Project acronym ALFA
Project Shaping a European Scientific Scene : Alfonsine Astronomy
Researcher (PI) Matthieu Husson
Host Institution (HI) CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2016-COG
Summary Alfonsine astronomy is arguably among the first European scientific achievements. It shaped a scene for actors like Regiomontanus or Copernicus. There is however little detailed historical analysis encompassing its development in its full breadth. ALFA addresses this issue by studying tables, instruments, mathematical and theoretical texts in a methodologically innovative way relying on approaches from the history of manuscript cultures, history of mathematics, and history of astronomy.
ALFA integrates these approaches not only to benefit from different perspectives but also to build new questions from their interactions. For instance the analysis of mathematical practices in astral sciences manuscripts induces new ways to analyse the documents and to think about astronomical questions.
Relying on these approaches the main objectives of ALFA are thus to:
- Retrace the development of the corpus of Alfonsine texts from its origin in the second half of the 13th century to the end of the 15th century by following, on the manuscript level, the milieus fostering it;
- Analyse the Alfonsine astronomers’ practices, their relations to mathematics, to the natural world, to proofs and justification, their intellectual context and audiences;
- Build a meaningful narrative showing how astronomers in different milieus with diverse practices shaped, also from Arabic materials, an original scientific scene in Europe.
ALFA will shed new light on the intellectual history of the late medieval period as a whole and produce a better understanding of its relations to related scientific periods in Europe and beyond. It will also produce methodological breakthroughs impacting the ways history of knowledge is practiced outside the field of ancient and medieval sciences. Efforts will be devoted to bring these results not only to the relevant scholarly communities but also to a wider audience as a resource in the public debates around science, knowledge and culture.
Summary
Alfonsine astronomy is arguably among the first European scientific achievements. It shaped a scene for actors like Regiomontanus or Copernicus. There is however little detailed historical analysis encompassing its development in its full breadth. ALFA addresses this issue by studying tables, instruments, mathematical and theoretical texts in a methodologically innovative way relying on approaches from the history of manuscript cultures, history of mathematics, and history of astronomy.
ALFA integrates these approaches not only to benefit from different perspectives but also to build new questions from their interactions. For instance the analysis of mathematical practices in astral sciences manuscripts induces new ways to analyse the documents and to think about astronomical questions.
Relying on these approaches the main objectives of ALFA are thus to:
- Retrace the development of the corpus of Alfonsine texts from its origin in the second half of the 13th century to the end of the 15th century by following, on the manuscript level, the milieus fostering it;
- Analyse the Alfonsine astronomers’ practices, their relations to mathematics, to the natural world, to proofs and justification, their intellectual context and audiences;
- Build a meaningful narrative showing how astronomers in different milieus with diverse practices shaped, also from Arabic materials, an original scientific scene in Europe.
ALFA will shed new light on the intellectual history of the late medieval period as a whole and produce a better understanding of its relations to related scientific periods in Europe and beyond. It will also produce methodological breakthroughs impacting the ways history of knowledge is practiced outside the field of ancient and medieval sciences. Efforts will be devoted to bring these results not only to the relevant scholarly communities but also to a wider audience as a resource in the public debates around science, knowledge and culture.
