Cost Action A36
Tributary Empires Compared
Minutes of the meeting of the management committee
19 June 2005, Copenhagen
Present
Peter Bang (DK)
C. A. Bayly (UK)
Halil Berktay (Tur)
Jeroen Duindam (Neth)
Björn Forsén (Fin)
Vincent Gabrielsen (DK)
Ebba Koch (Au)
Dariuz Kolodziejczyk (Pol)
J. C. Meyer (Nor)
Giovanni Salmeri (It)
Claire Sotinel (Fr)
David Grønbæk (COST)
Agenda
1. Welcome.
2. Report from the Science Officer, including information on Scientific Short Term Missions.
3. Presentation of the minutes of first meeting and confirmation of decisions made at the kick-off meeting in Brussels, 18 April.
4. Organization of the work of the management committee. Do we need a steering group to support the chair?
5. Evaluation of the working group meeting in Copenhagen.
6. Working Group 2: Presentation of programme for Istanbul meeting, 15-16 October, budget etc.
7. Planning of meetings next year.
8. Next years budget.
9. Publications and web-site news.
10. Place and date of next meeting
11. Miscellaneous
The meeting was opened by the acting chair Peter Bang who passed the word to David Grønbæk.
ad. 2) David Grønbæk gave a short introduction to COST and its procedures, informed about the number of signatory countries, presently 11, and the size of the budget for this year, app. Euro 40,000.
- He reminded participants of the possibility of organizing Short Term Scientific Missions (STSMs) and suggested that the management committee adopted a set of standard rules of procedure at the next meeting.
-Finally he reminded participants to fill out their reimbursement forms in advance to speed up administrative processing.
ad. 3) Peter Bang presented the minutes of the kick-off meeting in Brussels and asked the management committee formally to confirm the decisions made in Brussels. The minutes were confirmed unanimously by the management committee and the key decissions were approved, including the election of C. A. Bayly as Vice-Chair and Peter Bang as Chair. Peter Bang was authorised to apply for a General Action Support Grant and spend up to euro 2000 of the annual budget on a student assistant to alleviate the administrative work-load involved in running the network.
ad. 4) Peter Bang suggested that a Core Group was formed to assist him making the necessary day to day decisions in running network activities. This Core Group is to work with the local organisers of individual working group meetings to ensure that the programme and speakers fit into the general agenda of the network. To maintain a balance between the individual fields of interest in the network it was decided to have both Roman, Ottoman and Mughal/Indian history represented in the Core Group. The Core Group was therefore composed as follows:
Peter Bang (Rome), C. A. Bayly (India) and Metin Kunt (Ottoman Empire).
ad. 6.) Due to travel schedules point 6 on the agenda was treated before 5 and 7. Jeroen Duindam presented a preliminary programme for the meeting of working group 2 in Istanbul, 14-16 October. It was estimated that a budget of app. Euro 20,000 or perhaps a little less would be available. This meant that the local organisers, Metin Kunt, Halil Berktay and Jeroen Duindam would have to raise an additional sum of money to finance the entire programme and list of speakers for the meeting.
ad. 5 & 7). These two points were treated together.
a. On the basis of the Action’s Memorandum of Understanding (Technical Annex) and in the light of the experience in Copenhagen, it was decided that the focus of the network should be on our 3 core empires, the Roman, the Ottoman and the Mughal. However, it was also quite clear that comparisons made with e.g. Assyria, Persia, Russia, China or the Holy Roman Empire could further the research agenda in valuable and important ways. Working groups should therefore remain open towards supplementing their membership with experts from outside the key empires.
b. A key question to turn up during the discussions in Copenhagen was the issue of comparing polities across time and cultures. Which sorts of comparisons would be most useful, synchronic or diachronic? No clear answer could be given, at the present state of research. However, it does seem clear that the answer cannot be stated in absolute terms. Some institutions developed more in the course of classic imperial history than others. It can, for instance, be stated with considerable certainty that military technology developed rather more than the capacity of the imperial governments to tax provincial societies. It should, therefore, be a main concern of the network to develop a clearer understanding of the differences between different time periods and cultures within the time-span covered by the key imperial polities. The longue durée and the character of historical change in pre-industrial societies will be at the centre of work.
c. The character of agrarian imperial states was another central problem during discussions. Traditional notions of the central state were widely held to be unsatisfactory. This calls for that both central state institutions and imperial government in provincial societies be re-examined. Working Group 2 will re-examine central state institutions while Working Group 3 will deal with provincial societies.
d. Due to the cancellations of Chris Wikham and Andrea Hintze, there were fewer traditional historical sociological contributions to the meeting in Copenhagen than originally planned. This can be remedied at the mid-term meeting where more contributions of this sort should be invited to strengthen the work of synthesis in Working Group 1. Potential contributors, apart from some of the contributors in Copenhagen, would include, John Haldon (now Princeton), Chris Wickham (Birmingham), Runciman (Cambridge), Michael Mann (California).
e. It should be a key concern of the network to attract and inspire the work of young scholars (working at their PhDs or recently Postdocs). All working groups should be on the look out for potential contributions from this group of researchers.
Following these considerations, the meeting schedule for 2006 was set up.
Meeting schedule for 2006
Working Group 3 will convene in Athens, 19-20 June 2006. Local responsible organiser: Björn Forsén and Giovanni Salmeri.
Working Group 1 will convene a mid-term meeting/conference in Warsaw in October 2006. Local responsible organisers: Dariusz Kolodziek and Adam Zielkowski. The goal of this meeting will be to follow up on the beginnings made in Copenhagen in the light of the meetings of W2 & 3. The Warsaw meeting should result in the production of a collected volume which will present a common framework for the network.
The Athens meeting of W3 was sketched in greater detail.
3 sessions were suggested for the first Experience of Empire meeting:
Session I: How did local people relate and respond to the imposition of imperial government.
- This session will attempt to exemplify a number of model approaches to the study of provincial societies, e.g. some of the scholars working on Ottoman provincial communities or scholars working on Romanization in particular provinces.
Session II: The longue durée of provincial societies.
This session will attempt to broaden the framework set out in session 1 by looking more closely at the development of imperial provinces over the longue duree. Following the questions raised during the Copenhagen meeting about long-term historical developments, this session should attempt to address this issue by systematically studying provincial societies which were successively part of different empires. This can be quite easily accomplished in all our 3 cases since the Roman and Ottoman Empires occupied much of the same territory. The same can be said about several regions in India which were subject to both the Mughals and the British, not to mention the Delhi sultanate which preceded them both. 1 or 2 regions within the Roman/Ottoman world and within North Indian society should be selected for study.
Session III: Empires and ethnicity.
This final session will look at imperial local heterogeneity from a complementary angle. Rather than focussing on provinces per se, it will look at how different ethnicities were both subtected to and asserted themselves vs. the imperial conquering élite.
The programmes, for Athens and Warsaw, should now be fleshed out in greater detail by the core group working with individual local organisers. All members of the management committe are encouraged to make suggestions as to possible speakers and communicate whatever ideas they have about these meetings to the network leadership.
ad. 8) The budget is expected to be larger next year. But nothing can be stated with certainty at the moment.
ad. 9)
- Bang presented his plans for a network web-site. He was given mandate to proceed with having a web-site set up during the autumn.
- Publications: It is expected that the Istanbul meeting of W2 is sufficiently focused to warrant publication. About W1 it was decided that it should use the Copenhagen meeting as a basis from which to work towards publication of the mid-term meeting.
ad. 10) Next MC meeting will be in Istanbul, 15-16 October 2005.
Peter Fibiger Bang
Chair
