Sovereignty and Empire: The Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman Worlds

This one-day workshop explores the differing and diverging trajectories of states and territories across the Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires. By reconsidering alternative legal and political architectures of sovereignty and their implications for international politics, the workshop sheds new light on the nineteenth-century imperial and twentieth-century post-imperial worlds of Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Russian Empire. The workshop brings together international and legal historians, scholars of empire and of specific regions, and academics engaged in comparative work to explore what can be gained from a more expansive approach to law and sovereignty in the modern age and how we can gain from engaging beyond regional, national, and imperial boundaries. We will discuss the terminology and legal practices of sovereignty, consider how sovereignty functioned ‘on the ground’ both within and beyond empires, and what the international framework looked like from ‘below’.

Organisers: James Morris (UCL) and Georgios Giannakopoulos (City University)