Browse

This book explores the intersecting worlds of those who regularly traversed the early modern Venetian–Ottoman frontier, including colonial migrants, redeemed slaves, merchants, commercial brokers, religious converts, and diplomatic interpreters. In their sustained interactions across linguistic, religious, and political lines these trans-imperial subjects helped to shape shifting imperial and cultural boundaries, including the emerging distinction between Europe and the Levant. The book argues that the period from 1570 to 1670 witnessed a gradual transformation in how Ottoman difference was conceived within Venetian institutions. Thanks in part to the activities of trans-imperial subjects, an early emphasis on juridical and commercial criteria gave way to conceptions of difference based on religion and language. The book begins the story in Venice’s bustling marketplaces, where commercial brokers often defied the state’s efforts both to tax foreign merchants and define Venetian citizenship. The story continues in a Venetian charitable institution where converts from Islam and Judaism and their Catholic Venetian patrons negotiated their mutua!Sl transformation. It ends with Venice’s diplomatic interpreters, the dragomans, who not only produced and disseminated knowledge about the Ottomans but also created dense networks of kinship and patronage across imperial boundaries. The book’s new conceptual and empirical framework sheds light on institutional practices for managing juridical, religious, and ethnolinguistic difference in the Mediterranean and beyond.

Early in the eighteenth century, in the French colony of Pondichéry, India, a man’s life was thrust into turmoil. A Tamil commercial broker named Nayiniyappa, the colony’s most powerful local man, was arrested, swiftly convicted of tyranny and sedition, and died in prison while serving out his sentence. But following his death a global mobilization effort on his behalf ensued, and the French King exonerated Nayiniyappa posthumously. The struggle over this man’s guilt or innocence drew into debate merchants of the French trading company, the Compagnie des Indes, Catholic missionaries of various orders, high ranking officials in Paris and Versailles, and local families in Pondichéry. As they fought over Nayiniyappa’s fate, they also articulated radically different visions of the French colonial project in India. This microhistory of the affair and the fault lines it reveals shows that conflicts between and within the projects of trade and religion were a defining feature of the little-known French empire in South Asia.

Heaven’s Wrath explores the religious thought and religious rites of the early Dutch Atlantic world. The book argues that the Reformed Church and the West India Company forged and maintained a close union, with considerable consequences. Merchants, officers, sailors, and soldiers found in their faith an ideology and justification for mercantile, martial activities. The company, on the other hand, supported the church financially in Europe and helped spread Calvinism to other continents. Calvinist employees and colonists both benefitted from the familiar, comforting aspects of religious instruction and public worship. But the church-company union had a destructive side, too: Calvinists became the instruments of divine wrath in fighting Catholic enemies and punishing sinners and non-conformers in colonial courts, all of which imposed costs that the small Dutch Republic and its people-strapped colonies could not afford. At the same time, the Reformed Church in the Netherlands contributed to problems later blamed on the West India Company because the church kept an iron grip on colonial hires, publications, and organization. Heaven’s Wrath shows that the expense of the Calvinist-backed war and the church’s meticulous, worried management of colonial affairs hampered the mission and reduced the size and import of the Dutch Atlantic world.

This book looks at the questions of state- and nation-building in interwar Central Europe. Ever since Hitler annexed his native Austria to Germany in 1938, the term “Anschluss” has been linked to Nazi expansionism. The legacy of Nazism has cast a long shadow not only over the idea of the union of German-speaking lands but also over German nationalism in general. Due to the horrors unleashed by the Third Reich, German nationalism has seemed virulently exclusionary, and Anschluss inherently antidemocratic. However, as the text makes clear, nationalism and the desire to redraw Germany's boundaries were not solely the prerogatives of the political right. Focusing on the supporters of the embattled Weimar and First Austrian Republics, this book argues that support for an Anschluss and belief in the großdeutsch idea (the historical notion that Germany should include Austria) were central to republicans' persistent attempts to legitimize democracy. With appeals to a großdeutsch tradition, republicans fiercely contested their opponents' claims that democracy and Germany, socialism and nationalism, Jew and German, were mutually exclusive categories. They aimed at nothing less than creating their own form of nationalism, one that stood in direct opposition to the destructive visions of the political right. By challenging the oft-cited distinction between “good” civic and “bad” ethnic nationalisms and drawing attention to the energetic efforts of republicans to create a cross-border partnership to defend democracy, the book emphasizes that the triumph of Nazi ideas about nationalism and politics was far from inevitable.

Coinage and currency—abstract and socially created units of value and power—were basic to early modern society. By controlling money, the people sought to understand and control their complex, expanding, and interdependent world. This book investigates the creation and circulation of currency in France. The royal Cour des Monnaies centralized monetary administration, expanding its role in the emerging modern state during the sixteenth century and assuming new powers as an often controversial repository of theoretical and administrative expertise. The Cour des Monnaies, the book shows, played an important role in developing the contemporary understanding of money, as a source of both danger and opportunity at the center of economic and political life. More practically, the Monnaies led generally successful responses to the endemic inflation of the era and the monetary chaos of a period of civil war. Its work investigating and prosecuting counterfeiters shone light into a picaresque world of those who used the abstract and artificial nature of money for their own ends. The book's broad, multidimensional portrait of money in early modern France also encompasses the literature of the age, in which money's arbitrary and dangerous power was a major theme.

During the Renaissance, the Venetian Mediterranean empire stretched from the lagoon city’s shores to the island of Cyprus. This vast empire was governed by aristocratic men: educated as humanists, they were sent out into the empire armed with ancient geographies and classical epics. Once there, they married women who were their own subjects, and in doing so crossed the boundaries of ethnic and religious identity which divided the early modern Mediterranean world. An Intimate Empire undertakes the first study of this relationship between humanism, empire, and family. Mining private writings, humanist geographies, letters, and extensive archival documentation, the book takes an intimate view into the emotions and subjectivities of imperial governors. It finds that it was within intimate life that one’s relationship to empire – to its politics, its shifting social structures, its metropolitan and colonial cultures – was determined.