Urban Experience and Everyday Life in Brasov, 1867-1914

My research explores the social organisation of a Transylvanian city, Brasov, between 1867 and 1914. Brasov was historically controlled by German-speaking Saxons, who constituted the traditional elite and exercised historical privileges. Hungarians and Szeklers had certain rights at a regional level, while several other Transylvanian communities such as the Romanians, Roma and Jews were merely tolerated.

The period of study, however, was one of dramatic political, cultural and demographic change where the differentiated, hierarchical local structure faced multiple challenges. The territory's incorporation into Hungary resulted in Saxon political privileges being abolished and replaced with Budapest's representational politics and a standardised legal framework. This political change was accompanied by an explosion in mass communication and migration, and the growth of numerous nationalist movements - all of which generated profound structural changes in the city's population, governance and economy and stimulated debate about its inhabitants' identities and organisation. This research examines Brasov's social reconfiguration in this period in order to better understand the forces and factors that shape regional urban development and identities.

The project will apply social network analysis to archival data and map how people in the city structured their civic, professional, religious and private lives. Social network analysis is a comparatively new technique for historians and has not yet been applied to any of Transylvania's towns. Owing to this method's ability to capture far-spanning, complex and overlapping networks, it is particularly appropriate for identifying and interpreting Brasov's social structures, which spanned religious, linguistic, civic and national groups.

The key research questions are: What was Brasov's social and economic organisation? How were local identities and loyalties expressed and debated? To what extent did the city's increasingly diverse populations and immigrants integrate and interact with more established communities? Do we see evidence for conflict or cooperation? How did Brasov's changing organisation reflect broader national and transnational changes?

Twentieth-century Romanian and Hungarian nationalist historiography was fixated on Transylvania's transfer from Hungary to Romania in 1918 and emphasised historic divisions and antagonisms between Romanian and Hungarian populations. Consequently, scholarship largely overlooked Transylvania's other populations such as the Saxons, Szeklers, Roma, Jews, Greeks and Armenians. More recent research on the late Habsburg Empire has also questioned the role and popularity of nationalist movements, particularly in urban contexts. Transylvania, located within the highly nationalistic Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary and with a long history of self-governance, has however been largely ignored in these debates despite its compelling mix of nationalities, languages and religious practices. This research will thus contribute to the ongoing discussions about nationalism and national indifference in Austria-Hungary and will examine Transylvania within a transnational framework.

For contemporary scholars of urban development and change, it will provide a detailed, far-ranging case study explaining how society functioned in a city whose population and economy was diversifying, growing and changing rapidly. Overall, by deploying network analysis, and drawing on conceptual frameworks developed in urban sociology and social history, as well as in nationalism studies, this project will make a major contribution to understanding both everyday social relations and more formal structures of self-organization in Brasov in this period of rapid and profound change.