Max ERC Funding
1 871 250 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31
Project acronym AveTransRisk
Project Average - Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries)
Researcher (PI) Maria FUSARO
Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2016-COG
Summary This project focuses on the historical analysis of institutions and their impact on economic development through the investigation of a legal instrument – general average (GA) – which underpins maritime trade by redistributing damages’ costs across all interested parties. This will be pursued through the comparative investigation of GA in those European countries where substantial data exists: Italy, Spain, England, France and the Low Countries (1500-1800). Average and insurance were both created in the Middle Ages to facilitate trade through the redistribution of risk. Insurance has been widely studied, average – the expenses which can befall ships and cargoes from the time of their loading aboard until their unloading (due to accidents, jettison, and unexpected costs) – has been neglected. GA still plays an essential role in the redistribution of transaction costs, and being a form of strictly mutual self-protection, never evolved into a speculative financial instrument as insurance did; it therefore represents an excellent case of long-term effectiveness of a non-market economic phenomenon. Although the principle behind GA was very similar across Europe, in practice there were substantial differences in declaring and adjudicating claims. GA reports provide unparalleled evidence on maritime trade which, analysed quantitatively and quantitatively through a novel interdisciplinary approach, will contribute to the reassessment of the role played by the maritime sector in fostering economic growth during the early modern first globalization, when GA was the object of fierce debates on state jurisdiction and standardization of practice. Today they are regulated by the York-Antwerp Rules (YAR), currently under revision. This timely conjuncture provides plenty of opportunities for active engagement with practitioners, thereby fostering a creative dialogue on GA historical study and its future development to better face the challenges of mature globalization.
Summary
This project focuses on the historical analysis of institutions and their impact on economic development through the investigation of a legal instrument – general average (GA) – which underpins maritime trade by redistributing damages’ costs across all interested parties. This will be pursued through the comparative investigation of GA in those European countries where substantial data exists: Italy, Spain, England, France and the Low Countries (1500-1800). Average and insurance were both created in the Middle Ages to facilitate trade through the redistribution of risk. Insurance has been widely studied, average – the expenses which can befall ships and cargoes from the time of their loading aboard until their unloading (due to accidents, jettison, and unexpected costs) – has been neglected. GA still plays an essential role in the redistribution of transaction costs, and being a form of strictly mutual self-protection, never evolved into a speculative financial instrument as insurance did; it therefore represents an excellent case of long-term effectiveness of a non-market economic phenomenon. Although the principle behind GA was very similar across Europe, in practice there were substantial differences in declaring and adjudicating claims. GA reports provide unparalleled evidence on maritime trade which, analysed quantitatively and quantitatively through a novel interdisciplinary approach, will contribute to the reassessment of the role played by the maritime sector in fostering economic growth during the early modern first globalization, when GA was the object of fierce debates on state jurisdiction and standardization of practice. Today they are regulated by the York-Antwerp Rules (YAR), currently under revision. This timely conjuncture provides plenty of opportunities for active engagement with practitioners, thereby fostering a creative dialogue on GA historical study and its future development to better face the challenges of mature globalization.
Max ERC Funding
1 854 256 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-07-01, End date: 2022-06-30
Project acronym BantuFirst
Project The First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Human Migration, Language Spread, Climate Change and Early Farming in Late Holocene Central Africa
Researcher (PI) Koen André G. BOSTOEN
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT GENT
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2016-COG
Summary The Bantu Expansion is not only the main linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. It is also one of the most controversial issues in African History that still has political repercussions today. It has sparked debate across the disciplines and far beyond Africanist circles in an attempt to understand how the young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. This massive dispersal is commonly seen as the result of a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture, but many questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still open. They can only be answered through real interdisciplinary collaboration. This project will unite researchers with outstanding expertise in African archaeology, archaeobotany and historical linguistics to form a unique cross-disciplinary team that will shed new light on the first Bantu-speaking village communities south of the rainforest. Fieldwork is planned in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Angola that are terra incognita for archaeologists to determine the timing, location and archaeological signature of the earliest villagers and to establish how they interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers. Special attention will be paid to archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental data to get an idea of their subsistence, diet and habitat. Historical linguistics will be pushed beyond the boundaries of vocabulary-based phylogenetics and open new pathways in lexical reconstruction, especially regarding subsistence and land use of early Bantu speakers. Through interuniversity collaboration archaeozoological, palaeoenvironmental and genetic data and phylogenetic modelling will be brought into the cross-disciplinary approach to acquire a new holistic view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa.
