Workshop 6: The Informational Fabric of the Premodern Mediterranean, 1400-1800
Abstract
For millennia, the Mediterranean was a crossroads of continuous interactions and
exchanges between Christians of various creeds (Catholic, Orthodox, and Copt), Jews (of
various denominations), and Muslims (of various creeds); by bringing together three
continents and a multiplicity of political forms (imperial centres and peripheries, kingdoms,
principalities, oligarchic republics and free cities), the Mediterranean served as a contact zone that facilitated religious exchange and interaction. The “inner sea”, thus, provides an ideal setting to examine the construction, circulation and uses of information (a) across and within diverse ethno-religious communities, (b) between political entities and institutions, and (c) within the processes of the constitution of institutions and what has been termed “state building”. The kaleidoscopic history of the countries and people populating Mediterranean shores necessitated the formation of dense and complex informational networks that allowed for the constant flow of people, goods, and ideas. These networks shaped, in fact, the relations between political entities and actors, and contributed to the creation of political spheres characterized by its specific discourses, forms of deliberations in decision-making processes. Often, such networks facilitated the circulation of divisive discourses that articulated the region as religiously torn and divided, separating self-contained entities and bounded religious communities. Such articulations, however, did not exclude indeed intensified forms of coexistence, shared political spheres, and intense interaction. The aim of this workshop is to examine the history of Mediterranean informational networks in the period roughly from 1400 to 1800. In doing so, we intend to explore both the kinds of information such networks made available – religious, social or political – and the historical actors – individual, collective or institutional – that produced, diffused, collected and selected information. We will also examine the networks’ mechanics and the tissues of connectivity they established, which linked together three continents as well as various ethnicities and religions. Understanding who produced and distributed information, and how information flowed and transformed, would help illuminate both what social communities and political and religious institutions knew about events taking place across the sea and the conditions in which information and knowledge circulated. Finally, by examining the process of information production, its circulation, diffusion and usages, we would shed light on the mediation of difference across distance and on the ways in which this intense informational flow contributed to the fabric of a shared Mediterranean political sphere.
Description
The Mediterranean provides an ideal setting to examine interaction and circulation of
information across and within diverse ethno-religious communities (Braudel, Horden and
Purcell). For millennia, the “inner sea” was the home to continuous interaction and exchange between Christians of various creeds (Catholic, Orthodox, and Copt), Jews, and Muslims; the sea brings together three continents and a multiplicity of political forms (imperial centres and peripheries, kingdoms, principalities, oligarchic republics and free cities). The kaleidoscopic nature of political organization and ethno-religious diversity led to the formation of shifting political alliances driven by the demand of Realpolitik, thus cutting through religious boundaries. During their struggles with the Ottomans, the Mamluks did not hesitate to turn to the Genoese for help; Moroccan sultans struck agreements with Spain against Ottoman Algiers and vice-versa; and the French King and the Venetians were for long stretches of time at peace with the Ottomans. Ideology, however, played an important role in cladding and clouding these relations with idioms of crusade and jihad. This tension between exchange and collaboration on the one hand, and religious and political conflict on the other, led to the formation of complex informational networks that wove webs of connectivity, linking the people who populated the sea’s shores and allowing for the constant flow of people, goods,and ideas.
