Political entities and their discursive representation have been widely discussed in current historical research1. The workshop on state descriptions, hosted by the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Europe and America in the Modern World” and the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg, contributed in several ways to this discussion. In their introduction, the organizers pointed towards the many ways in which states can be described. In this regard, the term “revisited” has to be understood in two ways: On the one hand, it describes the long and distinct disciplinary tradition of state descriptions – or German “Staatenkunde” – and on the other hand, it aimed towards an expansion of the previous perception.

Indeed, part of the contributions dealt with the genre of German “Staatenkunde” and its appropriations in various East-(Central) European contexts. Here the workshop aimed to go beyond the state of the art that cast this multidisciplinary knowledge format as an academic enterprise of the late 18th – early 19th centuries only. Instead, as Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Duisburg-Essen) pointed out in the introduction, the goal was to explore its use in administrative circles and lay publics. With its strong links to geography and history, and travel writing, “Staatenkunde” was well fit for rendering the social, legal and spatial-territorial particularities of composite states and early modern polities at various geographic scales, from the local to the global. Its encyclopedic structure absorbed the most variegated kinds of information, should they be of administrative-quantitative nature, but also about indivisible attributes, such as rulers’ virtues, as well as customs and mores of inhabitants, without direct use for rulers and administrators. The information it purported was regarded as valuable enough to make standardized descriptions of states a viable commercial enterprise, so Török.

She located practices of “Staatenkunde” in the broader administrative and scholarly milieus of Central and Eastern Europe and pointed at related knowledge practices, such as map-making. Therefore, the workshop addressed alternative, competing and suppressed knowledges about the administrative territory and their relationship to standard or “official” representations beyond the locus classicus of “Staatenkunde”, the academic milieus. Rather, it considered an entire range of authors and sources hitherto left out of the literature. These authors could be related to the state, like governmental bureaucrats, Church personnel administering administrative data, as well as governors, statesmen and even kings, but also included civilians and political dissenters: anarchists, environmental and human rights activists. The workshop thus ventured out of the comfort zone of the history of academic disciplinary knowledge into the history of the public sphere and beyond: literature, folklore and the visual media, where alternative or sub-political visions of the administrative space have been articulated.

The introduction assessed “Staatenkunde” as a public genre, a trait that distinguished it for long from early modern arcane administrative knowledge and made it, at least in the eyes of its late 18th-century academic practitioners, a critical scrutiny of politics. Whether the practice validated such a noble cause, has been since the inquiries by Harm Klueting an open question, as well as the possibility that state descriptions could well carry misinformation and fulfill propagandistic or commercial, goals(2). This question was particularly interesting when it came to newer representations of the administrative space via photography and the digital media.

Next to the question about the practitioners and the characteristics of “Staatenkunde” as a knowledge field, the workshop explored the biography of this regional genre in a geographically and historically comparative perspective. By analyzing photographic representations of the space and visual narratives of governance from the late 19th century to the present, it addressed the legacy of territorial descriptions in new genres, media, and places. New representations of the political space were preserved also in the geographic and ethnographic literature, including modern commercial travel literature.

The comparative discussion drew on a broad range of case studies that shed light on different actors, methods, and contexts of state representations. The workshop program covered the large time span from the early 17th century until most recent times. Beyond its emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe, it included papers about Northern and Southern America, Central Asia as well as India. During the workshop, common features even between spaces that look contradictory at the first glance, could be identified: NILANJANA MUKHERJEE (New Dehli) presented different attitudes towards and narratives about the Great Indian Desert that had striking similarities with the descriptions of other examples of “wilderness”, such as the Pontic Steppe in today’s Ukraine, presented by ANDRIY POSUNKO (Dnipro), or even the Wadden Sea, which was the subject of a paper by ANNA-KATHARINA WÖBSE (Gießen). Furthermore, by breaking up the previous understanding of “state descriptions”, the participants were able to present a completely new variety of possible sources. They ranged from “classical” statistical publications in the tradition of German “Staatenkunde”, analyzed e.g. by TIBOR BODNÁR-KIRÁLY (Budapest) and Török, to non-academical books for a wider audience, presented by VOLKER BAUER (Wolfenbüttel), and to surprisingly impersonal travel diaries of the Austrian Emperor Francis I., discussed by CONRAD CLEWING (Regensburg). The legacies of another emperor’s travelling, namely Tsar Nicolaus’ II., were considered by EKATERINA BOLTUNOVA and GALINA EGOROVA (both Moscow) in their paper on Russia’s Golden Ring. They argued against the widespread legend, that the emergence of the route was a kind of a “grassroot” development, which started after the release of several newspaper articles in the 1960s, and put the development of the tourist route in the context of imperial legacies within the Soviet Union. Even present visual forms of state representation were included: KAROLINA KLUCZEWSKA (Ghent) presented a large collection of recent street posters in Tajikistan, distributed by the autocratic government, and interpreted them in their social and political context.

Previous research often constructed a narrative of a linear development from early modern descriptive statistics to modern administrative statistics within the framework of state formation. In contrast, the workshop broadened the perspective by emphasizing the role of intermediaries, non-state actors and counter-narratives. MARINA LOSKUTOVA (St. Petersburg) pointed to the conflicts and misunderstandings between the Russian imperial center in St. Petersburg and the regional actors. BOGUMIŁ SZADY (Lublin) addressed the limited range of the central administration within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As a consequence, they had to rely on the Catholic Church to gather the data needed for an extensive state description.

