Temporality, Agency and Reforms in the Portuguese, Hispanic, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, 1700s-1900s (EMPIREPOSTDECAY)

• Reference: ATR2024-154403
• Period: September 2025/August 2028 (3 years)
• Funding: 893.575 € (Ministry of Science-Spain)

In a context where current challenges are presented as radically new and unprecedented, and in which traditional powers are once again tilting towards nostalgia for the imperial past, “Crossing Through Decadence” proposes a comparative investigation on the experience of the populations of the four main European empires in the transition to modernity, in search of regularities and differences so that it

• 1) contributes to generating a narrative framework on the origins of the current world complementary to the established one, focused on national states;

• 2) consolidates a line of studies on European imperial cultures between 1700 and 1900; and

• 3) offers resources to think historically some of the current concerns about major civilizational threats.

Over the course of two long centuries, the Portuguese, Hispanic, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires managed to maintain themselves despite growing geopolitical pressure and deep internal economic, political and cultural crises. They did so, however, marked by a collective sense of being in decline. This dimension of temporality is what articulates the research proposed in this project.

The main hypothesis behind this research is that the concept and experience of decadence, its possible overcoming and/or the fear of its reappearance, marked the cultural, social and institutional dynamics of the populations and institutional orders that occupied the bulk of Europe at that time. They provoked extreme reactions: either attempts to restore the glorious past —in a context already dominated by other referents of meaning— or an absolute rejection of the colonial legacy —but remaining negatively attached to it.

The project aims to analyse this complexity through a multi- and interdisciplinary research that combines time theory and history, conceptual history, theories of identity as recognition, social psychology, political economy, legal history, and the theory and history of social movements. The core activity consists of gathering discursive information on the self-perception of imperial temporality, and relating it to a genealogy of individualist and collectivist conceptions of agency among different types of subjects (gender, ethnic, religious, and class), as well as to various proposals for institutional intervention crystallized by combining a language of reforms.

The proposed research team is composed of the PI specializing in the Hispanic empire, and three postdocs, each of them on one of the other three empires under study.

Alongside a seminar and an intensive course in comparative conceptual history of European imperial cultures in the transition to modernity, the main objective of the project is to request funding from the European Union to stabilize an international network on imperial cultures in the passage to modernity (through a COST program application) and to form an international doctoral network based in four universities located in the territory of each of the four historical empires.