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Stephan Sander-Faes

Stephan Sander-Faes

Position

Associate Professor

Affiliation

E-mail
stephan.sander-faes@uib.no
Phone number
+47 55583131
Visitor address
Christies gate 12
5015 Bergen
Postal address
P.O. Box 7805
NO-5020 Bergen
Norway

Stephan Sander-Faes

Position

Associate Professor

Affiliation

Research

I am a historian of early modern and modern European civilisation, with geographical emphases on the Mediterranean as well as Central and Eastern Europe. Thematically, I focus on urban-rural interrelationships, social and economic history, including the history of everyday life and crime, and I have worked extensively on state transformation, the administrative history of the Habsburg Monarchy, and Austrian history. Methodologically, I combine qualitative information from manuscript sources with their quantitative analysis to embed individuals and events in their larger contexts. Due to my research in archives north and south of the Alps, I also have broad palaeographical experiences of Mediterranean and Central European handwriting. All my activities in research, supervision, and teaching are based on an interregional comparative and transnational approach, which is complemented by extensive international visibility and work experience in Switzerland, the USA and, since 2020, Norway.

Educated at the Universities of Vienna and Graz, I obtained my Ph.D. from the latter in 2011 and obtained the Habilitation in Early Modern and Modern History from the University of Zurich in 2018. Before joining UiB in 2020, I have taught for ten years at the history departments at the Universities of Zurich and Fribourg, as well as held the István Deák Visiting Professorship in East Central European Studies at Columbia University in 2018.

In my first book, Urban Elites of Zadar (Rome: Viella, 2013), I analysed a Mediterranean urban society in the 16th century, taking into account land use and agricultural productivity, which implies addressing the contradictory national historiographies and the totalitarian experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries. My study also pioneered the concept of a Venetian "commonwealth", which emphasises the transnational and transimperial characteristics of the rule of the Republic of St Mark over large parts of the Mediterranean.

My Habilitation thesis (2018) forms the basis for my forthcoming research monograph in which I examine the emergent "fiscal-military-financial regime" of the Habsburg Monarchy under Leopold I (r. 1658-1705) and his two sons. On the basis of previously unused archival sources – especially tax records – from the Bohemian possessions of the Princes of Eggenberg (Eggenbergové), I investigate state-building from the perspective of, and through, the experiences of the patrimonial-rural periphery of the Habsburgs' "metropolitan province" (H. Bowen), Bohemia. My book, entitled Lordship and State Transformation (Toronto: McGill-Queen's University Press), will be published in December 2024.

Currently, I am pursuing two further monograph projects: On the one hand, I am currently writing my next book, which deals with bureaucratic and scientific change in Habsburg Lower Austria around 1800. Entitled Crime, Enlightenment, and Punishment, my study is concerned with how state power found ways and means of integrating itself into existing patrimonial structures and thus into supra-regional systems of order during the transition from pre-modern social formations to modern states and societies. I consider this dynamic a "patchwork-in-progress" and analyse the extent to which the expansion of state authority was based on the "transposition" (B. Steunenberg and M. Rhinard) of centralising norms and practices into everyday administrative life.

I am furthermore working on a revised, and expanded second edition of my first book. Urban Elites of Zadar was very received, and, after a decade of further research, I received an offer to publish an updated version, which will be published next year, on the other hand.

As a long-term interest, I have begun investigation into my late grandfather's picture postcard collection. Compiled by Erich Sonntag (1922-88), it comprises approx. 40,000 vintage postcards mostly from Austria its Central European neighbours, but there are also plenty of specimen from literally all over the world. Please visit my new (March 2024) weblog over https://espc.substack.com/ to find out more and, of course, have a look at postcards.

Please see the attached CV for further particulars, and do not hesitate to get in touch about academic service, teaching, or speaking activities.

Teaching
  • Coordinator of the late medieval and early modern M.A. seminar (from autumn 2021).
  • My teaching's geographic focus rests on Central and Eastern Europe
  • I am happy to supervise and mentor graduate students working on my research interests.

Focus, Themes, and Approaches

  • Period: Renaissance, Early Modern and Modern European History
  • Areas: Central and Eastern Europe; Republic of Venice, Habsburg Monarchy
  • Themes: Fiscal-Financial Institutions, State Formation, Political Economy, Economic and Social History, Administrative History from Seigneurial Domination to the Modern 'Institutional State' (Max Weber), 'Little Divergence', Urban History, Rural History, Crime History, History of Everyday Life
  • Approaches: Quantitative History, Transnational/Transimperial History, Entangled History/histoire croisée, Communication and Media Studies, Cultural History, Microhistory
Publications

Growing out of my Ph.D. (2011), my first research interest concerns the intersections of Venetian Studies and South-East European History in the Renaissance Adriatic. As is customary in German-language academia, I then moved to a different topic, area, and period for my second qualification thesis, the Habilitation (2018); hence, my second research theme focuses on what I conceive of ‘state transformation’ in the Habsburg Monarchy, exemplarily focused on Bohemia from the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) to Charles VI (r. 1710-40). Uniting both fields, I began to develop interests in Crime History and Urban History. While revising my German-language Habilitation for publication in English, I moved on to my current research project, the study of state-building from the Enlightenment to the advent of the institutional state, exemplarily focused on Lower Austria ‘around 1800’.

