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)

该项目侧重于19世纪末和20世纪初东欧三个帝国的帝国精英代表的自传体实践。在这三个帝国中，人们可以观察到自19世纪中叶以来自传写作和出版物的兴起。到目前为止，这些发展主要被解读为主体性文化发展的标志，不仅包括资产阶级圈子，也包括贵族和其他社会阶层。各个社会对个人生活故事日益增长的兴趣，在多大程度上反映了理解19世纪下半叶三大帝国深刻结构变化的需要，这个问题迄今为止很少受到关注：民族和革命运动的出现，俄罗斯和哈布斯堡帝国的领土扩张，以及对奥斯曼帝国领土完整日益增长的威胁，迫使这些大国努力解决帝国领土问题。全面的国内政治改革，例如19世纪60年代和70年代的大改革，1905年俄国革命后的宪法转向，1867年奥地利和匈牙利的妥协，或1839年以后奥斯曼帝国的坦齐玛特，以及工业化和城市化导致的新社会阶级的政治出现，导致了权力结构的转变和传统政治秩序合法性的危机。面对这些激进的政治和社会经济变化和挑战，极大地刺激了19世纪末和20世纪初三个多民族帝国的公众自传热潮。本研究项目的目的是将自传体实践作为一种社会交流行为来阅读，并分析选定的演员群体的自我文件，包括对帝国统治的解释，对帝国空间的感知模式，以及帝国、国家、社会、宗教、性别或政治性质的集体认同的竞争概念的影响。该项目结合了比较历史和跨国历史的方法。因此，它有望对帝国身份概念的内容和传播以及帝国在现代之初作为想象共同体的功能提供重要的见解。作为牵头机构，巴塞尔大学的研究小组将与慕尼黑路德维希·马克西米利安大学和卡罗莱纳学院合作开展该项目。这些机构能够汇集他们在俄罗斯、奥斯曼帝国和哈布斯堡帝国的杰出历史专业知识。除了6篇学术论文，1篇博士后论文和5篇博士论文，3篇小型案例研究，初级研究人员研讨会和3次国际会议计划。

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.