The ESSHCs are bi-annual gatherings of historians and social scientists of different fields. The latest conferences in The Hague in 2002 and in Berlin in 2004 were attended respectively by 900 and 1350 scholars (numbers including professors and other senior scholars as well as younger participants and graduate students). The Elite Network of the ESSHC hosts sessions concerning the history of cultural, political and economic elites. A comparative approach between different historical case studies is favoured, as well as proposals open to multi-disciplinary discussion.

Furthermore, proposals for complete sessions are welcome, but the network chairs want to encourage single paper contributions as well, since there are good opportunities to find a place for individual papers in some of the proposed sessions (listed below), or in some still forthcoming session proposals (if you have an idea and a couple of interested speakers for it, please contact us). In addition, if you are able to participate to the conference not only as a paper author, but also as a session chair or a discussant, please be kind enough to let us know. There's always a lack of volunteers for that honorary function.

In the end of February 2005 the proposed (i.e., possible or likely) session themes for the ESSHC 2006 Elite Network are the following ones. Please note that the number of sessions that will actually be arranged depends on the number of proposed papers -- in other words, the list is very preliminary, and some themes can still drop out while other themes can pop in. Some of the themes are already familiar from the 2004 Elite Network, while some of them are new. The current list of session ideas is as follows:

• Cultural Networks in Early Modern Europe
• Enlightened Loyalties: The Conceptual Construction of National, Cultural and Political Identities and Loyalties in North-Western Europe, 1750–1800
• Church and Nation in the 18th Century
• Elites and Agricultural Progress, 16th–20th Centuries
• Napoleonic Elites in Europe
• Gendered Elites?
• The Cultural Identities of Urban Elites, 16th–20th Centuries
• From Estates to Nations
• Traditional Elites in the 19th-century Post-Revolutionary Europe
• Political Power of Economic Elites
• Opposition, Resistance and Strategies of Survival of the Traditional Elites in the 20th Century.

Please send your session proposals, single paper proposals and questions to Mr. Jouko Nurmiainen (e-mail address provided in the contact information, below), either as plain text or as an attachment (preferred file type is RTF). You can also contact the other network chair, Ms. Anu Lahtinen (anu.lahtinen@utu.fi). Allow us some time to respond; if we have not responded after a week or two, please mail again (in a world of spam it is always possible that mail messages get lost).

In addition, you should also send your paper abstracts to the IISH conference secretariate (ehi@iisg.nl) to pre-register to the conference in time. The deadline for this is 1 May 2005. More information is available at the conference website http://www.iisg.nl/esshc and at the page of the Elite Network (web address provided below).

The Elite Network of the 6th ESSHC wishes you well and look forward to seeing your proposals and meeting you in Amsterdam in spring 2006!