Author: TransCorr

Strategic Meeting on 9 December 2025

« Activities « Strategic Meetings

All team members except for Andrei Sorescu who was travelling to Romania were present either physically or online. Gábor Egry, Head of the Research Department and Senior Research Fellow at Institute of Political History in Budapest, was also present.

Silvia Marton led the meeting and began by announcing that two more events were proposed to be introduced in the TransCorr agenda for 2026.

The Workshop on July 2nd, 2026 to take place at NEC, Bucharest will focus on the status of the volume Old Practices, New Interactions? Favoritism, Interests, Patronage in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850), Silvia Marton and Constantin Ardeleanu (eds.).

The June 7-8, 2027 international conference will allow for the final peer review of the chapters. Besides team members, 2-3 contributors will also be invited. By then, all its chapters will be finalized.

In parallel, the work on Phanariots will focus on the Romanian principalities. An intermediate working group on principalities will be organized within the larger group on the phanariotism.

The volume on the phanariotism – The Phanariot Past and its Multiple Afterlives: Historicizing “Corruption” in Central-South-East Europe (1750s-1920s), Silvia Marton, Andrei Sorescu and Alex Tipei (eds.) – will be the third one produced by the TransCorr team and will be finalized by mid-2027.

It will be presented at the International Workshop organized by the team at NEC Conference Hall, during June 15-16, 2026.Contributors and guests will be soon invited, the organization work is in progress. The deadline for submitting the abstracts is set for Feb. 15, 2026.

Voting and Electoral Fraud in Nineteenth Century Romania. A Contribution to the History of Political Corruption

« Activities « Conference Papers

Silvia Marton gave a keynote lecture at the Conference titled “Residues and Innovations within Imperial Orders. Political Assemblies in Continental Europe, 1800–1850” and held at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, on 23 January 2025. Her lecture focused on electoral politics, on the meaning of voting, and on how and why candidates, MPs, and voters used and denounced electoral fraud and corrupt practices during the pre-democratic period in the nineteenth century in Romania. She zoomed in on the political conflict of the 1860s and on its climax, the failed 1870 republican coup orchestrated by the Liberal radicals in Romania (the left wing of the emerging Liberal party, also known as the “Reds” for their revolutionary leanings and 1848 record). Her lecture analysed how the 1860s crisis and the failed coup reorganized power and institutional relations for decades to come and stabilized the parliamentary system. She also showed that the Liberals and the Conservatives, the two main rival political groups, quasi-unanimously condemned electoral interference on moral grounds and they accepted it as a pragmatic tool, and that repeated and systematic electoral interference and its denunciation stabilized and legitimized the representative regime and the two-party system.

Corrupted are always the others: Systemic Corruption in Eighteenth Century Spain

« Activities « Research Seminars

3 November 2025, 16.00-18.00 (Bucharest time)
Ricard TORRA-PRAT, Guest Researcher, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

This presentation discusses the third chapter of my forthcoming monograph, Corruption and Office in Premodern Catalonia, 1350-1800, under contract with Routledge. While the first two chapters examine the emergence of the concept of corruption through the lens of late medieval legal culture –particularly the influence of Roman law– and trace how this concept was shaped within the political and legal traditions of early modern Catalonia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this third chapter turns to the eighteenth century, a period marked by the end of Catalonia’s distinctive institutional and legal order. Following the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1715), Catalonia was incorporated into the new centralized Bourbon regime, which introduced a political system rooted in Castilian models and abolished many of the region’s historical institutions and offices.

Recent historical scholarship on corruption, especially within the so-called “new history of corruption,” has posed the question of when and why societies begin to invoke the idea of systemic corruption as a means of delegitimizing entire political systems (Bernsee 2013; Knights 2021). Traditionally, premodern societies addressed corruption by identifying and punishing individual wrongdoers –expelling “the rotten apples”– without challenging the legitimacy of the system as a whole. In contrast, the modern era saw the emergence of critiques that framed corruption as a systemic problem, targeting the foundational legitimacy of regimes such as the Ancien Régime or, in some contexts, newly established liberal states.
Drawing on new archival evidence from early eighteenth-century Catalonia, this chapter challenges the neat division between “premodern” and “modern” attitudes towards corruption.

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This event is part of an ongoing series of public seminars organized under the ERC research project “Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850)” – TransCorr, hosted by New Europe College.

