Doing Debt. Praxeology of sovereign debt in the long 20th century

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Stefanie Anna Middendorf
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 391125689

The planned network will study practices of sovereign debt in historical perspective. It will focus on concrete procedures, situational decisions, and actor relations within politics of debt throughout the long twentieth century, and will put special emphasis on their significance for the negotiation of shifting boundaries between "the state" and "the market." By doing so, it intends to avoid the deterministic view taken in many academic debates so far and to add specific insight into historical connections between financial practices, social knowledge, and economic effects. The network draws on the recently broad praxeological discussion in cultural studies and the social sciences, relating to its sensitivity for informal behaviour, for the materiality of practices, and for the intrinsic logics of actor knowledge. The respective meanings of sovereign debt in the past, and the effects of public debt management since the late 19th century will be situated within moments of decision-making - rather than understanding them as calculable effects of theoretical models or conceptual orders.The interdisciplinary exchange between history, economics and social sciences thus shall enable a more sophisticated study of debt practices that takes their complexity and inconsistency into account. It aims at understanding and explaining the processual character and historical change of everyday (political) handling of public debt.Accordingly, the scheduled meetings will ask for 1) temporalities and caesuras, 2) spaces and limits, and 3) situations and structures in the history of sovereign debt. The results will be published in articles in refereed journals and in a reader that presents empirical case studies dealing with relevant source documents within the framework of these three dimensions. This publication shall reflect the fruitfulness of praxeological methods for the history of sovereign debt and intends to reach a broader academic audience. It will be suitable as a textbook for teaching modern and contemporary history at the university level.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Julia Laura Rischbieter