Summary
The Bantu Expansion is not only the main linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. It is also one of the most controversial issues in African History that still has political repercussions today. It has sparked debate across the disciplines and far beyond Africanist circles in an attempt to understand how the young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. This massive dispersal is commonly seen as the result of a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture, but many questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still open. They can only be answered through real interdisciplinary collaboration. This project will unite researchers with outstanding expertise in African archaeology, archaeobotany and historical linguistics to form a unique cross-disciplinary team that will shed new light on the first Bantu-speaking village communities south of the rainforest. Fieldwork is planned in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Angola that are terra incognita for archaeologists to determine the timing, location and archaeological signature of the earliest villagers and to establish how they interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers. Special attention will be paid to archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental data to get an idea of their subsistence, diet and habitat. Historical linguistics will be pushed beyond the boundaries of vocabulary-based phylogenetics and open new pathways in lexical reconstruction, especially regarding subsistence and land use of early Bantu speakers. Through interuniversity collaboration archaeozoological, palaeoenvironmental and genetic data and phylogenetic modelling will be brought into the cross-disciplinary approach to acquire a new holistic view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa.
Max ERC Funding
1 997 500 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31
Project acronym BaSaR
Project Beyond the Silk Road: Economic Development, Frontier Zones and Inter-Imperiality in the Afro-Eurasian World Region, 300 BCE to 300 CE
Researcher (PI) Sitta Valerie Ilse Alberta VON REDEN
Host Institution (HI) ALBERT-LUDWIGS-UNIVERSITAET FREIBURG
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2016-ADG
Summary This interdisciplinary project will show that inter-imperial zones and small to mid-size regional networks of exchange were crucial for ancient Transeurasian exchange connections. It will demonstrate the significance of exchange in imperial frontier zones emerging from political, economic, infrastructural, institutional and technological development within empires. This will lead to a new conceptual frame for analyzing inter-imperiality and the morphology of exchange networks within and across imperial zones.
The centuries from 300 BCE to 300 CE were a period of accelerated empire transformation involving also new regions of the Afro-Eurasian world. Consumption centres shifted, affecting production, settlement, and regional exchange networks. They changed the dynamics of exchange, created new geographies, and greater cultural convergence between imperial spheres of influence. The development of imperial frontier zones of intense exchange and mobility (e.g. Northern China, Bactria, Gandhara, Syria, and the Red Sea/Gulf/Indian Ocean coasts) was related to imperial hinterlands, their fiscal-military-administrative regimes, the development of media of exchange and infrastructures, settlement, urban growth, and so on. It was also related to new forms and levels of consumption in imperial centres. In order to understand Transeurasian connectivity, the interdependence of frontier zone and inner-imperial development is crucial. We will reveal that competitions for social power within empires mobilized and concentrated resources reclaimed from natural landscapes and subsistence economies. Greater mobility of resources, both human and material, endowed competitions for power with economic force, feeding into inter-imperial prestige economies and trade. This new model of Afro-Eurasian connectivity will abandon some problematic assumptions of Silk Road trade, while maintaining the Afro-Eurasian macro-region as a meaningful unit for cultural and economic analysis.
Summary
This interdisciplinary project will show that inter-imperial zones and small to mid-size regional networks of exchange were crucial for ancient Transeurasian exchange connections. It will demonstrate the significance of exchange in imperial frontier zones emerging from political, economic, infrastructural, institutional and technological development within empires. This will lead to a new conceptual frame for analyzing inter-imperiality and the morphology of exchange networks within and across imperial zones.
The centuries from 300 BCE to 300 CE were a period of accelerated empire transformation involving also new regions of the Afro-Eurasian world. Consumption centres shifted, affecting production, settlement, and regional exchange networks. They changed the dynamics of exchange, created new geographies, and greater cultural convergence between imperial spheres of influence. The development of imperial frontier zones of intense exchange and mobility (e.g. Northern China, Bactria, Gandhara, Syria, and the Red Sea/Gulf/Indian Ocean coasts) was related to imperial hinterlands, their fiscal-military-administrative regimes, the development of media of exchange and infrastructures, settlement, urban growth, and so on. It was also related to new forms and levels of consumption in imperial centres. In order to understand Transeurasian connectivity, the interdependence of frontier zone and inner-imperial development is crucial. We will reveal that competitions for social power within empires mobilized and concentrated resources reclaimed from natural landscapes and subsistence economies. Greater mobility of resources, both human and material, endowed competitions for power with economic force, feeding into inter-imperial prestige economies and trade. This new model of Afro-Eurasian connectivity will abandon some problematic assumptions of Silk Road trade, while maintaining the Afro-Eurasian macro-region as a meaningful unit for cultural and economic analysis.
