Sub-projects

• The Lion and the Lamb: A comparative monographic study of the formation of patrimonial elites in the Roman and Perso-Indian Mughal Empire, by associate professor, Dr Peter Fibiger Bang.
• Cosmopolitan Cultures between Rome and India: A PhD-project exploring the formation of a universalising imperial high-culture in the Roman Empire through a South Asian comparison, by PhD Fellow Karsten Johanning.
• The Limits of Civilisation: a comparative study of cultural integration and resistance in the Roman Empire, by PhD Fellow Kristian Kanstrup Christensen.
• Conceptualizing Late Pre-modernity: A comparative study of late pre-modern developmental trajectories in Eurasia, by PhD Fellow Lars Emil Nybo Nissen.

The combination of diachronic and synchronic comparative approaches within the project enables the group to address some debates currently at the centre of the world history discourse (Porter 2012) about; 

• the significance of interconnected developments across Eurasia before the early modern period
• cross-cultural transmission over the longer term
• whether social power is best understood within a framework of steady progression, or one of rising and decline
• it speaks to modern questions about globalization and the development of cosmopolitan forms of society.

The Lion and the Lamb

A research project by Associate Professor, Dr Peter Fibiger Bang.

A comparative monographic study of the formation of patrimonial elites in the Roman and Perso-Indian Mughal Empire. For a long, the government of extensive, complex land empires like the Roman and Mughal have long been studied with bureaucratic models in mind (Rome: Eck 2000; Devijver & Peeters 1976-90; Pflaum 1960-61; Mughal: Habib 1999 [1963]; Ali 2001 [1966]; 1985).

However, during the last generation these models have been increasingly found to be unsatisfactory (Rome: Lendon 1997; Garnsey & Saller 1987, Saller 1982; Mughals: Pearson 1976; Blake 1991; Alam & Subrahmanyam 1998; Hasan 2004; Moin 2012). The administration and government of these empires were far too small and depended too much on the service of aristocrats and landowners to make it viable in bureaucratic terms.

As Weber (1972: 580-653) has taught generations of historians and social scientists, the alternative to bureaucracy is patrimonialism, government through the independent households of aristocratic lords.

But this is usually connected with the fragmentation of state power during the European middle ages and the lack of central institutions. Both these empires, however, produced a set of strong central institutions, most importantly a court and vast permanent army, all of it supported by regular taxation (Bang 2011; Richards 1993).

This complex type of “patrimonialism”, for want of a better word, needs more systematic examination and explanation.

Therefore, this study, under contract with Oxford University Press, sets out to explore the character, functioning and constraints of such complex patrimonial empires by comparing the Roman experience with the understanding of Mughal India fleshed out in the more recent literature, combined with select illustrative sources.

Cosmopolitan Cultures between Rome and India

A research project by PhD Fellow Karsten Johanning.

This project explores the formation of a universalising imperial high-culture in the Roman Empire through a South Asian comparison. Cosmopolitanism has long been connected with Roman imperial high culture (Richter 2011). But there have been few attempts to explore this phenomenon within a wider comparative framework.

Recently, however, the Indologist Sheldon Pollock tentatively used Roman imperial cosmopolitanism to develop a model for the formation of Sanskrit as a translocal, cosmopolitan imperial language (Pollock 2006; 2003). The result was a radically new and refashioned general understanding of imperial cosmopolitan languages and literature from which Roman studies could profit considerably.

This project, therefore, seeks to continue the cultural dialogue and test Pollock's model of Sanskrit culture on the Roman experience. A vast body of work exploring the development of complex classicizing, inter-textual, and socially exclusive literary modes under the Roman imperial monarchy lends itself easily to such an exercise; in particular, the literature of the so-called Second Sophistic (Swain 1996; Whitmarsh 2001; 2013; König, Oikonomopoulou & Woolf 2013) would offer an interesting set of material on which to base the comparison.

