Throughout the last few decades, new trends in political and cultural history have significantly advanced the understanding of political praxis in the early modern world. The emphasis placed on the multiple strategies used by power groups to influence diplomatic negotiations, military plans of attack or governmental acts and reforms, well represents the breadth of an ever-expanding field of study. Particularly, comparative approaches to the exercise of power and symbolic communication at the royal courts, as studied by Jeroen Duindam in his recent “Dynasties”, have opened new ways to address policymaking in the Premodern world.
Following these lines of research, the aim of this seminar is to focus on the roots of the decision-making process. By exploring friendships, enmities, rivalries and cooperations shaped among the wide sociocultural network of actors present in the major centres of global politics (Istanbul, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Paris, Rome, Madrid, and Vienna), we will reflect on the way in which decisions were influenced in advance by personal interests or group ambitions.
We encourage researchers, especially those with an interdisciplinary approach, to submit papers on decision-making in the context of power centres and dynastic rulership, regardless of place, for the seventeenth century with overlap into the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Potential themes include, but are not limited to:
- Managing information and decision-making: information business (personal and public information networks) and informants (agents, artists, diplomats, scholars, and merchants)
- The architecture and furnishing of negotiation spaces (symbols, self-representation, and theater of negotiation)
- Social networks, power groups and decision-making (from family networks to corporations; from transnational connections to local politics)
- Female role and decision-making (female diplomacy, female networks, and female strategy)
The conference will take place in Prague (Czech Republic), Academy of Sciences, on Friday, 21st, and Saturday, 22nd of April 2023.
Abstracts (maximum 300 words) for papers of 20 minutes should be submitted to the organizers at stolicka@hiu.cas.cz along with a CV or brief biographical text in English by 31st January 2023.
Carlos Antolín Rejón (Autonomous University of Madrid)
Francesco Caprioli (Autonomous University of Madrid)
Ondřej Lee Stolička (Czech Academy of Sciences)