Category: Uncategorized

« Activities « Research Seminars

Date: 23 January 2026, 3 p.m. – 5 p.m. EET/ Location: NEC

On-site participants: Silvia Marton, Constantin Ardeleanu, Augusta Dimou, Mária Pakucs, Michał Wasiucionek

Online participants: Lucien Frary, Boriana Antonova-Goleva, Andrei Sorescu

Chair of the meeting: Silvia Marton, TransCorr P.I.

This working group within the TransCorr project focuses on the political, economic and social activities of the Serbian prince Miloš Obrenović whose influence in the Balkans region was tremendous at the beginning of the 19^th century, bridging Istanbul, Bucharest, Belgrade and Vienna. This topic will be a section in the second TransCorr volume: Old Practices, New Interactions? Favoritism, Interests, Patronage in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850), Silvia Marton and Constantin Ardeleanu (eds.)

Each team member presented the current stage of their work and proposed future research directions that were discussed together.

Michał Wasiucionek will include a historiographical overview on Obrenović.

Lucien Frary will detail the connections between the Russian and the Serbian states, with a focus on Obrenović’s relationship with Baron Grigorii A. Stroganov, the Russian ambassador to Serbia at that time.

Constantin Ardeleanu, whose chapter is already drafted, analyzed the salt trade and the route of money, during Obrenović’s reign. The prince was a genuine capitalist and entrepreneur, becoming one of the wealthiest persons in the Balkans.

Mária Pakucs will approach the topic from the Hungarian and Habsburg angles, digging into the relation with Széchenyi István and the Sina family network (notably Sina György Simon).

Augusta Dimou will write about Gligorije M. Jeftanović, as a case of entrepreneurship and community building among Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The volume will depict how these leaders operated, the motivations behind their actions and in what way they were transnational.

« Activities « Research Seminars

23 February 2026, 16.00-18.00 (Bucharest time)
Oana SORESCU-IUDEAN, TransCorr team member; Researcher at
the Centre for Population Studies of the Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca; Postdoctoral Researcher

The present paper examines how Transylvanian elite actors navigated and described networks and practices of network building at several levels, between roughly the early 1750s and the end of the 18th century. The enquiry is framed by two major collections of correspondence stemming from two Transylvanian Saxon elite families, whose scions effectively and deftly negotiated positions within the estate-level, the ‘national’ and the imperial administrations over the course of the second half of the century. It surveys and catalogues a medley of actors and groups holding varied agendas, arguing that despite differences in backgrounds or confessional allegiances, these nevertheless operated in similar fashions across the political scene of the Habsburg Monarchy’s peripheral provinces. Based on this exploration, it argues on the one hand that the emergence of a provincial-level civil service in Transylvania shifted the landscape of patronage by introducing new criteria of allegiance and novel nodes of power. On the other hand, this process likewise worked to formalize interactions between estates, individuals, and the government, which in turn paved the way for the construction of a ‘gray area’ within this realm of mediation that would eventually be assimilated to corruption during the 19th century.

« Activities « Research Seminars

22 January 2026, 16.00-18.00 (Bucharest time)
Augusta DIMOU, TransCorr team member; PhD. Privatdozentin,
Institute of Cultural Studies, Chair of Comparative European History, University of Leipzig

Gligorije Jeftanović (1840–1927) was indisputably a leading, if not the leading figure in the Movement for Church and School Autonomy among the Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last decades of the 19 th century. As a rule, he is commemorated as a larger than life personality, an ardent patriot, an adept and devoted national leader. In the aftermath of the recent Yugoslav wars and due to the subsequent hardening of historiographic fronts, Jeftanović has been portrayed as a forerunner of Serbian unity and territorial consolidation, and has acquired almost hagiographic traits for having led the Serbian peoples’ strivings for freedom, emancipation and statehood.

Consequently, his biographers focus predominantly on his political role in the Serbian national movement and understate other important aspects of his multifaceted personality such as that of a skilled entrepreneur with diversified business activities in commerce, the hotel industry and service sector, land ownership and industrial manufacture. In fact, his economic success often appears almost detached from his successful political career within the Bosnian Serbian orthodox community. His accomplishments, however, cannot be thought independently of the good business relations he entertained with the Provisional Government in Sarajevo and his far-reaching networks both to the Ottoman and the Habsburg empires. In my presentation, I will revisit his biography aiming at a recontextualization of G. Jeftanović as part of the Serbian commercial elite of Sarajevo, situating him within the broader socioeconomic development of new entrepreneurial elites in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Habsburg period.

