Deadline: May 15, 2025
1 Postdoc Position (0,8 fte): ‘Imperial Monetary Flows’
The postdoc will become part of the OCW startersbeurs-funded project ‘Reevaluting Conceptions of Imperial Monetary Flow: New Methodologies and Frameworks’, led by Dr. Liesbeth Claes (PI) and Dr. Isaac Scarborough (co-PI). The expected starting date is 1 September 2025; the postdoc position will last for 2 years and 4 months (ending on December 31, 2027).
Project description:
This project suggests a reconceptualisation of pre- and non-capitalist imperial monetary policy, arguing that the existing literature about imperial financial flows has unnecessarily privileged ideas of largesse and seemingly chaotic monetary distribution. Using the divergent cases of the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union, however, this project argues that by tracking existing monetary flows (in the form of issued coinage in the Roman Imperial period and tax balance sheets in the Soviet 1950s-1980s), a more complex picture appears. This new framework for imperial monetary policy includes clear intentionality and directed investment, problematising the existing literature and expanding knowledge about how financial flows and monetary policy have been directed in imperial contexts. The project aims to foster new cross-imperial comparative methodologies to better understand imperial financial flows, monetary agencies, trade balances, and modes of economic development.
We are looking for a postdoctoral candidate to work directly on these methodologies and models: to consider the broad scope of Roman finances, Soviet budgetary policy, and other imperial monetary unions, and consider places of overlap, conceptual synergy, and largescale similarity. The postdoctoral fellow will work closely with a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative data from many different imperial settings, and should be comfortable extrapolating and abstracting from individual contextual settings to larger theoretical arguments. The postdoctoral researcher is expected to bring a critical eye to existing narratives of imperial economic development and finance, and to work with the PI and co-PI to consider how novel models of finance in such settings may reframe global histories of empire.