Max ERC Funding
2 498 750 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31
Project acronym BORDER
Project Towards a decentred history of the Middle East: Transborder spaces, circulations, frontier effects and state formation, 1920-1946
Researcher (PI) Jordi TEJEL GORGAS
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITE DE NEUCHATEL
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2016-COG
Summary While the crisis of the territorial nation-state in the Middle East has once again been brought to a head by the wars in Iraq and Syria, it cannot be simply understood as the logical consequence of an imported political construction. Based on two epistemological notions – borderlands as histoire-problème (history-as-problem) and the co-production of borders between state and society – this research project proposes to rethink the classical historical narrative about the emergence of the post-Ottoman Middle East. Taking its cue from trans-border phenomena and thus paying attention to the circulation of people, goods and ideas as well as to everyday encounters between local actors and state representatives, the project will be guided by four principle objectives to offer:
• A socio-historical analysis of state violence in the borderlands of the Middle East;
• An examination of the capacity of border populations to create the history of the borderlands, nation-states, and the region as a whole;
• A study of the frontier effects based around the notions of subjectivity, space and time, and involving various levels of observation (macro, meso and micro) in order to identify the ruptures and continuities evoked by the delineation of new borderlines; and
• A historical lens through which to make sense of current events in Syria and Iraq, and possibly orient conflict-resolution practitioners.
Through the exploitation of a wide range of sources (diplomatic, administrative and military records, missionary documents, newspapers) and by looking at the social construction of international frontiers at the borderlands located between Turkey, Iraq and Syria in the interwar era, the research project will provide a much more holistic yet finely-grained understanding of the formation of the territorial state in the region in the aftermath of the First World War as well as a historical perspective on the on-going armed conflicts.
Summary
While the crisis of the territorial nation-state in the Middle East has once again been brought to a head by the wars in Iraq and Syria, it cannot be simply understood as the logical consequence of an imported political construction. Based on two epistemological notions – borderlands as histoire-problème (history-as-problem) and the co-production of borders between state and society – this research project proposes to rethink the classical historical narrative about the emergence of the post-Ottoman Middle East. Taking its cue from trans-border phenomena and thus paying attention to the circulation of people, goods and ideas as well as to everyday encounters between local actors and state representatives, the project will be guided by four principle objectives to offer:
• A socio-historical analysis of state violence in the borderlands of the Middle East;
• An examination of the capacity of border populations to create the history of the borderlands, nation-states, and the region as a whole;
• A study of the frontier effects based around the notions of subjectivity, space and time, and involving various levels of observation (macro, meso and micro) in order to identify the ruptures and continuities evoked by the delineation of new borderlines; and
• A historical lens through which to make sense of current events in Syria and Iraq, and possibly orient conflict-resolution practitioners.
Through the exploitation of a wide range of sources (diplomatic, administrative and military records, missionary documents, newspapers) and by looking at the social construction of international frontiers at the borderlands located between Turkey, Iraq and Syria in the interwar era, the research project will provide a much more holistic yet finely-grained understanding of the formation of the territorial state in the region in the aftermath of the First World War as well as a historical perspective on the on-going armed conflicts.
