As evidenced by the outbreak of war in Ukraine and other hotspots of conflict in Taiwan and Palestine, new impulses striving for hegemony are threatening the global order. Beneath the current atmosphere of burgeoning iterations of nationalism, in some former imperial centers there is a nostalgic discourse evoking past imperial grandeur, while anxieties arising from emerging hazards such as climate change, refugees and immigrant inflows, housing problems or soaring inflation are being tackled as if they were unprecedented events requiring completely new solutions. However, current solutions articulated by public intellectuals, political leaders and institutions may prove self-limiting if not placed in a broader historical perspective.

TRANSIMPERIALPASTS NET gathers together historians and other specialists in the social sciences motivated by the need to understand the way peoples of the Portuguese, Hispanic, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires responded to two centuries of challenges that affected their lives, as they may bear resemblance to options available still today, serving as an opportunity to reflect in new ways on our own collective responses to the sense of crisis.

We now know much more about these empires and their myriad contributions to the modern world. However, we still lack studies that consider these 5 empires together and through an intertwined, comparative analysis. We think there is much gain in bringing to the fore European empires that clearly shared a trajectory predating modern imperialism in order to tell a history that goes beyond accounting for the contributions of Western European nation-states to the world.

The quest to substantiate this network involves the methodological challenges facing scholars today as they treat these 5 empires separately. Comparative approaches tend to remain at most circumscribed to the Iberian metropoles and the Balkan territories divided up between Eastern European powers. However, these empires warrant an interconnected, all-embracing multidimensional study of their history, upsetting the teleology in European historiography which renders the Portuguese Braganza, Hispanic Bourbon, Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov dynastic empires as mere “shatterzones” contributing to the story of Western modernity mainly through their demise. TRANSIMPERIALPASTS is committed to de-nationalize the study of these empires by carrying out a trans-imperial approach reaching beyond single empires and ad hoc comparisons. As part of this venture, the research simultaneously extends to metropolitan and peripheral imperial societies alike, acknowledging the multifarious regional, ethnic, and religious communities that partook in the production of uniquely modern solutions to what was then (as often now) seen as a stage of decadence.

The network is guided by two main research questions:

• How have the peoples of what in modern historical narratives are treated as the edges of Europe responded to the dramatically shifting conditions of life in already-modern contexts of crises?

• And, in which ways may their efforts to make sense of communitarian challenges while adapting to survive various crises prove useful to us today?

The network aims at systematizing the extant research on these 5 empires relating to the transformations in imperial political, cultural, and economic structures but also unearthing previously unexplored evidence of social and cultural endurance. Beyond gathering already large amounts of secondary sources and studies, the research involves analyzing a wide array of published works by intellectuals and publishers, including officials, oppositionists, and independent thinkers who responded to crises, with an explicit engagement in memoirs, diaries, letters, literature of various genres, textbooks, public records of events, speeches, theological treatises, moralizing sheets, legal provisions, governmental proclamations, commercial agreements, contracts, and artistic productions.

The key to the network's success and interest ultimately depends on the dialogue between specialists in the various empires and colonies under investigation, a dialogue based on the value placed on intellectual exchanges between academic cultures from regions as widely separated as the Southern Cone and Siberia, with the Mediterranean serving as the connecting axis between imperial formations and their populations in the transition to modernity.