Category: Uncategorized

« 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
• Program

« Activities « Research Seminars

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

Participants: Gábor Egry, Alex R. Tipei, Constanța Vintilă

PROGRAM

Constanța Vintilă, “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History, Romanian Academy / New Europe College

In the Shadow of Power: The Career of a Minor Official in Wallachia, 1800–1850

Alex R. Tipei, University of Montréal / New Europe College

It’s Complicated: Ion Heliade-Rădulescu, the Phanariots, and Modern Greeks

Gábor Egry, Institute of Political History, Budapest / New Europe College

The Long Shadow of Old Patronage. How Unresolved Legal Transitions since 1848 Corrupted Interwar Romania’s Legal System?

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This workshop is organized within the framework of “Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750–1850)”, funded by the European Union (ERC, TransCorr, ERC-2022-ADG no. 101098095) and hosted by the New Europe College.

« 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.

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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 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.

« Activities « Conference Papers

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).

« Activities « Research Seminars

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.

« Activities « Research Seminars

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.