Max ERC Funding
1 997 675 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31
Project acronym BRASILIAE
Project Indigenous Knowledge in the Making of Science: Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648)
Researcher (PI) Mariana DE CAMPOS FRANCOZO
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2016-STG
Summary This project is an interdisciplinary study of the role of indigenous knowledge in the making of science. Situated at the intersection of history and anthropology, its main research objective is to understand the transformation of information and practices of South American indigenous peoples into a body of knowledge that became part of the Western scholarly canon. It aims to explore, by means of a distinctive case-study, how European science is constructed in intercultural settings.
This project takes the book Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (HNB), published in 1648 by Piso and Marcgraf, as its central focus. The HNB is the first product of the encounter between early modern European scholarship and South American indigenous knowledge. In an encyclopedic format, it brings together information about the natural world, linguistics, and geography of South America as understood and experienced by indigenous peoples as well as enslaved Africans. Its method of construction embodies the intercultural connections that shaped practices of knowledge production in colonial settings across the globe, and is the earliest example of such in South America. With my research team, I will investigate how indigenous knowledge was appropriated and transformed into European science by focusing on ethnobotanics, ethnozoology, and indigenous material culture.
Since the HNB and its associated materials are kept in European museums and archives, this project is timely and relevant in light of the growing concern for the democratization of heritage. The current debate about the societal role of publicly-funded cultural institutions across Europe argues for the importance of multi-vocality in cultural and political processes. This project proposes a more inclusive interpretation and use of the materials in these institutions and thereby sets an example of how European heritage institutions can use their historical collections to reconnect the past with present-day societal concerns.
Summary
This project is an interdisciplinary study of the role of indigenous knowledge in the making of science. Situated at the intersection of history and anthropology, its main research objective is to understand the transformation of information and practices of South American indigenous peoples into a body of knowledge that became part of the Western scholarly canon. It aims to explore, by means of a distinctive case-study, how European science is constructed in intercultural settings.
This project takes the book Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (HNB), published in 1648 by Piso and Marcgraf, as its central focus. The HNB is the first product of the encounter between early modern European scholarship and South American indigenous knowledge. In an encyclopedic format, it brings together information about the natural world, linguistics, and geography of South America as understood and experienced by indigenous peoples as well as enslaved Africans. Its method of construction embodies the intercultural connections that shaped practices of knowledge production in colonial settings across the globe, and is the earliest example of such in South America. With my research team, I will investigate how indigenous knowledge was appropriated and transformed into European science by focusing on ethnobotanics, ethnozoology, and indigenous material culture.
Since the HNB and its associated materials are kept in European museums and archives, this project is timely and relevant in light of the growing concern for the democratization of heritage. The current debate about the societal role of publicly-funded cultural institutions across Europe argues for the importance of multi-vocality in cultural and political processes. This project proposes a more inclusive interpretation and use of the materials in these institutions and thereby sets an example of how European heritage institutions can use their historical collections to reconnect the past with present-day societal concerns.
Max ERC Funding
1 475 565 €
Duration
Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31
Project acronym CLCLCL
Project Civil Law, Common Law, Customary Law: Consonance, Divergence and Transformation in Western Europe from the late eleventh to the thirteenth centuries
Researcher (PI) John HUDSON
Host Institution (HI) THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS
Call Details Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2016-ADG
Summary A highly significant division in present-day Europe is between two types of legal system: the Continental with foundations in Civil Law (law with an ultimately Roman law basis), and English Common Law. Both trace their continuous history back to the twelfth century. The present project re-evaluates this vital period in legal history, by comparing not just English Common Law and Continental Civil Law (or “Ius commune”), but also the customary laws crucially important in Continental Europe even beyond the twelfth century. Such laws shared many features with English law, and the comparison thus disrupts the simplistic English:Continental distinction. The project first analyses the form, functioning and development of local, national, and supra-national laws. Similarities, differences, and influences will then be examined from perspectives of longer-term European legal development. Proper historical re-examination of the subject is very timely because of current invocation of supposed legal histories, be it Eurosceptic celebration of English Common Law or rhetorical use of Ius commune as precedent for a common European Law.
