internationally leading role. These sources, whose impact has been limited by linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, offer a direct, contemporary view of how the empire worked on the ground, and how political and social structures were experienced, modified and appropriated by its subjects.This project will uniquely incorporate all available documents reflecting Muslim rule from the first 400 years of Islam, to reconstruct the system of social relations that enabled the crucial transition from a conquest society to a political organism that survived the breakdown of central caliphal control, and remains the region’s benchmark model today. It will critically advance our understanding of a world historical event, make a radically new contribution to empire studies, and connect and synergise area studies and disciplinary inquiry.

1 999 960 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31

Plant foods comprise the majority of most human diets, yet the potential importance of these foods in human evolution is often overlooked. Using a behavioral ecology framework, the HARVEST project explores fundamental questions: Why did hominins choose to eat certain plants? What were their foraging goals? We will focus on two objectives: 1) Reconstructing the diets of fossil hominins and 2) Exploring the costs and benefits of plant foods. To understand the factors driving food choice by ancient hominins, we must know what they ate. Analyses of plant remains, proteins, DNA and other residues preserved in dental calculus are cutting-edge methods for reconstructing diets, and provide information about food, processing techniques, and oral microbiota. With a sequential sampling approach, we will combine these analyses to identify foods consumed by hominin groups for which plants are thought to be of great importance. The decision to consume a particular plant depends on its inherent properties (nutrients and antifeedants) and on the biological and technological abilities of the consumer, so that each potential food has a different cost and benefit. We will study the variation in plant properties among microhabitats in African environments similar to those used by hominins, to better model their food choices. Separately, our study of the food choices among living African foraging and farming groups will reveal if plants are chosen for calories, micronutrients or cultural preferences, while analysis of their gut microbiota and studies of their food processing behaviors will indicate how they acquire nutrients from these foods. Finally, we will assess how the costs of fire might influence food processing choices. Results from these studies will help fill important lacunae in our understanding of hominin diets, broaden our knowledge of hominin behaviors in a variety of environments, and help generate hypotheses about the relationships between diet and human evolution.

1 499 950 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

The proposed research project breaks important new ground by analyzing and documenting how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) dealt with the legacy of mass atrocities committed under Maoist rule. Most accounts of the period mention the trial against the “Gang of Four” and the accompanying resolution on party history from 1981, which held former party chairman Mao Zedong accountable for grave political errors but not for criminal deeds. However, as yet there has been no in-depth analysis of the roughly five million cases and the over ten million petitions handled by courts and party committees between 1978 and 1987 in order to right previous injustices. Despite its enormous scale and relevance to societal stability, this so-called “revision of unjust, wrong, and false verdicts” has been virtually left unattended to by scholarly research. The project aims at diminishing this gap by studying the CCP’s strategies and the societal consequences of this major policy change. It proposes to analyze the partial break from the Maoist legacy as an important, yet by and large overlooked example of transitional justice, albeit confined by the party dictatorship’s overarching aim to stay in power. By way of relying on a wide array of recently available official and non-official sources, the project analyzes and documents how the CCP selectively dealt with the towering injustices of the past. The project will significantly contribute to current research on China’s transformation process and the Maoist legacy in at least four different areas: First, it will detail the CCP’s standards, institutions, and processes of administrating historical justice; second, it will show the great regional variances in implementing these policies between center and periphery; third, it will offer new explanations for the persistence of CCP rule despite the horrors of Maoism; and fourth, it will document both the revisal of verdicts and past atrocities in an electronic database to ease future research.

1 443 756 €

Start date: 2014-03-01, End date: 2019-02-28

The Persian Empire (539-330 BCE) represented a new political order in world history. At its height, it united a territory stretching from present-day India to Libya. It was three times as large and twice as long-lived as the previously most successful polity (Assyria), and it would take 2,000 years before significantly larger empires emerged in early modern Eurasia. What explains Persia’s success? This question eludes scholarship due to a lack of evidence and a lack of engagement. Since this Empire unified for the first time in history millions of people under its rule – a condition that became a recurring experience of humanity – understanding Persia’s success transcends its intrinsic relevance to the period in question. The principal reason why an effective engagement with this question is presently impossible is the lack of data. The PERSIA AND BABYLONIA project presents a substantial new data set that allows us, for the first time, to contextualize the emergence of the Persian Empire as a complex social process, shifting away from understandings of the Empire as a one-dimensional, state-initiated construct. This data derives from cuneiform textual sources that were produced in Persia’s most important periphery – Babylonia. A key analytical device in our work will be to compare Persian responses to those of the Assyrians, who were unable to establish control of Babylonia a century earlier. By combining a long-term with a deeply contextualized perspective, we will be able to draw out the distinctive efficiency of Persian rule, within the long history of this particular region. In addition to making a significant step towards understanding the emergence of Ancient Persia, we will develop a much-needed research tool for historians of empire and society in the ancient world.

1 999 733 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31

"This project examines the development of a European security culture as the sum of mutually shared perceptions on “enemies of the states,” “vital interests,” and corresponding practices, between 1815 and 1914. By studying seven distinct instances of supranational security cooperation and their professional agents we will analyze how this European security culture emerged as early as 1815 as an open process of convergence and divergence, and of inclusion and exclusion. The team consists of the PI, 3 PhDs, 1 Post-Doc, and a research assistant. The postulated existence of a shared European security culture in the 19th century may seem counterintuitive. Historians and scholars of international relations generally view the first half of this age through the lenses of “balance of power” and hegemony, and the second half as shaped by bellicose nationalism rather than collective security. European security cooperation and culture is generally situated after 1918, or 1945, as a reaction to the horrors of war and motivated by economic considerations. Nevertheless, after 1815 several concrete transnational security regimes were forged, (partly) designed to deal with “enemies of the states,” such as the Commissions on the Rhine and the Danube (to fight smugglers), the European Commissions on Syria and China (to fight colonial rebels), the Anti-Piracy and Anti-Anarchism Campaigns, and others. These security regimes, dictated by the threats and interests, were highly dynamic, encompassing a growing corpus of professional agents from different branches (police, judicial, military), and evolving from military interventions into police and judicial regimes. They were midwife to a veritable European security culture. This important development has not received the attention it deserves within the framework of the history of international relations and international studies. Our hypothesis is that the development of this culture (threat/interest perceptions and practices) was dependent on four determinants: 1) the quality of the epistemic community (agents), 2) their threat/interest demarcations (subject/object), 3) the level of juridification and the use of military/police force (norms), and 4) innovations in the information, communication, and transportation technologies (technology). These determinants explain variance and change, ranging from inclusion to exclusion of groups and interests, and from juridical convergence between the European states/societies regarding the security practices in some cases to a total dissolution in other cases. This project pioneers a new multidisciplinary approach to the combined history of international relations and internal policy, aiming to “historicize security.” Using new material, we are comparing seven different security regimes where Europe engaged globally, that stretched across the political and commercial domain, affected urban and maritime environments, and reached around the world to the Ottoman Empire and China."

1 973 419 €

Start date: 2014-06-01, End date: 2019-05-31