« Activities « Strategic Meetings
Team members discussed the constructivist approach to ‘corruption’ in a transnational context, one of the major contributions of TransCorr to existing scholarship on Central-South-East Europe.
Principal Investigator Silvia Marton presented a paper titled, “Hopeless corruption? Negotiating modernity in Wallachia and Moldavia in the 1830s”. She highlighted the surprising centrality of the language of (anti)corruption in Russia’s interventions in the two Principalities in the context of major political and institutional changes in these territories. She also showed that, as a historically specific concept, “corruption” was closely linked to novel ideas in the region about modernization (or westernization). As such, denouncing “corrupt” acts generated a particular form of political and social capital in an emerging order in South-East and Central Europe.
Alex R. Tipei’s presentation – entitled “Civilization or Corruption: Representing Modernizing Projects of the Early Greek State in the Francophone Press” – illustrated how transnational inquiry allows historians to move beyond the confines of the nation, which have characterized much of the scholarship since the nineteenth century itself. Following the presentation, team members discussed transnational history’s focus on relationships and networks that crisscrossed nation-states, empires, and continents, exploring the interplay between historical actors and processes in disparate locales and on multiple geographic scales.
Team members also discussed the historical corpus of their research that allows them to build their micro-historical and biographical studies and to track the trajectories of individual historical actors in a transnational context.