Project Details
Projekt
Familiar Strangers. Xenocratic Administration in Swedish Pomerania
Subject Area
Early Modern History
Art History
Art History
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465372539
Xenocracy has to be considered a widespread case of domination in early modern Europe, given the bellicity of the era. So far, this phenomenon has been discussed for European dominions primarily from the perspective of the centers of power as an element of state-building processes or in the context of the emergence and expansion of composite monarchies. What remains open, however, is how xenocracy and the changed relations of rule in the new 'provinces' were mediated, legitimized, and perceived: By whom were ascriptions of foreignness thematized, in what way, and for how long? How did administration function on the ground under such conditions, and what significance did the administration and its actors have for the establishment, maintenance, and transformation of xenocracy?This is where the planned TP comes in and examines these questions for a typical situation of xenocracy as a result of wars in the European context: the Swedish rule over parts of Pomerania, which fell to Sweden as a fief with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. With an interdisciplinary, historiographical and art-historical approach, this constellation of xenocracy (1.) will be examined to determine in which situations of administrative action or the actions of various actors strangeness was used as a category of difference in order to create (new) distinctions or when this was precisely not the case. Based on this, (2.) it should be clarified to what extent this changed over time: Did certain ascriptions of otherness successively lose their significance in mutual perception? Can processes of de-xenocratization be detected? And what effects did this have on the exercise of local rule? Finally, (3.) the mediation, legitimation, and perception of xenocratic rule in the ruled provinces will be investigated in different media, ranging from supplications and petitions to images and burial rites to monumental architecture and its decoration.
DFG Programme
Research Units
