The aim of this MRSEI is to finance the exploration of a network whose work will be directed towards the preparation of a SE intended to pave the way for a new phase in the study of the forms of European "feudalism". This project, led by historians, will be interdisciplinary and multisectoral: it will involve lawyers, linguists, computer scientists, geomatics specialists, archivists and museum conservators. The SE mobility project that we are carrying out will consist of building a common frame of reference, based on historiographic heritages, in order to reopen the question of the modalities of domination over land and people, in a comparative perspective, in order to get the questions out of the national ruts that still structure them. It will thus be possible to produce a renewed, global and long-term history of the socio-political structures that organized Europe from the central Middle Ages to the 18th century and constituted the model for its expansion into the Americas, which were largely colonized and exploited using "feudal" tools. The first task of the MRSEI will be to federate dispersed researchers around this object and to delimit the consortium in view of the SE. It will require meetings with the different partners already contacted or that we intend to contact in order to compare our methodologies, our research perspectives, and to evaluate the possibilities of working together as well as the existing support from the institutions to which we belong. Once the consortium is formalized, discussions will aim at making a critical assessment of the legacy of works published until the 1990s to bring this historiography into dialogue with more contemporary issues. These discussions will prepare a break with the historiography and provide the state of the art necessary for the SE. Further meetings as well as video-conferences will allow to define the common objectives of the SE and to determine the form and content of the resulting deliverables. The consortium will be composed of five to seven academic institutions, whose researchers will benefit from the SE mobilities. One or two non-academic partners will be added, to be specified during the MRSEI: archival foundations dedicated to the nobility or museums with which a strategy of valorization of heritage and archives related to feudal and seigniorial issues will be set up. On the scientific level, the objective of the SE is to produce tools that will be accessible online, multilingual, and that will make it possible to open up historiographies on feudalism and the seigniorial system, to better understand its history over the long term and its expansion, and to better grasp the differences and common points between these modes of domination over the land and men in space and time. On the pedagogical level, the SE will work on a strategy of valorization that will fluidify the relationship between higher and secondary education and that will place the digital tools developed for the project at the heart of learning, by targeting both students and teachers. In terms of cultural heritage, the idea will be to work with museums and/or private foundations to build tools for the diffusion of research (traveling exhibitions for museums, beautiful popularization books, signage or guides for new ways of visiting certain places, tools for the promotion of heritage based on our objects) in accordance with the objectives of safeguarding and promoting European heritage, which is immensely rich in this area. Developing this network within the CRH (UMR CNRS/EHESS) is a crucial asset: the EHESS has considerable experience thanks to the multiple European Union and ANR funding it has already obtained, and because it has already implemented RISE, the predecessor of SE.

In the late seventeenth century, the Mughal Empire (1526–1857) achieved its greatest territorial extent in South Asia and came to represent one of the most complex bureaucratic regimes of imperial power in the early modern world. The untold histories of early modern cities at the heart of this major empire have yet to be reconstructed by social and legal historians. MugUrba examines century-long processes of urbanisation that began with the consolidation of the imperial capital of Delhi in the 1650s, and which grew to encompass a dynamic urban triangle, along with the cities of Agra and Mathura situated in the Yamuna river plains. Suburban growth was fuelled by imperial privileges granted to the military elite to settle agglomerations with merchants and artisanal communities from the rural hinterland. By the 1740s, successive military occupations of northern India transformed urban life leading to a decline in infrastructure and security. As sites where multiple social and economic