Author: TransCorr

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

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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).

Michał WASIUCIONEK

« Team


Michał Wasiucionek is a Research Assistant at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. He holds an MA in History from the University of Warsaw (2011) and received his PhD in History and Civilization (2016). From 2016 until 2020, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the ERC grant Luxury, Fashion and Social Status in Early Modern South-Eastern Europe (LuxFaSS), hosted by New Europe College in Bucharest. In his research, his main focus is on regional and informal practices of power in Southeastern Europe, with particular attention on the place of the Danubian principalities within the Ottoman and Eastern European context. His publications include a monograph study, Ottomans and Eastern Europe: Borders and Political Patronage in the early Modern World (I.B. Tauris, 2019), as well as a number of contributions and articles focusing on Moldavian and Wallachian entanglements within a broader political, social and cultural world of the Ottoman ecumene.

Boriana ANTONOVA-GOLEVA

« Team

Boriana ANTONOVA-GOLEVA is assistant professor at the Institute for Historical Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She received her PhD from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (2016). She has been assistant professor at the University of Economics – Varna (2015–2019), and has held scholarships and postdocs at the University of Ioannina (2010–2011), Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” (2012–2014; 2020), the American Research Center in Sofia (2013, 2014), Aristotle University (Thessaloniki) (2010, 2017), Uludağ University (Bursa) (2016–2017), Comenius University (Bratislava) (2017–2018), the British Institute at Ankara (2018), the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2024).

Boriana Antonova-Goleva’s reseach focuses on the Southeast European infrastructure development, and particularly on the introduction of telegraphs and railways in the Ottoman Empire. She examines their construction and operation, as well as their development in a broader context, exploring the various aspects of modernization, economic transformation, industrialization, and the advent of capitalism in the region.

In TransCorr, Boriana Antonova-Goleva focuses on the modern corruption, as integral aspect of the Southeast European transformation, economic modernization, and infrastructure development. She studies its roots in the Ottoman Empire, its perception both on private level and in the public sphere, as well as the interrelationship between modernization and corruption (in the framework of the top-down/bottom-up interference between the Ottoman state and its Bulgarian subjects). An important concept applied in Antonova-Goleva’s research is the social network theory, which combined with the entangled histories approach, and the comparative approach, provides a useful interdisciplinary theoretical framework, which refines the analysis of the role and connections between the various foreign and local actors in the examined processes.

Email: [email protected] ; [email protected]

Selected Publications:

Transforming Southeast Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century: Persons and Personalities as Agents of Modernization in the Ottoman and the Post-Ottoman Space, Brill Schöningh, 2024 (co-edited with Ivelina Masheva)

‘“Top-Down” or “Bottom-Up’ Modernization: Local Railway Entrepreneurs in the Ottoman Empire in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century”, Turkish Historical Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 2023, p. 26–57

“Concessions and Mirages along the Lower Danube: The Town of Silistria in the Plans of Foreign Railway Promoters during the mid-1850s”, Journal of Balkan and Black Sea Studies, vol. 3, no. 5, 2020, p. 19–47

Electoral Corruption and Violence in Nineteenth Century Romania

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Cartoon’s title: “Political drollery”
Comment: “The freedom of elections is guaranteed.”
Bobârnacul (The Flip), anul II, no. 19, 16 March 1879, by Vim or Vinu

Event: Research Group
Location: NEC conference hall & Zoom

17 March 2025, 16.00-18.00 (Bucharest time)

Silvia MARTON, PhD. Associate Professor, Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest; Principal Investigator, ERC research project Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850), New Europe College

Short abstract:

From the very onset of modern voting procedures in the 1850s in the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia / Romania, candidates, politicians, and voters alike strongly denounced irregularities, fraud, and interference in elections in this pre-democratic period of census-based voting. The aim of my research is to explain the paradox of the simultaneous strong normative condemnation and the systematic and recurring practice of electoral corruption by all the relevant historical actors from the 1850s up to 1914.  The ample political freedoms, including freedom of expression and of the press, were counterweighed by the restricted suffrage which allowed limited citizen access to politics and elections, and by low literacy levels. The period also marked a high point for both nation- and state-building.

My focus in this paper will be on the physical and rhetorical violence in electoral politics in the 1850s-1870s. I will discuss, first, electoral fraud and interreference – subsumed in the then (in)famous expression “moral influence” – that included a wide range of (physically) violent techniques of influence, control, mobilization, or dissuasion of voters, in the context of a fierce rivalry between the two main contenders, the Liberals and the Conservatives that dominated parliament and politics. Second, I will examine the polemical and violent vocabulary and rhetoric of excess and satire that permeated the press, occasional publications (such as pamphlets), the official documents, and the parliamentary debates, when historical actors condemned electoral interference and corruption.

Politics, “Publicity”, and the Denunciation of “Corruption” in the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1834–1848)

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Photo: Obșteasca Adunare, 1837

16 January 2025, 16.00-18.00
Event: TransCorr Seminar
Location: NEC conference hall & Zoom
Constantin ARDELEANU, Researcher within the framework of the ERC project Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850); Senior Researcher, Institute for South-East European Studies, Bucharest

The appointment of new princes (“hospodars”) in 1834 to govern the two principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, in accordance with the “Organic Regulations”, was followed by a period of intense political infighting. Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica in Wallachia and Mihail Sturdza in Moldavia encountered considerable resistance from groups of disaffected boyars. The disagreements were especially pronounced within the Wallachian Assembly, where prince Ghica and the boyars exchanged a multitude of accusations. Facing pressure from various political factions and, more significantly, the loss of imperial Russia’s trust, Ghica was ultimately dismissed in 1842. The boyars elected a new prince, Gheorghe Bibescu, a prominent rival of Ghica’s.

In order to ensure the “good governance” of their respective countries, both Sturdza in Moldavia and Bibescu in Wallachia implemented more authoritarian measures against their political opponents. The censorship of the press was one method utilized to purge the public sphere of potentially disruptive political ideologies or provocations espoused by the opposition.
However, the opposition was not effectively silenced. In newspapers articles or printed brochures smuggled into the principalities, the princes were depicted as utterly “corrupt” leaders who exploited their public office for personal gain and the benefit of their close associates. The princes were denounced as guilty of embezzlement, extortion, nepotism, and conflict of interest. In response, the princes instructed their associates to disseminate articles and brochures defending their work and levelling accusations of “corruption” against their primary rivals.

Based on diplomatic reports, the private correspondence of several of the main actors and an analysis of the printed brochures and daily press, I will try to understand how “corruption” was defined and redefined in South-East-Central Europe and how such definitions were used for asserting or contesting political legitimacies.