Update:

The synthesis of this project has now been published in open access.

Our program brings together a team of senior researchers based in three Dutch universities: Leiden, Amsterdam (UvA) and Nijmegen. Together they coach eight researchers who each focus on a specific project within the program’s overall scope, covering Europe, West Asia, South Asia and East Asia.

While the projects take shape on the basis of specific language expertise and the study of primary sources, researchers define joint themes and produce joint papers. In this way the program as a whole seeks to bridge the gap between approaches of global history distant from sources and languages and the specialized studies of regional experts. This program explicitly aims to bring together researchers from many institutions and disciplines.

Since its inception the modern nation-state experiences problems in integrating regions and groups that do not comfortably fit the national stereotype. At the interstate level, supranational political structures have been notoriously ineffective in generating the political and cultural loyalties that alone can guarantee their success. Our program examines this problem in another age. We study how and to what extent Eurasian dynastic empires were successful in their efforts to hold together peoples, a process crystallizing around a conspicuous centre of redistribution and ritual, the court.

What held together peoples in the dynastic empire-states of Eurasia, ca. 1300-1800? Among the three levels that are usually accepted as determining compliance in political systems, i.e. coercion, perceived interest, and sanctified ideals and traditions, historical research has long focused on the development of a coercive apparatus. State-building traditionally served as main paradigm for the study of the early modern age, whereas the wider socio-cultural ramifications of state power were seen as a more recent development, emerging only with enlightenment, revolution, and the rise of nationalism. This construes consensus as a vital basis of modern states, while underlining force as the key element in pre-modern states and empires. In pre-modern states and empires, however, limited means of resource extraction as well as communication made it practically impossible to uniformly sustain an effective administrative and military presence. A monopoly of violence was never easily established, let alone preserved. The resulting typically loose structures of government functioned effectively only if the political-cultural centre maintained ties with a hierarchy of socio-political elites through administrative channels buttressed by patron-client connections, as well as through shared ideals and expectations. The population at large perceived the political centre not only through the mediation of elites, but also by the conspicuous show of power created around the (dynastic) ruler. Although often based on an ideology of sacred omnipotence, and frequently resorting to forceful measures, dynastic regimes in practice needed to accommodate regional elites, accepting semi- autonomy of groups nominally under their purview. We examine the attitudes, practices and processes by which the dynastic centre could draw such groups into its orbit.

We study this process through the prism of an institution almost universal in pre-modern global history: dynastic government. The structures and practices recurring in the history of dynastic government invite and make possible a thorough intercultural comparative examination based on historical-anthropological perspectives rather than on classical political or economic approaches. Focusing on an institution as characteristic for Alteuropa as it was for Asia, we steer clear of the complications caused by studying the rise of modernity. The logic of dynastic power itself offers a clear-cut basis for our comparative layout, starting with the figure in the centre, advancing to the household or court serving the ruler and his kin, finally reaching the level of the elites governing the empire. These three levels of ruler, court, and empire, are examined in terms of the core ruling person(s) or groups, their immediate relations and connections, and finally their representation as well as their perception by others.

• asian and european empires
• dynastic power centers in europe and asia
• eurasian empires
• rusland

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