Cornel Zwierlein – författare

In this major study, the history of the French and British trading empires in the early modern Mediterranean is used as a setting to test a new approach to the history of ignorance: how can we understand the very act of ignoring - in political, economic, religious, cultural and scientific communication - as a fundamental trigger that sets knowledge in motion? Zwierlein explores whether the Scientific Revolution between 1650 and 1750 can be understood as just one of what were in fact many simultaneous epistemic movements and considers the role of the European empires in this phenomenon. Deconstructing central categories like the mercantilist 'national', the exchange of 'confessions' between Western and Eastern Christians and the bridging of cultural gaps between European and Ottoman subjects, Zwierlein argues that understanding what was not known by historical agents can be just as important as the history of knowledge itself.

In this major study, the history of the French and British trading empires in the early modern Mediterranean is used as a setting to test a new approach to the history of ignorance: how can we understand the very act of ignoring - in political, economic, religious, cultural and scientific communication - as a fundamental trigger that sets knowledge in motion? Zwierlein explores whether the Scientific Revolution between 1650 and 1750 can be understood as just one of what were in fact many simultaneous epistemic movements and considers the role of the European empires in this phenomenon. Deconstructing central categories like the mercantilist 'national', the exchange of 'confessions' between Western and Eastern Christians and the bridging of cultural gaps between European and Ottoman subjects, Zwierlein argues that understanding what was not known by historical agents can be just as important as the history of knowledge itself.

This book examines the tremendous growth of the number of libraries and the development of Western reading cultures in eighteenth-century Asia. Between 1756 and 1773, the Seven Years' War, the Battle of Plassey, the British East India Company’s acquisition of Bengal Diwani Rights, and the Regulating Act set the stage for the Second British Empire in Asia. Although the French had largely lost the geopolitical game in Asia, they remained numerous in Pondichéry and Bengal. A very different form of high-culture society, including significant institutions such as the first common law court of record outside of Britain, the Supreme Court, was established. With the arrival of more soldiers and company servants, a Franco-British cultural canon began to form abroad, traceable in serial post-mortem household inventory documentation and a large amount of more standardized libraries. A detailed analysis of late eighteenth-century bestsellers among Europeans in India until approximately 1800 reveals the emergence of a "world literature" in the ambiguous Goethean sense.

This book reconstructs the first attempts to integrate Europe and Asia in terms of newspaper distribution, reception, and news coverage during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The East India Companies shared news via the “overland route” from Aleppo through Persia to India by using professional runners, riders, and postal relay systems. This book reminds us of the special character of the European handwritten and printed newspapers in Italy, Germany, France, and England as a precondition for what merchants in India and the Levant were likely to miss abroad. Comparative sections address such newspapers’ relationship with the Moghul newsletter system (akhbārāt) and whether the European Enlightenment was “meeting” a global Indian Renaissance in terms of news circulation. The conclusion compares these Euro-Indian realities with similar handwritten news circulation and printed press in China and in the Americas.

This book reconstructs the first attempts to integrate Europe and Asia in terms of newspaper distribution, reception, and news coverage during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The East India Companies shared news via the “overland route” from Aleppo through Persia to India by using professional runners, riders, and postal relay systems. This book reminds us of the special character of the European handwritten and printed newspapers in Italy, Germany, France, and England as a precondition for what merchants in India and the Levant were likely to miss abroad. Comparative sections address such newspapers’ relationship with the Moghul newsletter system (akhbarat) and whether the European Enlightenment was “meeting” a global Indian Renaissance in terms of news circulation. The conclusion compares these Euro-Indian realities with similar handwritten news circulation and printed press in China and in the Americas.

This book examines the contents of libraries of Western individuals and trading companies in the Mediterranean and India between approximately 1600 and 1750. Relying on extensive archival research, it provides a rare contribution to global book history.The libraries studied are mostly small in scale, with very different scopes and characters. Catholic missionary libraries and the Mediterranean and British companies’ institutional libraries showed more standardization regarding the role books played in worship. In contrast, private libraries belonging to merchants, physicians, surgeons, scientific travellers, and ambassadors were characterized primarily by their owners’ professions.The volume also examines how policies like censorship shaped libraries. This may partially explain many libraries’ more conservative characters, which manifested in the lack of broader Jansenist or clearly visible early and advanced Enlightenment influences. This book considers the “otherness” of Western cultural presence abroad until 1750: Westerners were just another trading population entering those regions. Performing a kind of proto-segregation, in “close distance” to their hosts, they mostly read books by other Westerners.

