Action no: A 36
MC meeting no: 7
Date and time: 13 April 2007, 14.00
Meeting place and address: Austrian Academy of Sciences
Chair: Peter Fibiger Bang
Agenda
1. Welcome to participants; taking of minutes
2. Adoption of agenda
3. Minutes of last meeting and purpose of this meeting
4. Report from the Science Officer
• News from the COST Office
• Status of Action
• Number of Signatories
• Budget Status (transition to grant holder)
5. Requests for membership
6. Request for non-COST participation
7. Website news
8. STSM status, applications
9. Year Budget planning
10. Action evaluations (Vienna meeting)
11. Progress report of working groups
- Utrecht-meeting
12. Publications
13. Dissemination plan
14. Long-term planning
- Implementation of the plan for the general continuous development of the network: the Rome meeting.
A. training school/summer school, ideas
B. Roman Host institutions, the Academia di Danimarca Via Omero, subsidiaries: the French School, British School, others?
C. Suggestions for joint comparative papers written by a pair of management committee or working group members.
D. Ideas for extra speakers, topics
15. Time and place of next meeting
16. AOB
Ad. 1: Peter Bang welcomed the new COST rapporteur Jana Gašparíková from the Slovak Republic and was chosen to take the minutes.
Ad. 2: the agenda was adopted.
Ad. 3: The minutes of the previous meeting were approved and the main task of this meeting briefly presented: to initiate discussions of the dissemination plan, organisation of a training school and to make suggestions for more joint-papers and contributors to the concluding Rome meeting.
Ad. 4:
- Julia Stamm had been selected as the new COST Science Officer for the action, now that David Grønbæk’s term had expired.
- Presently there were 14-15 signatories of the action.
- A budget frame of 80,000-85,000 € was suggested for the final year of the action
Ad. 7: the web-site was steadily developing and was welcoming information from management committee members about forthcoming conferences, events and book publications which would then be advertised on the website.
Ad. 8: During the preceding budgetary period, 4-5 STSMs had been completed within the action and they had been a very useful tool to promote the work of graduate students working on their PhDs. The STSM could also usefully be used to assist editorial and other such collaborative work among the MC members. For the coming year 3 new STSM, of up to 2500 € each, were approved:
- Jeroen Duindam: visit Metin Kunt in Istanbul to complete the editing of the papers from the households and royal courts volume.
- Dariusz Kolodziejczyk: visit to Copenhagen to work with Peter Bang on editing the papers on imperial universalism from Warsaw.
- Natalia Krolikowska: visit to Cambridge under the guidance of Christopher Bayly
Ad. 9: Budget 2008/2009:
- Utrecht meeting 27,000 €
- Rome meeting 35,000 €
- Training school 12,000 €
(20 particpants of 600 €)
- 3 STSM 7,500 €
Total 81,500 €
The 81,500 € is more likely to be the minimum needed. The requirements of the action in its final year may run a little higher.
Ad. 10:
Generally there was wide agreement that the Vienna meeting had been a great success, with a good mixture of general and specific presentations. Various points about the relative weight of discussion and presentation of papers were debated. Perhaps a little more time could be reserved for a final discussion, pre-circulation of papers for the Rome meeting might be useful.
In general, the meetings benefitted from the fact that the group was now getting to know each other well.
Ad. 11:
Jeroen Duindam presented the programme for the Utrecht meeting. The possibility of inviting an extra Indian historian working on colonial law was debated.
Ad. 12:
5 publications are now developing out of the meetings:
- Giovanni Salmeri & Björn Forsen (Athens meeting), Patterns of Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean, Papers and Monographs of the Finnish Institute at Athens, Vol. XIII, expected publication, August 2008.
- Metin Kunt, Tulay Artan & Jeroen Duindam (Istanbul meeting), Royal courts in dynastic states and empires: a global perspective, the papers are in and the editing process is entering its final stages.
- Chris Bayly & Peter Bang (Copenhagen-Warsaw), Empires in Contention, the editing is very close to completion
- Dariusz Kolodziejczyk & Peter Bang (Warsaw, plus Athens, on universalism), Universalism –
genealogies of imperial culture and representation, editing is planned to be finished during the autumn 2008.
- Suraiya Faroqhi & Adam Ziolkowski, are beginning to develop the Crete meeting into a publication.
Ad. 13:
- Discusssions about the final dissemination plan were initiated and there was general support for the idea of joining forces to write a more generally accessible book on the character of empires in history.
Ad. 14: Long-term planning:
Concluding meeting in Rome 24-26 April 2009:
a) Following the decision of the Crete meeting to attach a training school to the final concluding meeting, a group consisting of Metin Kunt, Claire Sotinel & Giovani Salmeri was set up to take care of the practical organisation. The school would take place from 21-23 April and then conclude with participation in the final meeting. The format would include up to 20 graduate students, and up to handful of teachers. The programme was to focus on the students and their needs rather than present them with an elaborate schedule of presentations.
b) Main host institution will be the Academia di Danimarca, but an effort will be made to include a number of the other academies and schools in the meeting as well.
c) Joint comparative papers
1. Imperial Universalism (Koch & Bang)
2. Central government (Kunt & Duindam)
3. Empire and knowledge (Woolf & Bayly)
4. Empire and conversion (Sotinel + Baehr?)
5. Empire and provincial elites (Anastasopoulos & Brelaz)
6. Empire and fiscality (Steven Mitchell & Suraiya Faroqhi)
7. Empire, client kingdoms and frontiers (Kolodziejczyk & Gabrielsen)
8. Imperial titles and “translation” in history (Forsen & Ziolkowski)
9. Empire and the novel (Salmeri & Hervé)
One or two more ideas were in the offing as well and would be sent to the chair later.
d. In addition to the joint papers, ideas were asked for to invite a limited number of extra complementary speakers. Various discussions ensued about the format of the meeting. Antonios Anastasopoulos suggested that in addition to the joint papers, a limited number of “key note speakers” (mostly sociologists) were invited and a final section included with a number of parallel panels where specific topics of the joint papers could be debated in greater depth. While this suggestion did not win approval in its entirety, the idea of restricting the number of externally invited people to a limited number of speakers was generally thought to be a good one. It could also be a good idea to include a discussion panel in the programme.
Michael Mann, the sociologist, had already been invited and accepted a year ago. Other ideas which came up were, in random order, Walter Scheidel, Caterina Napoleone, John Hall, Nicola di Cosmo, Bin Wong, Sanjay Subrahmanyam.
It was now up to the core group (Peter Bang, Chris Bayly and Metin Kunt) to work on the basis of these suggestions to set up a programme for the final meeting.