Concept Outline

Traffic infrastructure has played a central role in Southeast Europe’s political discourse for almost two hundred years. Roads, canals, and later railways were intimately linked with the enlightened absolutist promise of enabling “the pursuit of happiness” (in English liber-alism), “Glückseligkeit” (in Austrian cameralism), or “refah” (in Ottoman reformism). provide for both, began to inform Habsburg policy as of the eighteenth century and became pop-ular in the Ottoman Empire, its breakaway provinces and successor states, by the 1830s. And also, for almost two hundred years, the promise of infrastructure development and its failures have provoked resistance and Eigen-Sinn (self-interested adaptations), both on the epistemic level and in direct action. The conference will address the relationship of traffic infrastructure to power and its impact, among others, on discourse, culture, and everyday life in Southeast Europe from 1800 until the recent past. 

Please find more informatione in the detailed workshop programme linked on the right-hand side of this page.