FSP Kulturen des euromediterranen Raums und Altertumswissenschaften FSP Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft aus Historisch-‐Kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive State – Nation – Economy Interdisciplinary Workshop Freitag, 21. November 2014, 9:30-‐18:00 Hörsaal des Instituts für Byzantinistik und Neogräzistik, Postgasse 7/1/3, 1010 Wien 09:30-‐10:00 Welcome & Introduction Claudia Theune, dean of faculty: Welcome Peer Vries: Introductory remarks 10:00-‐11:00 Key lecture Peter Fibiger Bang (Copenhagen) The Natural State: Tribute, Segmentation and the Stability of Universal Empire in Preindustrial History 11:00-‐11:15 Coffee-‐break 11:15-‐12:15 Michael Jursa and Sven Tost (Vienna) The ‘Reach’ of the State in Antiquity: a Diachronic and Cross-‐Cultural Study Commentary: Peer Vries 12:15-‐13:15 Gijs Kruijtzer (Vienna) State Intervention in Legal Discourses about Usury: a Comparison Between the Early Modern Latin West and Persian East. Commentary: Lucian Reinfandt 1 13:15-‐14:15 Lunch 14:15-‐15:15 Key lecture Marjolein 't Hart (Amsterdam) Territoriality and Taxes: Practices in State Formation from Past to Present 15:15-‐15:30 Coffee-‐break 15:30-‐16:30 Rolf Bauer (Vienna) Colonial State and Imperial Economy: 19th Century India Commentary: Peter Becker 16:30-‐16:45 Coffee-‐break 16:45-‐17:45 Oliver Kühschelm (Vienna) Buy-‐national campaigns in the 20th Century: Consumption and the National Economy Commentary: Alexandra Schwell 17:45-‐18:00 Concluding Remarks Concept and Organization: Oliver Kühschelm, Claudia Rapp, Sven Tost, Peer Vries, Reinhard Wolters The workshop is financed by: Historisch-‐Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät FSP Kulturen des euromediterranen Raums und Altertumswissenschaften FSP Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft aus Historisch-‐Kulturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive Contact: [email protected] 2 Keynote speakers Peter Fibiger Bang, Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen, SAXO-‐Institute -‐ Archaeology, Ethnology, Greek & Latin Major publications: • Ed. (with Dariusz Kolodziejczyk): Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 • Ed. (with Christopher Bayly): Tributary Empires in Global History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 • The Roman Bazaar. A Comparative Study of Trade and Markets in a Tributary Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 Marjolein 't Hart, Professor, VU University Amsterdam, Department of History Major publications: • The Dutch Wars of Independence. Warfare and Commerce in the Netherlands, 1570-‐1680, London: Routledge, 2014 • Ed. (with Peter Boomgaard): Globalization, Environmental Change, and Social History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 • The Making of a Bourgeois State. War, Politics and Finance during the Dutch Revolt, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993 Abstracts Michael Jursa/Sven Tost The ‘Reach’ of the State in Antiquity: a Diachronic and Cross-‐Cultural Study The paper focuses on the contrast between Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-‐Roman administrative practices with respect to the state’s effort to secure access to resources (labour and taxes). While Iron Age empires in the Ancient Near East made ample use of mediated resource extraction through entrepreneurial middlemen in their core areas and through local patrimonial elites in the imperial periphery, the Hellenistic and the Roman state appears to have developed a more direct way of administrative action and bureaucratic control. Furthermore, while the Ancient Near Eastern systems – perhaps out of necessity – further minimized the cost of resource mobilization by targeting preferentially propertied strata of the population with a relatively heavy tax burden, the Roman state’s reach stretched in capillary form down to the level of local communities and productive cells: more households were taxed, but their respective tax load was less than in the Ancient Near East. The paper presents the pertinent data on the basis of case studies and discusses their implications within the conceptual framework established by the Bonney-‐Ormrod typology of fiscal systems. Gijs Kruijtzer State Intervention in Legal Discourses about Usury: a Comparison Between the Early Modern Latin West and Persian East. In the period between 1300 and 1700 those in power in both the Latin West (Western and Central Europe) and the Persian East (Iran, parts of Central and South Asia) had to 3 reckon with a tradition of religio-‐legal texts that proscribed usury, or what was understood by the Latin term usura or usuria and by the Arabic term riba. These terms were constantly redefined – the redefining being part of what I am trying to investigate. While in both regions the, Christian and Muslim, monarchs continued to rely for their state finance on peoples with a different religious background, Jews and Hindus respectively, both regions also saw rationalisations of the justice and necessity of credit that allowed for an increasing role of Christians and Muslims as creditors to the state as well as to others. In more or less explicit ways, the state played a role in this process by setting “just” rates as well as leading through the example of raison d’état or siyasat. In several ways the state was thus framed by the authority of divine rules at the same time that the application of those rules was slowly modified by the state – a dynamic that lends itself well to comparison across regions and eras. Rolf Bauer Colonial State and Imperial Economy -‐ 19th Century India In the second half of the 19th century the Indian colonial state shared many features with the modern European states of the same time: A large bureaucracy, a state that invested in public works and infrastructures, laws, a military, a national financial budget, etc. Many scholars, whether sympathetic to colonialism or not, described the colonial state as a type of or a phase towards the modern state. In this paper I will argue that there is a crucial difference between the modern and the colonial state: While the former acted in its own economic interest, the latter was part of an imperial economy, in which it was always ranked second. Using the examples of the railway and financial policy, I will show that colonial India's political economy was not determined by a modern state's concerns, but by the concerns of a British-‐dominated imperial economy. Oliver Kühschelm Buy-‐national campaigns in the 20th Century. Consumption and the National Economy In the late 19th century several developments converged and made the call for patriotic shopping sound like a good idea. With the rise of mass production attention towards consumers increased. Steering their behaviour became a principal area for social engineering. At the same time nation states were regarded as the gold standard of modern statehood, the goal every nationalist movement longed to achieve. Calls for patriotic shopping relied on melding the nation as an imagined community, the (nation-‐ )state, and the (national) economy. The paper will focus on the interwar years, a highpoint of buy-‐national propaganda. Important social and political actors believed in the coincidence of market space and national territory. Calls for patriotic shopping built on the concept of a national economy as an essentially closed circuit. The paper will show how the exponents and critics of buy-‐national propaganda discussed the political and economic implications of this conceptual metaphor. In its Keynesian version it stayed at the basis of thinking about the state and the economy for many decades. 4