Empire
April 16-17, 2005
Whitney Humanities Center
53 Wall Street, New Haven
Session I | Session II | Session III | Session IV | Conference Program
The European Union is an attempt to knit together the political and economic systems of the nation states that took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its constitution raises the question of what sort of unifying structures can accommodate the various traditions and social complexions of the historic nations. The historic empires faced this question in a different form. Exercising sovereignty over an internal landscape of diverse linguistic and confessional groups, the imperial regimes recognized and manipulated religious identity among the other markers of region and community. Confessional allegiances continue both to reinforce political boundaries and to complicate national politics. As an experiment in comparative history, this conference will investigate the status of religion in the context of the three continental empires: Romanov, Ottoman, and Habsburg, in which Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, and Roman Catholicism were the respective dominant faiths. Each also included a variety of subject populations. Over the course of the nineteenth century, until they dissolved under the impact of World War I, official policy responded to changes in the international context, the emergence of new ideologies, and the evolving self-definition of the communities involved. The changing context in turn affected, at the level of social experience, the terms of confessional identity and the political awareness of religiously defined groups. For example, the tsarist and Ottoman regimes, while observing the principle of cultural and political hierarchy, began the nineteenth century with a policy of pragmatic tolerance toward local spiritual elites and respect for the interests of different or competing communities. By the end of the century, attitudes toward particular minority confessions had hardened; the dominant faiths had become more aggressive; faith had to accommodate an increasingly secular political and public realm; the relationship among communities altered.
This conference will explore the character of these changes, both at the level of institutions and policies and of communities and local elites. It will consist of three three-hour-long sessions and a concluding comparative round-table. Each session will include four focused papers and a more general paper, as well as a commentator. We will circulate the texts of the papers in advance and keep oral presentations short, hoping to stimulate discussion. The conference will be in workshop format, but open to the local academic community.
Session I | Session II | Session III | Session IV | Conference Program
