Territorialization from below? Belongings and state building, Leipzig 1485-1806

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Birgit Emich
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: from 2016 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322898684

The nation state is deemed to be modernitys classic paradigm of order: state and nation are conceptually imagined as belonging together; the (implicit) assumption is that citizenship and the principle of territoriality came to be congruent. However, current research and sociopolitical debates both demonstrate that this national territorial conception of belonging reaches its limit: transnational and supranational entities as well as nonterritorially organized belongings replace territorial concepts of belonging or transform them. Therefore, the nation state paradigm can no longer claim extensive validity. This begs the question what might come after the nation state. At the same time, there is a growing interest in the era before the nation state that is, in its formation during the premodern age and its alternatives and variants. This is where the proposed project fits in. Inspired and informed by current processes of dissolution, it focuses on the paradigms formation, or to be more precise, on the connection between belonging and territorialization in the early modern era. Based on the example of the city of Leipzig over the period from 1485 to 1806, the goal is to map the interconnectedness and coexistence of multi tied belongings, their various spatial rang and their historicity. In a first step it will be asked which spaces were created and defined by the various key stakeholders (sovereign, urban, ecclesiastical, and academic) in early modern Leipzig. The second step involves asking for the transmission belts between this normative determination and the anchoring of these specifications in the townspeoples everyday life. On the basis of maps, cityscapes, and other symbolic representations, as well as city council and ceremonial records, it will be examined how and which differing spaces were visualized as well as which practices and rituals were used for the production of a mental map, that is for anchoring the authorities spatial arrangements in the minds of the urban dwellers. In a third step, the focus shifts towards the humans that move and interact within these urban spaces. Interrogation records and supplications in which the protagonists locate themselves spatially provide ample information of how they construed their own spaces and to what extent the authorities specifications were relevant in this process. As these configurations of spatial belongings change over the course of the early modern era, the project addresses this issue repeatedly in order to shed light on the highly relevant connection between territorialization, state building and belonging from a historical perspective. At the same time, the project introduces the facet of territorialization from below, which has hardly been considered until now, to the classic narrative of state building.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants