Imperial Biographies. Elite careers in the multi-ethnic empires of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Ottomans (1850-1918)
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Imperial Biographies. Elite careers in the multi-ethnic empires of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Ottomans (1850-1918)
Imperial Biographies. Elite careers in the multi-ethnic empires of the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Ottomans (1850-1918)
Research project
Research on the great European and Asian empires has taken on a new dynamic in recent years. Following on from the insights of post-colonial studies, the focus is once again more strongly on the colonial actors and their biographies. It draws on the findings of recent biographies, which emphasise more than ever the socio-cultural and situational ties of individuals. The research project "Imperial Biographies" takes up this new orientation and looks at the multi-ethnic empires that dominated the East-Central European-Eurasian region in the long 19th century. Three levels are considered.
On the one hand, the research project focuses on the high mobility of imperial actors and discusses its relevance for the change of imperial constitutions. In doing so, it focuses on those imperial elites whose academic appointments often involved empire-wide careers and whose biographies were linked to the imperial structures in a variety of ways. How did they influence events in different parts of the empire as decision-makers and professional experts? At the same time, the mobility patterns that characterised imperial career paths and elite circulation are examined.
Secondly, the project links these structural conditions with the self-images of the mobile actors and enquires into the genesis of their images of empire, loyalties and identities. An interdisciplinary look at the individual biographies allows insights into the subjective meaning of the protagonists, as whose space of experience, imagination and expectation the empire confronts us.
Thirdly, the research project aims to create a history of the transfer and interdependence of the empires. The mobile elites in the East-Central European-Eurasian area of interaction were connected with each other across borders in many ways and their biographies reveal patterns of trans-imperial interdependence, especially from an interdisciplinary perspective.
The research project thus focuses on imperial biographies as interfaces between individual life realities and their interpretations of meaning on the one hand, and imperial structures and sometimes cross-border mobility patterns on the other. Such an approach enables a reorientation of comparative research into the great empires in the long 19th century by placing the interactions of structural mobility patterns, trans-imperial exchange relationships and actor perspectives at the centre of the debate.
As part of this research focus, the German Research Foundation has funded the project Im Dienst des Zaren: Life and career paths of the imperial administrative elite in the late Tsarist Empire (1855-1914).
Conference programmes and reports "Imperial Biographies"
Workshop in Oldenburg from 23 to 24 September 2021
Conference report: www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-127725
Conference in Berlin from 3 to 5 May 2012
Call for papers: hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/termine/id=17048&sort=datum&order=down&search=imperiale+biographie
Conference in Bamberg from 19 to 21 July 2012
Conference report: www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=38346
Publications at the end of project
Monographs and edited publications
Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864-1915, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021(upittpress.org/books/9780822947011/).
Pol'skie zemli pod vlast'ju Peterburga. Ot Venskogo kongressa do Pervoj mirovoj vojny [Poland under the rule of the tsars. From the Congress of Vienna to the First World War], Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, in the series Historia Rossica. Okrainy Rossijskoj imperii, 2020.(www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/neprikosnovennyy_zapas/134_nz_6_2020/article/23252/?sphrase_id=448685).
Rządy imperialne w Kraju Nadwiślańskim. Królestwo Polskie i cesarstwo rosyjskie (1864-1915), Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2016(www.wuw.pl/product-pol-5999-Rzady-imperialne-w-Kraju-Nadwislanskim-Krolestwo-Polskie-i-cesarstwo-rosyjskie-1864-1915.html). Nominated by the Polish Historical Association (Polskie Towarzystwo Historyczne) for the "Pro Historia Polonorum" award for the best foreign book on Polish history from 2012-17.
Eliten im Vielvölkerreich: Imperiale Biographien in Russland und Österreich-Ungarn (1850-1918) / Elites and Empire: Imperial Biographies in Russia and Austria-Hungary (1850-1918), edited together with Tim Buchen, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015.(www.degruyter.com/view/product/454997)
Doomsday scenarios and visions of the future: Germany and Russia in the Fin de Siècle, themed issue Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, edited with Peter Haslinger, 63:11 (2015).
Imperiale Herrschaft im Weichselland: Das Königreich Polen im Russischen Imperium (1864-1915), Munich: Oldenbourg, in the series Ordnungssysteme - Studien zur Ideengeschichte der Neuzeit, 2014, www.degruyter.com/view/product/247946. Nominated by the Polish Association of Historians (Polskie Towarzystwo Historyczne) for the "Pro Historia Polonorum" award as the best foreign book on Polish history of the years 2012-17.
Imperial Biographies, themed issue History and Society, 40:1 (2014), www.vr-elibrary.de/toc/gege/40/1.
Border crossers in multi-ethnic empires: Grenzziehungen und -überschreitungen in Russland und Österreich-Ungarn (1840-1918), edited together with Jörn Happel, Berlin: Metropol, 2011 (Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 59:5).
