CV

BiograMarkus Christian Hansen is a postdoc at the Byzantine Studies Research Center and is associated with the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. He holds a PhD in History from Lund University (2025). Markus is interested in agrarian history, manorialism, lordship, and social transformation from the medieval to the early modern periods, as well as in questions of historical method and theory. He works at the intersection of social, intellectual, and economic history. His research is funded by the STINT foundation. From August 2027 onwards, Markus will be an MSCA postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social and Economic History at the University of Vienna. He studied at Aarhus University, St Andrews, and Cambridge University.

Project Description

Markus is currently working on a comparative historical project that aims to show how pre-industrial Europe can best be conceived of not as "feudal" or "tributary", but "absolutist", in the sense that the social actions that most elite actors engaged in were decisively shaped by the ability to integrate themselves into the state. This state elite complex thus created a very particular form of social and economic rationality, which we otherwise tend to identify as belonging to the early modern period. The Byzantine case here occupies a central position, as it stands as probably the best example of this dynamic in the medieval world.