The Making and Unmaking of Identities in the Early Modern Mediterranean

• Department of History
• Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies
• Decentering Eurocentrism

Join a workshop organised by the Department of History and Civilisation with the support of the EUI Decentering Eurocentrism Interdisciplinary Research Cluster and the Max Weber Programme.

When and how did identity matter in the early modern Mediterranean? How were they created and dissolved? In the past twenty years, historiography has defined the early modern Mediterranean as a region in flux where categories of belonging and classification were continuously created, contested, and remade according to political, economical, and social circumstances. This workshop questions the trend of seeing the Mediterranean merely as a space of coexistence and fluidity and aims to foster new insights and methodological approaches to the historical studies on the early modern Mediterranean.

Recent scholarship has reconceptualised the Mediterranean as a shared world and challenged long-time narratives based on fixed and binary national, cultural, and religious boundaries within the region. For example, in contrast to the seemingly fixed institutional and legal identities, scholars have discussed the fluidity of individual identities on the ground, from those of religious converts, to long-distance merchants and political elites. However, this new scholarship also tends to foster the image of the Mediterranean as an exceptional context defined by notions of hybridity and fluidity. Using identity as a methodological framework, this workshop builds on these discussions and seeks a middle ground between the two narratives. When and how did people across the Mediterranean defend their identitarian boundaries? When did showing/claiming an identity become a necessity? When did people lose their identity? We anticipate new insights from reconsidering these terms and demanding attention to the concepts of difference and diversity in different political and religious groups.