F. W. Maitland wrote that ‘there is not much “comparative jurisprudence” for those who do not know thoroughly well the things to be compared’. A comparative project requires collaboration – PI, senior researcher, post-doctoral and doctoral researchers, and Advisory Board. It also needs an integrated approach, through carefully selected areas, themes, and sources. The purpose is not just to provide geographical and thematic coverage but to assemble scholars who overcome divisions of approach in legal historiography: between lawyers and historians, between national traditions, between Common Law and Civil Law. The project is thus very significant in developing methods for writing comparative legal history - and legal history and comparative law more widely - in terms of uncovering patterns, constructing narratives, and testing theories of causation.
Summary
A highly significant division in present-day Europe is between two types of legal system: the Continental with foundations in Civil Law (law with an ultimately Roman law basis), and English Common Law. Both trace their continuous history back to the twelfth century. The present project re-evaluates this vital period in legal history, by comparing not just English Common Law and Continental Civil Law (or “Ius commune”), but also the customary laws crucially important in Continental Europe even beyond the twelfth century. Such laws shared many features with English law, and the comparison thus disrupts the simplistic English:Continental distinction. The project first analyses the form, functioning and development of local, national, and supra-national laws. Similarities, differences, and influences will then be examined from perspectives of longer-term European legal development. Proper historical re-examination of the subject is very timely because of current invocation of supposed legal histories, be it Eurosceptic celebration of English Common Law or rhetorical use of Ius commune as precedent for a common European Law.
F. W. Maitland wrote that ‘there is not much “comparative jurisprudence” for those who do not know thoroughly well the things to be compared’. A comparative project requires collaboration – PI, senior researcher, post-doctoral and doctoral researchers, and Advisory Board. It also needs an integrated approach, through carefully selected areas, themes, and sources. The purpose is not just to provide geographical and thematic coverage but to assemble scholars who overcome divisions of approach in legal historiography: between lawyers and historians, between national traditions, between Common Law and Civil Law. The project is thus very significant in developing methods for writing comparative legal history - and legal history and comparative law more widely - in terms of uncovering patterns, constructing narratives, and testing theories of causation.
Max ERC Funding
2 161 502 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-05-01, End date: 2022-04-30
Project acronym CROME
Project Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence: The Colonial-Liberation Wars in Postcolonial Times
Researcher (PI) Miguel Gonçalo CARDINA
Host Institution (HI) CENTRO DE ESTUDOS SOCIAIS
Call Details Starting Grant (StG), SH6, ERC-2016-STG
Summary Colonial-Liberation Wars generate plural memories, conflicting evocations and persisting amnesias. The project’s main challenge is to produce innovative knowledge about the memories of the wars fought by the Portuguese state and pro-independence African movements between 1961 and 1974/5. The approach chosen is simultaneously diachronic and comparative, inasmuch as it contrasts changes that took place between the end of the conflicts and nowadays, regarding how wars, colonial pasts and anticolonial legacies have been remembered and silenced in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe. The key hypothesis is that wars - as pivotal moments that ended the cycle of Empire in Portugal and started the cycle of African independences in the former Portuguese colonies - triggered memorialisation and silencing processes which had their own historicity.
CROME is divided into two strands. The first one, named ‘Colonial Wars, Postcolonial States’, looks at the role played by the states under consideration in mobilising, articulating and recognising the past, but also in actively generating selective representations. ‘Memory as a battlefield’ is the second strand, which will highlight distinct uses of the past and dynamics between social memories and individual memories.
The project intends to demonstrate how wars gave rise to multiple memories and conflicting historical judgements, mostly in Portugal, but also to examine how the specific nature of the (post-)colonial histories of each African country has generated different ways to summon war memories and (anti-)colonial legacies. CROME will, thus, put forward a ground-breaking perspective in terms of colonial-liberation war studies, and will be instrumental in dealing with such traumatic experience, for its comparative approach might help overcoming everlasting constraints still at play today, caused by the historical burden European colonialism left behind.