actors intersected and interacted, these cities were governed under specific ideologies and institutions, namely, Hanafi law, one of the four schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence. This legal system was also practised in the Ottoman Empire and the Central Asian Khanates. In the 1700s, over 20 percent of the world’s population lived under different kinds of Hanafi legal regimes making it one of the largest legal systems of the period, comparable to Civil law and Common law. However, how Hanafi legal norms and practices moulded South Asian urbanisation has not received scholarly attention so far, especially in the context of a multi-religious and multi-ethnic society. Irrespective of religious identity, Hanafi law was the empire’s legal system on “secular” matters such as fiscality, public administration, judicial procedures and urban planning. MugUrba examines the growth of state agents’ functions over this period and how administrative rules and regulations evolved within the Hanafi legal framework. In an urban society of Muslim, Hindu and caste-based neighbourhoods, asymmetrical power relations existed between legal authorities and civilians. Non-Muslims were considered dhimmis or “protected communities” of the Mughal State with autonomy concerning their religious, ritual and kinship relations. On matters of general concern such as private contracts, commercial rights, and public transactions, Muslims and non-Muslims were treated equally aside from specific legal forms of discriminatory practices. Public figures like judges, censors, agents, police and governors managed the major urban centres. How did legal authorities maintain Islamic legal conventions and limit their transgression while also permitting ordinary people to carry on their social life? On the one hand, the project demonstrates the protection of entitlements and autonomy of ordinary subjects that middling officials oversaw. On the other hand, it argues that the urban ecological landscape was also regulated to strike a balance between private interests and public welfare of maintaining law and order. How did the residents of Mughal cities experience public life while proving fraud at courts or dealing with petty crimes, paying user charges as much as tolerating heavy-handed policing and handling bureaucratic red tape? Through a range of multi-lingual and multi-sited archives, it reconstructs the first urban legal history of artisans, merchants, soldiers and state officials, exploring how the busy marketplaces, streets and main squares of Mughal India, were also sites of contestation, legal entanglements and public life. Thus, MugUrba puts Mughal urban history into dialogue with the fields of imperial and institutional histories of the Islamicate world.

In order to contribute to the history of the genocidal and repressive inner workings of the French state, the project aims to list and study the personal files of individuals identified as ideological and racial enemies by the Vichy regime: census records on Jews, anti-Masonic files, files on Jewish children taken into custody by child protection services. Our objective is to understand how these documents were put together, and how they were used, from the Occupation period to the present day, when the issue of opening them to the public and to researchers is of major importance in terms of individual and collective memory. Supported by two history research centers, the IHTP (Université Paris 8, CNRS) and the CRH (EHESS, CNRS), the Archives nationales (AN) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), the project will bring together archivists and historians. Combining case studies and a global approach, it will focus on three aspects. It will shift the focus of enquiry, from Paris to the regions, by identifying and studying new records in departmental archives, as well as at the Archives nationales d'outre-mer (ANOM) for colonial Algeria. We want to understand the administrative life of these records, by analysing sources that have so far been neglected by researchers, and records that local census will help us identify. Finally, we want to understand their afterlife, by distinguishing between post-war administrative uses and uses for memorial purposes: reparation, commemoration, ego-history. Their consultation by the people concerned and their descendants will be the subject of an oral survey at the departmental archives, the ANOM and the AN. In addition to the publication of scientific articles and conference proceedings, a guide to sources and a database of those involved in the registration process will be developed. The results will be shared with a wide audience through conferences, virtual exhibitions and a web documentary.