The Bulgarian Community in Istanbul between Networks, Corruption, and Modernization

« Activities « Research Seminars

9 December 2025, 16.00-18.00 (Bucharest time)
Boriana ANTONOVA-GOLEVA, TransCorr team member;
Assistant Professor at the Institute for Historical Studies of the
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia; Postdoctoral Researcher

The modernization of Southeast Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is widely studied by contemporary researchers. Topics as diverse as political and institutional development, social and cultural transformations, economic changes, and technological innovations address important features of this process. The emergence of new concepts and ideas about governance and public order was an integral part of this transformation. Thus, the present talk will explore the Bulgarian (and Ottoman) transition to modernity during the nineteenth century by focusing on the contemporaries’ perceptions of corruption and associated practices related to advancing modern technological projects and capital investments. It will discuss the emergence of the topic in the public sphere, as well as the role of some Bulgarian sites within the Ottoman capital as places of publicity. The interrelationship between modernization and corruption in the framework of the top-down/bottom-up interference between the Ottoman state and its Bulgarian subjects will be adressed. Thus, the focus of the talk will be placed on some members of the Bulgarian community in Istanbul as intermediary actors in the center-periphery dynamics related to corruption, its spread, and its denunciation.

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This event is part of an ongoing series of public seminars organized under the ERC research project “Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850)” – TransCorr, hosted by New Europe College.

A Knez and His Purse: Power, Wealth and Corruption in Miloš Obrenović’s Serbia and Beyond

« Activities « Research Seminars

Photo: Portrait of Miloš Obrenović from 1824 by Pavlo Djurkovic, currently housed in the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade. The image is licensed under Creative Commons.

9 October 2025, 16.00-18.00 (Bucharest time)
Michał WASIUCIONEK, Postdoctoral researcher, Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850), New Europe College; Researcher, “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History (Bucharest), Romanian Academy

In the history of the Balkans, traditional historiographies have generally framed the nineteenth century as a watershed that brought about a radical break with the “Ottoman yoke” and allowed the region’s peoples to resume their ‘natural’ historical trajectory as part of the European world following the path of national state-building and modernization. Although in recent decades the historiographical paradigm has been refined and nuanced, the basic assumptions behind this narrative have proven difficult to dislodge and the Ottoman past has continued to be perceived as an obstacle that the emergent nation-states had to overcome. Among these vestiges, the notion of corruption played a central role.

The scope of my paper is to unsettle these clear-cut dichotomies by examining the case study of the emergent Serbian polity that illustrates well the inherent tensions that force us to refine our notions of corruption in the early nineteenth-century Balkans. Emerging from the turmoil of two uprising against the Porte, the Serbian kneževina under Miloš Obrenović was in many respects a project marred with contradictions that frequently boiled over into open political conflict. Firstly, Serbia’s break with the Ottoman Empire was only a partial and gradual one; secondly, despite the elements of Western European political culture and vocabulary adopted by the Serbian elite, the upper stratum of power-holders in the kneževina was formed within the early nineteenth-century imperial realities that continued to shape their political behavior. Finally, the third axis was formed by the obvious imbalance of power between the fabulously wealthy Prince Miloš, whose political power was greatly enhanced by his financial assets, and the rudimentary character of the political and administrative institutions that other members of the elite could repurpose to enhance their position. As a result, the emergent debate over corruption was deeply entangled with the political dynamics of the Serbian political scene and embedded into the post-Ottoman political culture of the principal actors.

By drawing on correspondence of major figures of the Serbian political scene and engaging in a lopsided comparison with the parallel developments in the Ottoman Empire, the presentation will provide an in-depth analysis of the dynamics that underpinned Serbian politics in 1820s and 1830s, focusing on the ways in which the structural contradictions fueled and shaped the notion of corruption.

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This event is part of an ongoing series of public seminars organized under the ERC research project “Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850)” – TransCorr, hosted by New Europe College.

Reframing the Phanariot Past, Historicizing ‘Corruption’ in the Danubian Principalities / Romania (1750s-1900s)

« Activities « Conference Papers

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. 

Strategic Meeting on 28 May 2025

« Activities « Strategic Meetings

All team members met for the TransCorr recurrent strategic meeting on the premises of the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, prior to the Society for Romanian Studies 2025 International Conference they also attended.

During the strategic meeting, postdoctoral team members Boriana ANTONOVA-GOLEVA, Oana SORESCU-IUDEAN and Michał Wasiucionek presented their research questions and methodology, and the initial results of their archival findings. Team members peer-reviewed the precirculated chapters they drafted for the first edited volume in the framework of TransCorr, edited by Silvia Marton and Alex. R. Tipei and titled Conceptualizing Corruption: Between Old Regimes and New Orders in East-Central-South Europe (1750s-1850s) [forthcoming by Bloomsbury academic publisher].