Summary
Colonial-Liberation Wars generate plural memories, conflicting evocations and persisting amnesias. The project’s main challenge is to produce innovative knowledge about the memories of the wars fought by the Portuguese state and pro-independence African movements between 1961 and 1974/5. The approach chosen is simultaneously diachronic and comparative, inasmuch as it contrasts changes that took place between the end of the conflicts and nowadays, regarding how wars, colonial pasts and anticolonial legacies have been remembered and silenced in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe. The key hypothesis is that wars - as pivotal moments that ended the cycle of Empire in Portugal and started the cycle of African independences in the former Portuguese colonies - triggered memorialisation and silencing processes which had their own historicity.
CROME is divided into two strands. The first one, named ‘Colonial Wars, Postcolonial States’, looks at the role played by the states under consideration in mobilising, articulating and recognising the past, but also in actively generating selective representations. ‘Memory as a battlefield’ is the second strand, which will highlight distinct uses of the past and dynamics between social memories and individual memories.
The project intends to demonstrate how wars gave rise to multiple memories and conflicting historical judgements, mostly in Portugal, but also to examine how the specific nature of the (post-)colonial histories of each African country has generated different ways to summon war memories and (anti-)colonial legacies. CROME will, thus, put forward a ground-breaking perspective in terms of colonial-liberation war studies, and will be instrumental in dealing with such traumatic experience, for its comparative approach might help overcoming everlasting constraints still at play today, caused by the historical burden European colonialism left behind.
Max ERC Funding
1 478 249 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31
Project acronym CROSSROADS
Project Human Evolution at the Crossroads
Researcher (PI) AIKATERINI CHARVATI
Host Institution (HI) EBERHARD KARLS UNIVERSITAET TUEBINGEN
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2016-COG
Summary The most important open questions in European paleoanthropology concern the timing, number and origin of early human dispersals into the continent, the identity and number of taxa present, and their possible interactions. These issues remain unresolved partly due to the lack of research in South-East Europe, a region at the crossroads between continents and a refugium for fauna, flora and possibly human populations during glacial times. The PI’s previous work there (ERC StG PaGE) aimed to add new evidence to further our understanding of human evolution on the continent. PaGE led to the discovery of several new Paleolithic sites, including the oldest radiometrically dated archaeological site from South-East Europe, placing the region squarely in the Paleolithic map of Europe.
CROSSROADS is an ambitious, groundbreaking research program that builds on the foundation of PaGE to take Paleolithic research in the region to a new level. In contrast to the exploratory goals of PaGE, it focuses on the early part of the Paleolithic targeting the following questions: Can human presence in South-East Europe, considered a major dispersal route into the continent from Africa and the Near East, be documented beyond the current known chronology of ca. 500 ka BP, as shown in the West? Is there a gap between the earliest human arrival and subsequent human activity in the region, or was human habitation continuous, as would be expected in a refugium? What was the environmental backdrop of the early human dispersal and subsequent evolution? How did behavioral / biological change correlate with environmental changes, chronology and landscape use? Can we document a higher level of diversity in the human fossil record of the region than would be expected under evolutionary scenarios developed on Western European evidence, suggesting that different evolutionary processes were at work? The answers to these questions will be essential for testing hypotheses about human evolution in Eurasia.
Summary
The most important open questions in European paleoanthropology concern the timing, number and origin of early human dispersals into the continent, the identity and number of taxa present, and their possible interactions. These issues remain unresolved partly due to the lack of research in South-East Europe, a region at the crossroads between continents and a refugium for fauna, flora and possibly human populations during glacial times. The PI’s previous work there (ERC StG PaGE) aimed to add new evidence to further our understanding of human evolution on the continent. PaGE led to the discovery of several new Paleolithic sites, including the oldest radiometrically dated archaeological site from South-East Europe, placing the region squarely in the Paleolithic map of Europe.