PROCIT is a project backed by an international, multidisciplinary network around the topic of “Local identities in the Mediterranean” and is intended to explore the theme of citizenship from the perspective of property and the rights pertaining thereto. It will focus on the modern era. This project is intended as a contribution to research on processes of social integration and the nature of the socio-economic and legal inequalities that determine the direction of that integration and are, simultaneously, its products. Two decisions in particular characterize this project: the decision to deal with the connected dimensions of citizenship, integration, and inequalities in the longue durée history of Mediterranean societies (from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries); and the decision to situate these themes in a deliberately comparative perspective, on the basis of research carried out in Europe, North Africa, Palestine, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. The eighteenth scholars working together on the PROCIT project are from institutions rooted in these different countries. Together, they can already boast a shared experience of work and collaboration. The notion of citizenship considered in this project does not refer to the formal political prerogatives of which nation-state members can avail themselves, but rather to the set of rights to which one has access as a result of acknowledged belonging to a particular place. These rights conferred by belonging, in the societies we wish to analyze, are the point of origin of differential access to resources (such as the market, property, credit, work, charity, etc.), which structure the social scale. The term “citizenship” thus refers to a status where access rights to resources encounter the social recognition of these rights as well as the ability to claim them. Our research is thus focused on the processes that have produced this status in different societies north and south of the Mediterranean. In this project, property has appeared as a fundamental variable shared by different societies. In modern societies, the notion of property refers to a vast semantic field, which cannot be reduced to material wealth alone. Differential access to property rights not only outlines economic hierarchies or symbolic primacies; it also creates prerogatives that occupy individuals more broadly. In a wide range of cases, the condition of “citizen” or subject of a central authority is closely linked to the recognition of one’s capacity to access property or to transmit it. In modern societies of the northern and southern Mediterranean, relations to things create social statuses, relations, and ties, and grant access to rights related to belonging. The ability to exercise property rights traces the outline of local communities, and, as a result, of wider territorial communities. Access to property, in that sense, is an essential phase in every process of social integration. This major investigation into citizenship in the northern and southern Mediterranean requires painstaking comparative analysis. The comparison implemented here avoids culturalism entirely and is based on reasoned, methodologically informed empiricism. It will explore an original method, based on sources. This method must allow us to grasp practice as closely as possible to the documentary systems that shape and show them. This will allow the researchers to build a relevant questionnaire and explanatory framework together. This method requires close coordination among scholars, who will choose among three thematic axes: access to the market; creating trusts (“off-market” goods); and finally, wealth transmission practices. Two historians specialized in each theme in the northern and southern Mediterranean will coordinate each axis and organize the comparative work.

Reflections on modern emancipation often involve a disavowal of the contribution of religion. The latter is either criticized or portrayed as conservative criticism. This project wants to challenge this conception of the relation between emancipation and religion. Our main thesis is that monotheistic religions, structured by the concept of justice, have and still can contribute to the constitution of critical subjectivities engaged in the project of modern emancipation. This thesis implies that we consider religion as part of modernity, not as its opposite. We start from the following principle: the specific contribution of religion to the emancipation of our modern societies must be situated in the individuals, their reflexive positions and their critical activities Modern societies are characterized by the fact that the idea of emancipation is inextricably linked to the critical activity of the social actors themselves. Criticism and emancipation are inextricably linked to the reflexive return by socially constituted individuals on society, its normativity and its promises of justice. Consequently, the link between religion and emancipation in modernity has to be situated precisely in the critical subjectivity: in what religion makes subjects do or allows them to do. This is indeed our approach to the link between religion and emancipation. It is the heart of the central thesis of our project: investigate on the relationship between religion and emancipation in modernity means to understand religion as a form of reflexivity that allows subjects to criticize the project of modernity in view of its incompletion. Therefore, we will study religion exclusively in terms of its contribution to the constitution of critical subjectivities. And we maintain that it is an important factor in this constitution, including in modernity. In order to develop this thesis, we refer to the political anthropology of Freud, for whom religion is the model of a collective practice protecting individual criticism against madness. Indeed, Freud demonstrates that the individualization of the subject in its relation to the law produces a new constellation: henceforth the conflict of the desiring subject with the instituting law (society) comes to express itself in the form of neurosis, even madness, where previously the collective (oscillating between respect for the taboo and transgression of the taboo) assumed this conflict. As a result, modern societies open up a double possibility: first, precisely the possibility of neurosis, even of madness. But secondly, it opens the possibility for a process of civilization that realizes itself by the reflexive self-constitution of societies through the return of individuals to the normativity that makes them think and act. By giving individuals a language of collective ideals - namely of justice - derived from common practices and conserved in texts, religion allows them to oppose the established law on the basis of these ideals. In this way, religion supports the critical movement of individuals by providing them with a language of shared justice, and which is shared although the normative scope of this language transcends justice achieved in concrete societies. This role of the religious language in its relation to critique will be examined by studying: 1) the worker’s movement and its ambiguous practical relation to religion; 2) the feminist movement, which radically challenges our research hypothesis of a strong link between monotheisms and the search for practical and symbolic fulcrums for politics of emancipation.