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Convened by Silvia Marton and Andrei Sorescu, and chaired by Silvia Marton, the panel ”Reframing the Phanariot Past, Historicizing ‘Corruption’ in the Danubian Principalities / Romania (1750s-1900s)” was part of the 2025 ICCEES XI World Congress held at University College London from July 21 to July 25, 2025. Team members Constanța Vintilă, Mária Pakucs, Alex Tipei and Andrei Sorescu presented papers, and Constantin Ardeleanu was the discussant. The session explored the historical semantics and the social history of the concept “phanariotism” as a basic historical and disruptive concept that was crucial for conceptualizing political life, state, and society in the Danubian Principalities/ Romania from the eighteenth century and into the 1900s. Panelists offered both synchronic and diachronic analyses in order to explore the evolving meanings of the term. This covered a period beginning with the waning years of the so-called “Phanariot” rule, by the Istanbul-appointed elites in Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, as client states of the Ottoman Empire. The panel also studied the discursive afterlife of “Phanariot” as a term of abuse, with its evolving range of meanings and applications after the demise of the Phanariot regime itself and the return of autochthonous rulers (in 1821), within the framework of post-imperial nation-and state-building.
TransCorr team member Oana Sorescu-Iudean presented the paper entitled “Subtle and entrenched ways”: Networks of public debt and private credit in Transylvania, 1750-1800 at the first edition of the Central European History Convention in Vienna, organized by the University of Vienna between the 17th and the 19th of July, 2025.
The paper surveyed the intertwined networks of public debt and private credit in Transylvania, focusing on those nodes who readily provided capital in both segments, their affiliations, ties to the plurality of administrations present in the province, and what “benefits” they might have derived from reaching central positions in the network.
The paper began its enquiry by discussing a highly problematic situation that was first noted around mid-eighteenth century in Transylvania, namely the staggering amount of public debt that had accumulated towards the Habsburg state in Transylvanian Saxon villages, cities, and Seats. By the time Joseph II first visited the province in 1773, voices from the Habsburg administration would identify the cause of this ever-growing indebtedness in “self-interested office-holding” (eigennützige Amtirung der Officianten). Complaints during the 1770s mentioned the Saxon estate’s “subtle ways of […] making individuals indebted to itself, a procedure that seemed to have been entrenched a long time ago.” In fact, financing a significant share of the public debts incurred by the nation was the capital advanced by none other than its political and economic elites, leading to a paradoxical situation. Paralleling this development, urban Transylvanian Saxon society had become strongly indebted itself, as evidenced by probate records: half of those who passed away in the 1790s owed more than half of their wealth to creditors. The insidiousness of debt, mirrored by the strength of credit networks linking province and empire, and fueling the fiscal-military state, suggested that a parallel examination of these two issues might shed light on how private interests and state building intersected in nefarious, if not outright corrupt ways, during the second half of the eighteenth century.
