2025/07/01 by Gábor Egry
Social Sciences · #Balkans: History, Politics, Society #Central European national history #European Cultural and National Identity
paper · doi:10.1017/s096077732510091x
openalex publication_date 2025/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
The article, as an afterword to the special issue Navigating Post-Imperial Transitions , uses the story of a Transylvanian Romanian and Greek Catholic family, the Pordeas, as an example of several key themes of the articles: managing difference within and after the empire, concrete consequences of international arrangements, agency of individuals in the transition. The Pordeas’ extremely intense engagement and entanglement with the empire highlights that a key feature of imperial biographies, the skill of connecting milieus as a way of differentiated rule, was not limited to the high-ranking imperial bureaucrats; it was rather a knowledge important in lower educated strata of society. After 1918, within nation states that often consciously used techniques of imperial rule for their own consolidation, it opened upward mobility and sometimes global horizon for these people. However, the ability to create connections is just as important for any state facing internal difference as it was for empires, showing how much empire was created from below.