As much as information circulated widely, political (royal bureaucracies, princely authorities or municipal institutions), social (the family), and religious (the inquisition) institutions constantly sought ways to be better informed about friend and foe as well as enabling them to control their own subjects in distant lands. Professional and lay informants answered that need: soldiers and spies (Sola), pirates and corsairs (Greene), merchants and consuls (Boulanger, Steensgaard, Trivellato), captives and slaves (Colley, Matar, Weiss), missionaries, pilgrims and converts (Bennassar, Rodríguez Mediano, García-Arenal)constantly criss-crossed the sea – both as active producers of social, political or religious knowledge, and yet also as passive bodies inscribed with useful information. Some of these travelers were experts, professionals or charlatans (claiming expertise), who produced knowledge about the cultures they brokered (Rothman); others were laymen, who without ever claiming expertise, participated in the constant flow of information, which in the right hands was transformed into applicable knowledge. These boundary crossers produced and distributed news and rumours in print, manuscripts as well as orally. They sent letters, published pamphlets or produced on a regular basis, as novellanti, handwritten or printed avvisi for important people and institutions who incorporated them into their decision-making processes (Di Vivo, Petitjean, Zwierlein). Much information, however, was transmitted orally in rumours, interviews or investigations and thus remains more elusive for the historian. In examining the nature of Mediterranean informational networks, we will address the dynamics that structured the relations between information-hungry institutions and various agents who produced and circulated information. The flow of news and rumours transformed its couriers, the objects of the information, as well as the institutions that hunted it and were haunted by it. The claim to possess information, or to know, bestowed status and power and granted economic favours on the claimants. For institutions it provided a foothold across the sea in the enemy’s land. Political bureaucracies, for example, gained power by laying their hands on strategic information deemed crucial for the security of the polity (Voigt). Circulation of rumour about family members, who converted to Islam in the early modern Maghrib, enabled Spanish or Italian families to establish and reestablish communal and kinship boundaries. Such information, however, often made its way to the Inquisition, a religious institution notorious in its search for knowledge of religious subjectivities and dissent, allowing inquisitors to follow the religious conduct of Catholics living under Muslim dominion. Likewise, when Muslims enslaved in Christendom wrote home reporting and often complaining about the conditions of their enslavement and what they perceived as the violation of their religious privilege, they put in motion diplomatic negotiations and affected the lives of Christians held captive in the Maghrib (Kaiser). By reconstructing and analyzing trajectories of information production and flow, the movements of its brokers and how institutions received and interpreted it, we seek to re-historicize binary understandings of the Mediterranean that reify it as a political and religious boundary (Dakhlia, Shryock) and to give way to a much more open understanding of the informational fabric of a shared political and cultural world.
Outcomes
The purpose of the workshop is three-fold: (1) to provide a forum for leading international scholars of the history of information within the context of the Mediterranean to discuss recent developments in this emerging field; (2) to produce individual and comparative scholarly contributions based on concrete cases; and (3) to publish an edited volume based on the contributions of the participants and the organizers. Scholars from relevant disciplines (history, literature, art history, historical anthology and sociology, etc.) would submit empirically-grounded papers focusing on the period from roughly 1400 to 1800 and on the Mediterranean region (North Africa, Iberia, France and Italy, the Balkans and the Middle East). Participants would focus on informational networks within and across empires and smaller polities as well as various ethno-religious communities. We are especially interested in contributions that take a comparative approach (Burke III), or that of connected history (Subrahmanyam). Papers would address one or various aspects of the following clusters of questions:
1. Who were the individuals who formed networks of information in the Mediterranean?
What were the relations between the merchants and consuls, soldiers and spies, captives and slaves, pilgrims, missionaries and converts who played an instrumental role in the production of circulation of information across the sea?
Were there specialized cadres who made a professional job of producing information agents or carrying news?
Why did individuals produce and circulate information and how were they transformed in the process?
2. What kind of institutions (for example, the family, political bureaucracies, the
inquisition, consulates, etc.) sought information? How did they solicit it and how did they manage parallel, often competing, channels of information?
What were the uses information was put to and how did information of various origins shape and reshape
social and political culture?
3. What were the relations between institutions that sought, selected, and used information and informational networks?
What role did institutions play in shaping informational networks and determining the kinds of information distributed?
What kind of networks did institutions foster and why did they limit other forms of distribution of information?
4. What kind of effect did informational networks have on the space across which they
stretched? This question could be addressed both historically and from a historiographical point of view. Papers could explore how networks of information socially shaped the Mediterranean; alternatively, they could examine the ways in which news and rumour shaped the ways in which the Mediterranean was perceived by early modern subjects, and by contemporary historians.
Page last updated on 04 September 2018