Imperial Subjects. Autobiographical Practices and Historical Change in the Continental Empires of the Romanovs, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. (Mid 19th and early 20th Centuries)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Aust
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 229146628

The project focuses on autobiographical practices of representatives of imperial elites in the three Eastern European empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In all three empires, one can observe a rise in autobiographical writing and publications since the middle of the 19th century. Until now, these developments were read primarily as an indicator of a developing culture of subjectivity, encompassing not only bourgeois circles, but also the nobility and other social strata. The question to which extent this growing interest of the respective societies in individual life-stories reflected the need to make sense of the profound structural changes in all three great empires during the second half of the 19th century has so far received little attention: The emergence of national and revolutionary movements, the territorial expansion of the Russian and Habsburg Empires, and the growing threat to the Ottoman Empire s territorial integrity forced these powers to grapple with the question of imperial territoriality. Comprehensive domestic political reforms, for example the Great Reforms in the 1860s and 1870s and the constitutional turn after the Revolution of 1905 in Russia, the Compromise between Austria and Hungary in 1867, or the Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire from 1839 onwards and the political emergence of new social classes as a result of industrialization and urbanization led to shifts in the power structures and to crises in the legitimacy of the traditional political order. The encounter with these radical political and socio-economic changes and challenges significantly stimulated the autobiographical boom among the public in the three multinational empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The aim of this research project is to read autobiographical practices as an act of social communication and to analyze ego documents of selected groups of actors with regard to the interpretation of imperial rule, patterns of perception of imperial spaces and the influence of competing concepts of collective identity of an imperial, national, social, religious, gender-specific, or political nature. The project combines approaches of comparative and transnational history. Therefore, it promises significant insights into the content and the dissemination of concepts of imperial identity and the functioning of empires as imagined communities at the dawn of the modern age. The research group at the University of Basel as Lead Agency will work collaboratively with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Collegium Carolinum to conduct the project. These institutions are able to pool their outstanding historical expertise on the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg empires. In addition to six academic theses, 1 PostDoc and 5 dissertations, and three minor case studies, workshops for junior researchers and three international conferences are planned.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Participating Persons: Dr. Robert Luft; Professor Dr. Maurus Reinkowski; Professor Dr. Frithjof Benjamin Schenk