Total Number of Publications (as of Feb. 2024)

18 refereed articles and book chapters (1 co-authored); 2 published monographs, 1 in press, and 1 contracted; 2 (co)edited volumes; 14 non-refereed articles and book chapters (2 co-authored); 35 book reviews; 2 dissertations; and 9 ‘other’ publications.

Monographs

Crime, Enlightenment, and Punishment: Bureaucratic and Scientific Change in Habsburg Austria, 1750s-1820s (London: Taylor & Francis [contracted]).

Lordship and State Transformation: Bohemia and the Habsburg Fiscal-Financial-Military Regime, 1650-1710 (Toronto: McGill-Queen’s University Press [forthcoming]).

Europas habsburgisches Jahrhundert, 1450-1550 [Europe’s Habsburg Century] (Darmstadt: wbg Academic, 2018), 160 p., ISBN 978-3-534-27058-3.

Urban Elites of Zadar: Dalmatia and the Venetian Commonwealth, 1540-1569 (Rome: Viella, 2013), 292 p., ISBN 978-8-867-28115-2.

Refereed Journal Articles and Book Chapters (selection)

‘State Transformation between Centre and Periphery: Non-State Actors and Everyday Administration in Lower Austria, 1790-1848’, in C. Armenteros, H. Hein-Kircher, and F.F. Sterkenburgh (eds.), Modernizing the Unmodern: Europe’s Imperial Monarchies and Their Path to Modernity in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London: Palgrave MacMillan, in press).

Co-author, with Mikołaj Malinowski, ‘Labour and Forced Labour in Early Modern History (ca. 1500-1800)’, in J. Hansen et al. (eds.), The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe (Cambridge: OpenBook, 2022), 661-70.

‘Herrschaft, Steuern und Bürokratie nach dem Weißen Berg: Die Eggenberger Herrschaften und der Habsburgisch-Ständische Verwaltungsapparat (c. 1650-1720) [Domination, Taxation, and Bureaucracy after White Mountain: The Eggenberg Domains and the Habsburg-Territorial Administrative State]’, Český časopis historický | The Czech Historical Review, 120, no. 3-4 (2022), 607-52.

For a full list of publications, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me.

Lecture
Academic lecture
Chapter
Academic article
Academic chapter/article/Conference paper

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.

Projects

State Transformation in the Austrian Empire

Despite the copious amounts of research devoted to European state-making, there remains a major lacuna: the crucial contribution of non-state actors to the transformation of pre-modern social formations into modern states and societies, especially east of the Rhine, have not been studied yet. This project will close this gap by delivering a novel account of state-crafting as a co-production of state and non-state actors from around 1780 to 1870. Historically, this period witnessed the drastic, if non-linear, expansion of state authority into areas and contexts where it previously did not exist. Hybridity and multi-variate systems of order co-existed and whose repercussions continue to manifest themselves to this day.

Historians conventionally study the transformation of state power along three trajectories: (i) domestically, as the transition from direct and personal rule to increasingly representative and abstract governance; (ii) as an era of drastic change of intra-state relations due to the reduction of sovereign states; and (iii) through the creation of international organisations, such as the Red Cross (1861) or the Telegraph Union (1865). A reified ‘state’ is presumed the principal mover in all three contexts, by way of absorbing existing structures and territories, as well as ‘outsourcing’ state authority to a different level. Yet, there is considerable historical evidence and a large body of present-day experiences showing that these changes occurred through close cooperation between state and non-state actors, like, e.g., merchants, bankers, industrialists, or patrimonial staff. This is immediately apparent in the context of international organisations that came about by private initiative (e.g., Henri Dunant’s founding of the Red Cross) or were established, in today’s terms, as ‘public-private partnerships’ from the outset.

Until the breakthrough of the ‘institutional state’ in the final quarter of the 19th century, ‘Europe’ consisted of a wide variety of entities and polities that —like Renaissance Italy or the premodern Holy Roman Empire—contained seemingly endless numbers of (semi)autonomous non-state actors, including merchants, bankers, and guilds. Until the abolition of feudal privileges between 1789/90 and 1848/49, one must also account for the continued existence of traditional patrimonial authority with its many different characteristics, ranging from production (demesne lordship) to social status (subjection), and from the administration of justice to staggered seigneurial rights of patronage. In short: there existed all sorts of governmental functions that are indicative of the absence of a consistent salience within one or the other state; to the contrary, ambiguities, hybrid forms of authority, and variations abounded, and they did so on all levels of power and were widely diffused across time and space.

Emphasis on these complex and contradictory dynamics of implementing centralised authority will free scholarship from prevailing, if anachronistic, projections of intentionality and presumed teleology. Instead, STATECRAFTING will connect the study of institutional development with its political, social, and economic dimensions, thereby revealing the extent to which state-building involved reciprocal, if asymmetrical, exchange between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ within a polity as well as across Europe. Fleshing out the role of state and non-state actors will be the study’s key contribution. In sum, this project will lead to a comprehensive reassessment of the growing reach, scale, and capabilities of the institutional state during The Great Transformation (Karl Polanyi). The study of how these changes were implemented by the state’s collaborators, the non-state actors, has never been told.