But this could be complemented by an examination of how the Judaean Josephus, or the African Apuleius, came to utilize one or other of the cosmopolitan imperial languages, Greek and Latin respectively.

The Limits of Civilisation

A research project by PhD Fellow Kristian Kanstrup Christensen.

This study offers a new framework for understanding how and to what extent imperial high-culture, in the Roman Empire, was able to interact with and penetrate wider social strata, through comparisons with how South and South East Asian peasantries and tribal populations have interacted with as well as resisted imperial civilisation and literary high-culture before modernisation.

A rich body of work has conceptualised this process in the Indian and South East Asian contexts with great success and sophistication.

In particular, this study will attempt to tackle the question through the lens of the little oral and the great literary tradition (Marriott 1955; Redfield 1956; Sinha 1958), a notion surprisingly neglected by Roman historians (a notable exception showing the promise of the approach is Frankfurt 2000, chap. 3), and of the various "arts of not being governed" identified by Scott (2009; 1990).

Rome’s ability to integrate Mediterranean elites within a cultural ecumene is a well-rehearsed topic of ancient and imperial history (Woolf 1994; Wallace-Hadrill 2008).

Indeed, it now serves as a vehicle for much more extensive claims that the Roman Empire absorbed the entire population in a cultural discourse of loyalty and identity (Ando 2000; Revell 2009). But that is unrealistic; the reach and impact of Roman civilisation ought to be studied with a view to the means of communication and their limitations (cf. Noreña 2011).

A view of power focused on its logistical constraints, in this case, limits to literary education and communication, would rather predict considerable variety and fragmentation and see integration in terms of cultural and ethnic hierarchies within the empire (cf. Barkey 2008; Bang 2010). And this is in fact what a new group of linguistic studies is beginning to find in the Roman Empire, stressing the great variety of spoken languages and dialects in the empire (Adams 2003).

At the same time, archaeologists have been able to document the very discrepant experiences of the different ethnic and social groups within the Roman empire (Mattingly 2011; Alcock 1993; Millett 1991).

In this situation, the model of the great and the little tradition could usefully be applied to this body of Roman provincial studies, because it offers a way of conceptualising the interaction of imperial elite civilisation and oral peasant culture that transcends any simplistic dichotomy between those that focus on unity and consensus and those that see diversity and division.

Conceptualizing Late Pre-modernity

A research project by PhD Fellow Lars Emil Nybo Nissen.

A comparative study of late pre-modern developmental trajectories in Eurasia. The period 1600-1800 has traditionally been conceptualized differently in the Western and Eastern parts of Eurasia. In Europe, the period has been framed as “early modernity”, and understood as a crucial period leading up to, and preparing the way for, the modern world. In China, it has traditionally been known as “late imperial times”, and thus seen as a period looking more backwards than into the future.

In the last couple of decades, the view of China as stagnant and conservative has been thoroughly challenged by a mass of revisionist scholarship, which has emphasized the dynamic qualities of Chinese society throughout its history. This has led to claims of a supposed “early modernity” in China, or even a global “early modernity”, claims which have as of yet not been generally accepted in the scholarly community.

This project is based on the proposition that the search for early modernity is in itself problematic. Rather than extend the concept to other parts of the world, we need to reevaluate the concept of European early modernity in its entirety. If dynamics qualitatively similar to what we have termed “early modern” in a European context are to be found in areas outside Europe and thus with a much weaker connection to the concept of modernity, we have to question its applicability to Europe as well.

The aim of this project is thus to reconceptualize the period in question as a global “late pre-modernity”. Inspired by the historical sociology of Michael Mann, it will seek to “map” the conditions and developmental trajectories of the period through a large-scale comparative study of some of the largest, most powerful political entities of the time: China, France & the Habsburg Empire.

Hopefully, the new perspective adopted here will provide fresh insights into both global and local histories, while at the same time helping to integrate the conceptual frameworks used to make sense of western and eastern history.