Guido Hausmann (Regensburg) explicitly addressed the question of counter-representation that mainly emerged as a new phenomenon at the end of the 19th century, due to the international spread of media. Anarchist geographers questioned the state as the only just and legitimate order, but – surprisingly – still did not discard it completely.

Almost all papers addressed – in one way or the other – the issue of categorization and othering. State descriptions always went hand in hand with constructing a sense of belonging or not belonging to the entity in question. This could concern social groups both within and outside the respective state. SARAH ALBIEZ-WIECK (Cologne) presented examples from the Spanish Empire. Comparing different kinds of taxation categories in Southern America and the Philippines, she showed how these categories shaped the social organization and how the described groups tried to renegotiate them. Taking the example of Carpathian villagers, MARTIN ROHDE (Halle/Saale) described the Habsburg Monarchy as a space of images that was constantly renegotiated by different actors. MARTIN DEUERLEIN (Tübingen) showed how the Northern American Iroquois people attracted the attention of scholars and politicians throughout centuries. They served as an ambivalent mirror, on the one hand representing backwardness but also arousing admiration for peaceful self-organization. At several points, it became very clear that those kinds of descriptions might tell more about the persons describing than the persons described, which is why it is even more important to put them into their broader context.

Thus, state descriptions can offer orientation or reaffirmation in times of crisis or change. However, they also can be the very means of addressing exactly this difficulty and thereby serving as a means to amplify the critique. The variety of perspectives presented by the participants located the history of state descriptions within the larger framework of the history of knowledge. It broadened the scope of approaches and explicitly addressed the question of publicness by adding different contexts and actors. Furthermore, it presented insights into the various forms of the aftermath of state descriptions in the 19th and 20th centuries. The prospect offered by the organizers, to take this first workshop as a takeoff for future discussions, was therefore very much appreciated.

Conference overview:

Guido Hausmann (Leibniz-Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung, Regensburg) / Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Duisburg-Essen): Welcome Address and Introduction

Section 1: World-Making and World-Ordering, 17-19th Centuries

Chair: Guido Hausmann (Regensburg)

Sarah Albiez-Wieck (University of Cologne): Social Difference and Mobility in the Spanish Empire, 17th-18th Centuries

Volker Bauer (Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel): Scaling Staatenkunde. State Description and the Global Community of States in the Series of the German Publisher Renger (1704–1718)

Borbala Zsuzsanna Török (Duisburg-Essen): Staatenkunde Goes Global: Göttingen, Scotland, India Late 18th – early 19th Centuries

Discussant: Willard Sunderland (Cincinatti)

Section 2: Legal and Infrastructural Geographies

Chair: Ekaterina Boltunova (Moscow)

Bogumil Szady (Catholic University Lublin): The First (and the Last) Detailed Description of the Pre-Partition Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Marina Loskutova / Anton Kotenko (Higher School of Economics of St. Petersburg): 19th-Century Hydrographic Maps of the Russian Empire as Representations and Instruments of Territorialization

Tibor Bodnár-Király (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest): From Mapping to Measuring: State-Description and Enlightenment in 18th-Century Hungary

Discussant: Borbala Zsuzsanna Török (Duisburg-Essen)

Section 3: Peripheries from Above and from Below

Chair: Borbala Zsuzsanna Török (Duisburg-Essen)

Nilanjana Mukherjee (University of Delhi): Spatialising the Great Indian Desert

Konrad Clewing (Leibniz-Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung, Regensburg): Dalmatia as an Austrian Province, as Described by its Ruler (1818) and by one Early Geographical Expert (1857)

Andriy Posunko (Dnipro): Bringing Imperial Order to the Wild Steppes: The Invention of New Russia (Novorossia), Late 18th – early 19th Centuries

Discussant: Jörn Happel (Hamburg)

Section 4: Uses of State Descriptions in the Late 19th – Early 20th Centuries

Chair: Willard Sunderland (Cincinatti)

Ekaterina Boltunova / Galina Egorova (Higher School of Economics Moscow):
Russia’s “Golden Ring”: Imperial Basis for a Late Soviet Tourist Route

Martin Rohde (University of Halle-Wittenberg): Illustrating the Empire: Circulating Photographs in Late Habsburg State Descriptions

Discussant: Guido Hausmann (Regensburg)

Section 5: Counter-Concepts and Competing Representations, 20th – 21st Centuries

Chair: Sven Jaros (Regensburg)

Guido Hausmann (Leibniz-Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung, Regensburg): World Ordering of Anarchist Geographers: Petr A. Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus (late 19th – early 20th Centuries)

Martin Deuerlein (University of Tuebingen): The Origin of the State? European Descriptions of the Six Nations / Iroquois Confederacy and their Significance for the Indigenous Movement

Karolina Kluczewska (Ghent University): Visual State- and Nation-Building: Representing the Past, Present and Future in Tajikistan

Anna-Katharina Wöbse (University of Giessen): Space, Place, Land, and Sea: Framing the Global Wadden Sea

Discussant: Borbala Zsuzsanna Török (Duisburg-Essen)

Concluding Discussion

Notes:
1 See e. g. Lutz Raphael, Ordnungsmuster und Deutungskämpfe. Wissenspraktiken im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen 2018.
(2) Harm Klueting, Die Lehre von der Macht der Staaten. Das außenpolitische Machtproblem in der „politischen Wissenschaft” und in der praktischen Politik im 18. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1986; Gunhild Berg / Zsuzsanna Török / Marcus Twellmann (Hrsg.), Berechnen/Beschreiben. Praktiken statistischen (Nicht-)Wissens 1750–1850, Berlin 2015.