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.
