University of Heidelberg

"Transnational empires", combining populations of different cultural, linguistic, religious and ethnic affiliations, have constituted the normality in world history. In pre-modern times, social and political cohesion on a supra-regional level was only possible within the frame of dynastic rule, combining a metaphysical concept of order and face-to-face relations of personal, princely rule at the centre of power. Dynasties did not refer to a concrete population or territory, but genealogically to their family, or rather to a common ancestor.

However, when the imperial idea paled and territorial states emerged in Europe, the dynasty and its means of representation gradually became associated with one particular country: dynasties were, so-to-speak, “nationised”. It would therefore be wrong to see the modern nation-state (eventually based on popular sovereignty) merely as an opposition to pre-modern dynastic rule (by a sovereign king). Symbolically and realistically, the nation needed the king to become a political entity as much as the monarch had to be nationised if he wanted to mobilize his country’s resources.

As the concept of nation soon got politicised, the hereditary rulers were confronted with a decision of whether to remain above the nation and thus oppose it, or to belong to the nation, thus losing pre-eminence of descent and divine investiture. This political reading of the nation eventually reduced the monarch who had once been an exclusive member of a dynasty to a regular member of the nation.

The process that can be labelled “nationising the dynasty” has not been studied systematically, mainly because the nation – as a sovereign – has traditionally been seen as winner over the dynastic principle. Still, it were the nationised dynasties that became the leading forces in the imperialist European expansion. Confronted with this supremacy, the nationisation of the dynasty became an imperative in those countries that were faced with the European expansion: India, Japan and China. On the other hand, when numerous authors of the Enlightenment had before interpreted the nation as a cultural entity in a global setting opposing different civilisations, China had often been used as positive – and sometimes negative – example for European nations.

The members of the Research Project study different aspects of the changes brought to France, England, China and India by the nationisation of their dynasties. Special focus lies on comparative and transcultural aspects: how and with which consequences did dynasties become national, and what is the role played by Asian and European models in these transformations? The main source of the studies are the manifold media that show the hereditary ruler as representative of the nation: pictures, caricatures, buildings, music, fashion, flags, architecture, coins as well as texts such as school books or maps, with a special emphasis on popular media such as pamphlets, etchings, newspapers, magazines and dime novels that were increasingly used to transport changing images of the dynasty.