CROSSROADS is an ambitious, groundbreaking research program that builds on the foundation of PaGE to take Paleolithic research in the region to a new level. In contrast to the exploratory goals of PaGE, it focuses on the early part of the Paleolithic targeting the following questions: Can human presence in South-East Europe, considered a major dispersal route into the continent from Africa and the Near East, be documented beyond the current known chronology of ca. 500 ka BP, as shown in the West? Is there a gap between the earliest human arrival and subsequent human activity in the region, or was human habitation continuous, as would be expected in a refugium? What was the environmental backdrop of the early human dispersal and subsequent evolution? How did behavioral / biological change correlate with environmental changes, chronology and landscape use? Can we document a higher level of diversity in the human fossil record of the region than would be expected under evolutionary scenarios developed on Western European evidence, suggesting that different evolutionary processes were at work? The answers to these questions will be essential for testing hypotheses about human evolution in Eurasia.
Max ERC Funding
1 999 250 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-04-01, End date: 2022-03-31
Project acronym EarlyModernCosmology
Project Institutions and Metaphysics of Cosmology in the Epistemic Networks of Seventeenth-Century Europe
Researcher (PI) Pietro Daniel OMODEO
Host Institution (HI) UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Call Details Consolidator Grant (CoG), SH6, ERC-2016-COG
Summary The focus of this project is the competing confessional discourses on cosmology of the seventeenth century, an epoch in which religious conflicts originated opposing ‘epistemic cultures’, which were embodied in scholarly institutions and networks such as the Protestant web of northern European universities or the global web of Jesuit colleges.
In the Early Modern Period cosmological controversies (over issues such as heliocentrism, plurality of worlds, space, infinity, cometary theory, celestial matter and fluidity) were heated and amplified by increasing political and confessional fragmentation. The Roman prohibition of the Copernican system (1616) and the extraordinary condemnation of Galileo (1633) accelerated the formation of competing cosmological cultures along confessional and political lines of alliance and opposition. This research project addresses the interrelations between [1.] cosmological debates in the northern European Protestant institutional networks of scholars and institutions and [2.] cosmological debates in Jesuit institutional networks aiming at [3.] a comparative assessment of early formations and transformations of epistemic webs. It considers parallelisms and contrasts, negotiations and intersections of seventeenth-century cosmological discourses between scholars, institutions and scientific communities belonging to different epistemic cultures. This endeavor brings into focus the political-confessional dimension of early-modern cosmology and shows how science is embedded in struggles for cultural hegemony, struggles which were at once institutional and ideological. While there is a great deal of in-depth study on the history of science in various early-modern confessional contexts, a comparative study bringing together the history of knowledge institutions and their metaphysical legitimation is still a desideratum.
Summary
The focus of this project is the competing confessional discourses on cosmology of the seventeenth century, an epoch in which religious conflicts originated opposing ‘epistemic cultures’, which were embodied in scholarly institutions and networks such as the Protestant web of northern European universities or the global web of Jesuit colleges.
In the Early Modern Period cosmological controversies (over issues such as heliocentrism, plurality of worlds, space, infinity, cometary theory, celestial matter and fluidity) were heated and amplified by increasing political and confessional fragmentation. The Roman prohibition of the Copernican system (1616) and the extraordinary condemnation of Galileo (1633) accelerated the formation of competing cosmological cultures along confessional and political lines of alliance and opposition. This research project addresses the interrelations between [1.] cosmological debates in the northern European Protestant institutional networks of scholars and institutions and [2.] cosmological debates in Jesuit institutional networks aiming at [3.] a comparative assessment of early formations and transformations of epistemic webs. It considers parallelisms and contrasts, negotiations and intersections of seventeenth-century cosmological discourses between scholars, institutions and scientific communities belonging to different epistemic cultures. This endeavor brings into focus the political-confessional dimension of early-modern cosmology and shows how science is embedded in struggles for cultural hegemony, struggles which were at once institutional and ideological. While there is a great deal of in-depth study on the history of science in various early-modern confessional contexts, a comparative study bringing together the history of knowledge institutions and their metaphysical legitimation is still a desideratum.
Max ERC Funding
1 999 976 €
Duration
Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31