Roundtables organized by the members of the ERC project “TransCorr” at SRS 2025 International Conference, Cluj-Napoca

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Event: Roundtable
Location: Faculty of European Studies, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

30 May 2025, 8.00-9.20
30 May 2025, 13.00-14.20

It is our pleasure to invite you to two roundtable discussions organized by the members of the ERC research project TransCorr at “Voices and Silences: 50 Years of the Society for Romanian Studies” International Conference, Cluj-Napoca:

Transnational Histories of “Corruption”
Chair: Alex R. TIPEI
Panelists: Augusta DIMOU, Silvia MARTON, Constantin ARDELEANU, Mária PAKUCS, Constanța VINTILĂ, Andrei SORESCU

on Friday, 30 May 2025, from 8.00 to 9.20, at the Faculty of European Studies, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

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Voices and Silences of Political “Corruption” in the Nineteenth Century in Romania and Central-South-East Europe
Chair: Silvia MARTON
Panelists: Constantin ARDELEANU, Lucien FRARY, Mária PAKUCS, Andrei SORESCU, Alex R. TIPEI, Constanța VINTILĂ

on Friday, 30 May 2025, from 13.00 to 14.20, at the Faculty of European Studies, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

These events are part of the international conference Voices and Silences: 50 Years of the Society for Romanian Studies organized by the Society for Romanian Studies (www.srstudies.org).

Transnational Trade Networks and the Development of the Black Sea Port Cities during the Modern Age: a Comparative Analysis

« Activities « Conference Papers

TransCorr team member Constantin Ardeleanu presented the paper titled “International Shipping, Russian Control, and Allegations of “Corruption” in Sulina (1830s–1850s)” at the international conference Transnational Trade Networks and the Development of the Black Sea Port Cities during the Modern Age: a Comparative Analysis organised at the New Europe College in Bucharest on June 19, 2025. His paper examined the transformation of Sulina, a small settlement at the mouth of the Danube, into a flashpoint of international controversy in the decades preceding the Crimean War. Following the Treaty of Adrianople/Edirne (1829), the Danube Delta was integrated into the Russian Empire, making Sulina a strategic node in the empire’s quarantine regime and a key artery for international grain trade from Wallachia and Moldavia. As Western commercial interests surged, Sulina’s centrality to Black Sea shipping heightened tensions between Russian administrators and foreign merchants. Allegations of corruption, infrastructural neglect, and discriminatory practices proliferated. Core disputes revolved around quarantine restrictions, navigational hazards at the Sulina bar, monopolized lighterage operations, and the unregulated use of river pilots. Western diplomats and consuls portrayed Sulina as a symbol of Russian despotism and dysfunction, where opaque administration, extortionate practices, and deliberate obstructionism curtailed free trade.

While some of these critiques reflected genuine administrative challenges in managing a volatile deltaic environment, they also served broader geopolitical and ideological purposes nourished by Western Russophobia. The Sulina question, far from being a local matter, became a site of overlapping imperial rivalries, environmental constraints, and normative expectations of “civilized” rule. By tracing these entangled disputes, the paper shed light on the politicization of infrastructure and public health in a contested maritime zone and anticipates the later internationalization of Danube navigation under the European Commission of the Danube.

Oana SORESCU-IUDEAN

« Team

Oana SORESCU-IUDEAN is a researcher at the Centre for Population Studies of the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Regensburg (2021), where she was a member of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies. Most recently, she held a postdoctoral grant from the STAR-BBU Institute of the Babeș-Bolyai University, which provided a data-driven approach to studying the plague in 18th century Transylvania, as well as a SeeFField-funded seed grant from the University of Regensburg (2023-2024). Over the past decade, she has been involved in several projects integrating digital humanities approaches with East-Central European historical sources from the 18th to 20th centuries. Her current research deals with the social, economic, and administrative history of early modern and modern Transylvania, focusing on the development of urban health infrastructures, shifts in housing and living conditions, and the evolution of epidemic diseases such as the plague.

As part of the TransCorr project, she will focus on the use and abuse of power within the framework of multiple, overlaying administrative layers, fiscality, and the issue of public and private debt in Transylvania between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.

Email: [email protected]

Selected publications :

Forthcoming:

“Bearing the costs of epidemic: remaining households in Hermannstadt/Sibiu during the 1719-1720 and 1738-1739 plague outbreaks”, The History of the Family (peer-reviewed article, under press)

“Keeping the City Alive: Managing Public Health Crises in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century in Sibiu”, in Maria Pákucs, Julia Derzsi (eds.), Towns between Empires: Good Governance and “Police” in Case Studies from Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia, 1500s–1800s, CEU Press, 2025 (under press, chapter in edited volume)

Recent:

“Patterns of Romanian Women’s Civil and Political Engagement in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth Century Transylvania and Hungary” (w. Vlad Popovici), in Marta Verginella (ed.), Women, Nationalism, and Social Networks in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848-1918, Purdue University Press, 2023, 65-86 (chapter in edited volume).

“Elites and Groups in East-Central and South-East-Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century. Foreword from the Editors” (w. Judit Pál, Vlad Popovici), in Judit Pál, Vlad Popovici, and Oana Sorescu-Iudean (eds.), Elites, Groups, and Networks in East-Central and South-East Europe in the Long 19th Century, Brill | Schöningh, 2022, 1-27 (chapter in edited volume).

“Patterns in the Timing of Widows’ Remarriage in an 18th-Century Transylvanian City”, Romanian Journal of Population Studies, vol. XVI, Issue 2, 2022, 9-26 (peer-reviewed article).