« Activities « Research Seminars

26 March 2026, 16.00-18.00 (Bucharest time)
Lucien FRARY, TransCorr team member; PhD Professor of history
at Rider University

Drawing on Russian foreign ministry records, this paper examines the extension of Russian patronage and influence in the Ottoman Balkans through human webs. It charts the development of Russia’s consular network through the activity of its ambassadors and their use of unofficial and official Eastern Orthodox agents. By 1774, Russia’s practice of using Eastern Orthodox clients with linguistic capacities relevant to the region became a potent device to assert tsarist prerogatives.

The paper focuses on the participation of Russia’s diplomatic and intelligence agents in Serbia’s journey toward independence. Under Ambassador Grigorii A. Stroganov (1816–21), the tsarist government aimed to ensure the autonomy and privileges granted to the pashalik according to the Bucharest Treaty by intervening in the system of government and by pressuring the Sublime Porte to comply with its obligations. Russian consulates in Bucharest (Aleksandr A. Pini) and Iași (Andrei Pisani) served as relay points for Russian action in Belgrade, where St. Petersburg pursued well-defined objectives: to increase Serbian autonomy without making it appear that Russia was interfering in Serbian affairs, and to extend Russian influence among the primates and merchants of the region.

Connections with the Supreme Knez (Prince) Miloš Obrenović and the Serbian elite were quintessential to the success of Stroganov’s mission. The chapter spotlights the activity of Mihailo Todorović-German, an adventurer from Macedonia (Razlog) who spent years wandering in Italy and the Ottoman and Austrian empires before becoming a confidant of Obrenović as well as a loyal servant of the tsar. The chapter features the secret Stroganov–Obrenović correspondence to reveal how favoritism and personal intervention proved significant in determining domestic affairs in Belgrade. Written in Russian and Serbian, in cipher, and conducted via the intermediary German, the correspondence blossomed into full-fledged plans for the pashalik’s future. The intervention of the Russian embassy in Istanbul and its consular network produced an accretion of advantages for the pashalik of Belgrade until the outbreak of the Eastern Crisis in 1821 ended the Russian mission. The chapter demonstrates how the Russian state extended its patronage and influence through consular webs in fledgling states like Serbia, setting the groundwork for the next century of intervention.

Lastly, the activity of low-level Russian agents in the Ottoman Empire represents an underappreciated aspect of the transformation of foreign policy institutions over the nineteenth century. Russia’s consular officers and offices in the Ottoman Balkans formulated, bent, and broke common rules of foreign policy execution by intervening with the regional elite in the areas under their jurisdiction. These agents represented new states like Serbia, Greece, and Romania to the outside world, making them a special channel and source for domestic and foreign policy aspirations.

« Activities « Research Seminars

4 May 2026, 16.00-18.00 (Bucharest time)
Constantin ARDELEANU, TransCorr team member; PhD Senior Researcher, Institute for South-East European History, Bucharest / Long-Term Fellow, New Europe College, Bucharest

Starting from the emblematic case of the relationship between Prince Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica, the banker Ștefan Hagi Moscu, and several of the leading capitalists of the era, my presentation aims to investigate the complex relationship between money, influence, and power in 1830s Wallachia, as part of a broader system of governance through networks.

My analysis will follow three complementary directions. First, I will focus on the inter-imperial networks of business, trust, and patronage that linked Bucharest to Iași, Belgrade, Istanbul, and Vienna. These networks – composed of merchants, officials, diplomats, and creditors – functioned simultaneously as mechanisms of regional economic integration and as infrastructures of personal enrichment, in which the circulation of capital relied on the social capital of relationships and political protection.

Second, I will examine the fluidity of the boundaries between public and private in a world governed by personal loyalties, family alliances, and reciprocal obligations. In the absence of a clear separation between “public interest” and “private benefit,” the prince, ministers, and capitalists operated within a regime of reciprocity and compensation, where state resources were negotiated and redistributed according to the logic of patronage. This porosity of spheres did not signify the absence of order, but a different form of political rationality, specific to a moral economy of governance in which personal relationships substituted for formal institutions.

Finally, the article will address the emergence of a new regime of accountability and transparency in the administration of public funds, following the introduction of the Organic Regulations and the empowerment of the General Assembly to oversee budgetary expenditures.

This normative framework made possible the rise of a discourse of political morality, in which terms such as “good governance,” “abuse,” or “corruption” began to redefine older practices of patronage and to mark the transition from personal to institutional forms of governance.

« Activities « Research Seminars

15-16 June 2026, 16.00-18.00 (Bucharest time)
Silvia MARTON, Andrei SORESCU and Alex TIPEI (eds.)

• Call for Papers

« Activities « Research Seminars

2 July 2026, 16.00-18.00 (Bucharest time)
Silvia MARTON and Constantin ARDELEANU (eds.)

« 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.

« 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.

« 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.

*

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.