Universität Basel

Departement
Geschichte

Dynastic reproduction - Princely courts and dynastic offspring in the early modern world

Our project aims at shedding new light on the ways in which the continuity of dynastic rule was ensured in early modern Europe and beyond. We start from the observation that the providing for healthy, legitimate offspring in order to reiterate the dynastic line constituted a key challenge of early modern European ruling houses, not least due to the importance they gave to the norm of monogamy. By exploiting as different sets of sources such as the records of German princely courts and European travelogues that describe different princely courts in Asia, we aim to understand how contemporaries tackled this challenge on a practical and on an intellectual level.

Dynastic rule was the most widespread form of political organization in the world well into the nineteenth century. However, dynasties had one major weak point: their continuity depended on (usually male) offspring. Recent comparative studies have shown that this problem was especially acute for European dynasties because of the importance they placed on the Christian principle of monogamy. Together with the high infant mortality rates in all strata of early modern societies, this made children a highly precious asset. This project aims to analyze practices and representations connected with the problem of early childhood and dynastic reproduction – i.e., the practices that aimed at providing for numerous and healthy legitimate offspring in order to reiterate the dynastic line – during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and on a global scale. It does so by combining different methodological approaches – archival research, analysis of early modern travel reports, and a comparative analysis – in three distinct subprojects.

The project „Early Childhood and Dynastic Reproduction at Princely Courts, 1600-1800: European and Global Perspectives“ was first based at the Chair of Early Modern History of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). In August 2023 the project moved to the University of Basel (Switzerland), where Nadine Amsler took over the Chair of Early Modern History.

The project is funded by a PRIMA grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation from 2021 to 2028 (project number 193073).

Subprojects

Maria Theresia

Nadine Amsler

Early childhood at German princely courts

The subproject "Early childhood at German princely courts" aims at shedding light on the ways how infants and young children were cared for at European princely courts.

Chand Bibi

Pascal Firges

Dynastic Femininities in the Age of Exploration: Extra-European Arguments and the Negotiation of Gender in Early Modern Europe

The subproject “Dynastic Femininities in the Age of Exploration” investigates how the newly acquired knowledge about extra-European societies in the early modern period influenced European discourse on gender roles.

Ivan

Cristian Consuegra

Dynastic reproduction in European reports on Eurasian countries

The subproject analyzes European authors’ descriptions of practices linked to the problem of dynastic reproduction at the courts of China, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire from ca. 1500 to 1800.

Qianglong Emperor

Nadine Amsler, Pascal Firges, Cristian Consuegra

Comparative perspectives on dynastic reproduction

Building on the growing amount of comparative historical work on dynasties and courts and on monarchical rule, subproject "Comparative perspectives on dynastic reproduction" will compare practices linked to the problem of dynastic reproduction in Eurasia.

Team

Nadine Amsler

Prof. Dr. Nadine Amsler

I am a historian of early modern history with special interests in the history of dynasties, religious history, gender history and the history of childhood in Europe and China. After my studies of Science of Religion, History, and Chinese in Bern, Paris and Beijing, I wrote my dissertation on women in early modern Chinese Catholicism at the Universities of Bern and Freiburg i. Br. The book that resulted from this research was published in 2018 under the title “Jesuits and Matriachs: Domestic Devotion in Early Modern China” by the University of Washington Press.

After finishing my dissertation, I was a lecturer of early modern history at the University of Bern (2015-2018) and then benefited from an SNSF mobility fellowship at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (2018-2019). In the academic year 2020/2021, I was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. From 2021 to 2023 I was assistant professor for early modern history at the University of Fribourg, where I also lead the SNSF PRIMA project “Early Childhood and Dynastic Reproduction at Princely Courts, 1600–1800: European and Global Perspectives”. In august of 2023 I was appointed as professor of early modern history at the University of Basel.

PD Dr. Pascal Firges

PD Dr. Pascal Firges

My main research interests are the relations between Europe and the rest of the world, the historicity of marriage and gender relations, political culture, and the internal mechanisms of power in dynastic centres. My research ascribes itself to a “bottom-up perspective” (Hunt 2014) on globalization processes in the early modern era. I am currently preparing a book on the culture of marriage and extramarital relationships in early modern French court society.
After my studies in Heidelberg, Paris IV, and Cambridge, I worked in major academic positions in Paris, Munich, Taipei, Essen, and Bielefeld. Since 2024, I am a lecturer at the University of Basel and a researcher in the SNSF PRIMA project “Early Childhood and Dynastic Reproduction at Princely Courts, 1600–1800: European and Global Perspectives”. I am author of French Revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-editor of Well-Connected Domains: Towards an Entangled Ottoman History (Brill, 2014).
List of publications: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7536-1578

Cristian Consuegra

Cristian Consuegra

I completed my Bachelor of Arts in History at the University of Bern in 2018. In my B.A. thesis I analysed eighteenth-century Bernese judicial records, examining how local patricians were punished for petty criminal activities related to forbidden card games. I completed my Master of Arts at the same University in 2021 with a thesis on Sengambian agriculture, cattle breeding and culinary practices during the first Atlantic age (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries). This thesis is based on source work with Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, French, and English travelogues and was achieved in the frame of the SNSF Sinergia project Foodways in West Africa. An Integrated Approach on Pots, Animals and Plants. I worked for several years as a student assistant in the SNSF Eccellenza Project Atlantic Italies before joining the Dynastic Reproduction project in 2022.

I am currently writing my dissertation on descriptions of dynastic reproduction in European reports on selected Eurasian kingdoms (subproject 2).

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