11:05 a.m.
Call for Papers
Merit, Worth, and Social Advancement in the Early Modern World: Rethinking Meritocracy as
a Category of Historical Analysis
University of Hamburg, 7–8 September 2026
Organised by Carolin Gluchowski (Universität Hamburg) and Asger Wienberg (Lund University)
Conceptual Framework
The term meritocracy is a modern one. Coined in the twentieth century and shaped by
debates about education, social mobility, expertise, and competition, it names a social
order in which offices, rewards, and opportunities are supposedly distributed according to
individual merit rather than inherited status or privilege. At the same time, the problems
to which the term speaks are much older. Long before “meritocracy” existed as a word or
political ideal, societies developed languages and practices for identifying, displaying,
rewarding, and contesting merit, worth, desert, deservingness, qualification, and fitness
for office.
Why the Early Modern Period?
This conference starts from the premise that the early modern period is a particularly
productive site from which to reconsider these questions. Between roughly 1500 and 1800,
older structures of lineage, privilege, corporate belonging, and inherited rank did not
simply disappear, but increasingly interacted with other criteria for advancement:
learning, service, confessional discipline, civility, usefulness, competence, performance,
and examinable skill. In many spheres of life, claims to social position, office,
education, patronage, and recognition had to be formulated, justified, assessed, and made
visible in new ways. The early modern world was therefore not “meritocratic” in any
straightforward modern sense. Yet it was deeply concerned with the problem of how worth
should be recognised, by whom, and according to which criteria.
Questions and Themes
The conference asks what historians gain by using meritocracy as an analytical category
for the study of the early modern world. Under what conditions does the concept help us
identify historical forms of valuation, selection, and advancement? Where does it obscure
more than it reveals? How can it be used without collapsing historically specific
vocabularies of virtue, honour, service, talent, discipline, or desert into a single
modern framework? And how did claims to merit relate to other principles of stratification
such as birth, patronage, wealth, confession, gender, race, and legal status?
We invite proposals that address these questions through close engagement with historical
sources and with the conceptual stakes of the topic. We are especially interested in
papers that examine how merit and worth were defined, narrated, institutionalised,
measured, or challenged in the early modern period. Relevant topics might include the
languages of merit, virtue, talent, qualification, and deservingness; practices of
recruitment, promotion, exclusion, and reward in courts, churches, schools, universities,
convents, guilds, academies, armies, charitable institutions, and bureaucracies; and the
documentary forms through which claims to advancement were articulated and evaluated,
including petitions, supplications, recommendations, examinations, testimonials, service
records, and applications. We also welcome work on the visual, material, and spatial
cultures of merit, such as portraits, inscriptions, monuments, honours, ceremonial
display, architecture, and other media through which worth was rendered legible and
socially effective.
Merit and Inequality
A central aim of the conference is to explore how supposedly universal claims to worth
were always shaped by structures of inclusion and exclusion. We are therefore particularly
interested in contributions that address the tension between merit and inequality: how
access to recognition depended on social origin, gender, confessional belonging, economic
resources, or imperial and colonial power; how institutions defined and regulated
“deserving” subjects; and how actors navigated, appropriated, or resisted such frameworks.
We also welcome papers that trace the interplay between older languages of virtue and
service and newer logics of competition, credentials, comparison, and performance.
Chronological and Geographical Scope
While the conference is centered firmly on the early modern period, contributions on
medieval antecedents or modern afterlives are welcome where they clearly illuminate early
modern formations or trace longer genealogies of merit and social advancement. Comparative
and global perspectives are likewise very welcome, especially where they complicate or
provincialise familiar European narratives. At the same time, we are not primarily seeking
papers that use “meritocracy” simply as a loose synonym for fairness, competition, or
qualification without engaging the concept’s historical and analytical specificity.
Format and Participation
The event will bring together approximately 10–12 participants for a two-day
workshop-style conference at the University of Hamburg. In addition to standard papers of
20–25 minutes, the programme may include a limited number of shorter lightning talks for
work in progress or conceptual interventions, as well as extended discussion sessions
designed to foster exchange across chronological, regional, and disciplinary boundaries. A
short excursion in Hamburg may also be included. Selected contributions may be considered
for publication in a themed journal issue. Subject to external funding, we expect to be
able to cover accommodation and at least part of participants’ travel and subsistence
costs.
Scholars at all career stages are invited to apply, and early-career researchers are
especially encouraged. The working language of the conference will be English.
Submission Details
Please submit a single PDF containing an abstract of 300–400 words outlining your
argument, sources, period, and engagement with meritocracy as an analytical category,
along with a short biographical note of no more than 150 words. Please indicate whether
you would prefer to present a full paper or a lightning talk.
Proposals should be sent by 15 April 2026 to
carolin.gluchowski(a)uni-hamburg.de
asger.wienberg(a)hist.lu.se