Essays
"What Is the "Russian Cause" and Whom Does It Serve? Russian Nationalists and Imperial Bureaucracy in the Kingdom of Poland", in: The Tsar, the Empire, and the Nation. Dilemmas of Nationalisation in Russia's Western Borderlands, 1905-1915, edited by Yoko Aoshima and Darius Staliūnas, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2021, pp. 67-109.
"Imperial Biographies Revisited", together with Benedikt Tondera, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 68:2 (2020), pp. 270-281.
"Officials on the move. Zu Strukturen und Akteuren imperialer Herrschaft im ausgehenden Zarenreich", in: Migrationen im späten Habsburgerreich, edited by Carl Bethke, Tübingen: TVV-Verlag, 2020, pp. 101-131.
"Towards a new quality of statehood: Bureaucratisation and state-building in empires and nation states before 1914", together with Hannes Grandits and Pieter Judson, in The Routledge History Handbook of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2: Statehood, edited by Sabina Ferhadbegovic, Joachim von Puttkamer and Włodzimierz Borodziej, London: Routledge, 2020, pp. 41-114.
(https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-History-Handbook-of-Central-and-Eastern-Europe-in-the-Twentieth/Borodziej-Ferhadbegovic-Puttkamer/p/book/9781138301665)
"Činovniki v raz'ezdach. K voprosu o strukturach i dejstvijuščich licach imperskoj bjurokratii na zakate Rossijskoj imperii [Civil servants and mobility. On structures and persons of imperial bureaucracy in the late Russian Empire]", in: Istoričeskij kur'er, No.1 (2018), pp. 84-102.
"Between State-Building and Local Cooperation: Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland (1864-1915)", in: Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 19:2 (2018), pp. 385-416.
"Co-operation in conflict? The Tsarist Administration in the Kingdom of Poland between State Expansion and Social Activation (1863-1914)", in: Vom Vorrücken des Staates in die Fläche. Ein europäisches Phänomen des langen 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Jörg Ganzenmüller and Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Cologne: Böhlau, 2016, pp. 35-64.
"Namiestnicy Królestwa Polskiego i generał-gubernatorzy warszawscy po powstaniu styczniowym (do 1914 roku)" [The imperial governors and the Warsaw governors-general after the January Uprising of 1863 (until 1914)], in: Wbrew królewskim aliansom. Rosja, Europa i polska walka o niepodległość w XIX wieku, edited by Łukasz Adamski and Sławomir Dębski, Warsaw 2016, pp. 355-391.
"The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Nationhood in the Russian Empire", in: Revolution, War and the Birth of State and Nation. Staatsbildung in Europa und den Amerikas 1770-1930, edited by Ewald Frie and Ute Planert, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016, pp. 193-210.
"Doomsday scenarios and visions of the future: Germany and Russia in the Fin de Siècle. Introduction", with Peter Haslinger, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 63:11 (2015), thematic issue, edited by Peter Haslinger and Malte Rolf, pp. 925- 929.
"Elites and their imperial biographies. Zur Einführung" / "Elites and Their Imperial Biographies. Introduction", with Tim Buchen, in: Eliten im Vielvölkerreich: Imperiale Biographien in Russland und Österreich-Ungarn (1850-1918) / Elites and Empire: Imperial Biographies in Russia and Austria-Hungary, 1850-1918, edited by Tim Buchen and Malte Rolf, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 3-31.
"Imperial Biographies. Lebenswege imperialer Akteure in Groß- und Kolonialreichen (1850-1918) - zur Einleitung", in: Imperiale Biographien, edited by Malte Rolf, Themenheft Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 40:1 (2014), pp. 5-21.
"Bureaucracy and Mobility in Late Imperial Russia. Reflections on Elite Careering and Imperial Biographies in a Multiethnic Empire", in: Moskauer Vorträge zum 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, No. 16 (2013), edited by Ingrid Schierle (http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/vortraege-moskau/rolf_bureaucracy).
"Russification, depolonisation or internal state building? Konzepte imperialer Herrschaft im Königreich Polen (1863-1915)", in: Kampf um Wort und Schrift: Russifizierung in Osteuropa im 19.-20. Jahrhundert, edited by Zaur Gasimov, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012, pp. 51-88.
"Imperial Rule in Urban Space: Tsarist Officials and Urban Public Spheres in Warsaw (1870-1914)", in Russia's Imperial Power. Integrationsstrategien und ihre Reichweite in transnationaler Perspektive, edited by Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2012, pp. 123-153.
"Die Durchlässigkeit der Grenze: Einleitende Überlegungen zu Grenzgängern und ihren Lebenswelten in der späten Habsburger- und Romanow-Monarchie", in: Grenzgänger in Vielvölkerreichen: Grenzziehungen und -überschreitungen in Russland und Österreich-Ungarn (1840-1918), Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 59:5 (2011), thematic issue, edited by Malte Rolf and Jörn Happel, pp. 397-404.