This book examines the contents of libraries of Western individuals and trading companies in the Mediterranean and India between approximately 1600 and 1750. Relying on extensive archival research, it provides a rare contribution to global book history.The libraries studied are mostly small in scale, with very different scopes and characters. Catholic missionary libraries and the Mediterranean and British companies’ institutional libraries showed more standardization regarding the role books played in worship. In contrast, private libraries belonging to merchants, physicians, surgeons, scientific travellers, and ambassadors were characterized primarily by their owners’ professions.The volume also examines how policies like censorship shaped libraries. This may partially explain many libraries’ more conservative characters, which manifested in the lack of broader Jansenist or clearly visible early and advanced Enlightenment influences. This book considers the “otherness” of Western cultural presence abroad until 1750: Westerners were just another trading population entering those regions. Performing a kind of proto-segregation, in “close distance” to their hosts, they mostly read books by other Westerners.

For the last decade, early modern studies have significantly been reshaped by raising new and different questions on the uses of religion. This ‛religious turn’ has generated new discussion of the social processes at work in early modern Europe and their cultural effects ‑ from the struggle over religious rites and doctrines to the persecution of secret adherents to forbidden practices. The issue of religious pluralisation has been mostly debated in terms of dissent and escalation. But confessional controversy did not always erupt into hostilities over how to symbolize and perform the sacred nor lead to a paralysis of social agency. The order of the day may often have been to suspend confessional allegiances rather than enforce religious conflict, suggesting a pragmatic rather than polemic handling of religious plurality. This raises the urgent question of how 'normal' transconfessional and even transreligious interaction was produced in a context of highly sharpened and always present reflexivity on religious differences. Our volume takes up this question and explores it from an interdisciplinary and interconfessional perspective. The title “Forgetting Faith?” raises the question whether it was necessary or indeed possible to sidestep religious issues in specific contexts and for specific purposes. This does not mean, however, to describe early modern culture as a process of secularization. Rather, the collection invites discussion of the specific ways available to deal with confessional conflict in an oblivional mode, precisely because faith still mattered more than many other social paradigms emerging at that time, such as nationhood, ethnic origin or class defined through property.

For the last decade, early modern studies have significantly been reshaped by raising new and different questions on the uses of religion. This ‛religious turn’ has generated new discussion of the social processes at work in early modern Europe and their cultural effects ‑ from the struggle over religious rites and doctrines to the persecution of secret adherents to forbidden practices. The issue of religious pluralisation has been mostly debated in terms of dissent and escalation. But confessional controversy did not always erupt into hostilities over how to symbolize and perform the sacred nor lead to a paralysis of social agency. The order of the day may often have been to suspend confessional allegiances rather than enforce religious conflict, suggesting a pragmatic rather than polemic handling of religious plurality. This raises the urgent question of how ''normal'' transconfessional and even transreligious interaction was produced in a context of highly sharpened and always present reflexivity on religious differences. Our volume takes up this question and explores it from an interdisciplinary and interconfessional perspective. The title “Forgetting Faith?” raises the question whether it was necessary or indeed possible to sidestep religious issues in specific contexts and for specific purposes. This does not mean, however, to describe early modern culture as a process of secularization. Rather, the collection invites discussion of the specific ways available to deal with confessional conflict in an oblivional mode, precisely because faith still mattered more than many other social paradigms emerging at that time, such as nationhood, ethnic origin or class defined through property.

Machiavellismus seriös erforscht: Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft entdeckt gerade wieder die Politikgeschichte neu - als Kulturgeschichte des Politischen, als neue Politikgeschichte, als historische Politikforschung, als Geschichte der symbolischen Kommunikation. So kontrovers die Ansätze hierbei sind, so gibt es eine Gemeinsamkeit: bis auf wenige Ausnahmen will man offenbar von politischer Ideen- oder Diskursgeschichte wenig wissen, man überlässt dies den Politikwissenschaften. In diese Lücke stößt der vorliegende Band, der exemplarisch interdisziplinäre und internationale Forschungen zum Machiavellismus vom 16. bis ins 21. Jahrhundert vereint. Machiavellismus wird dabei jenseits des in den Quellen seit dem 16. Jahrhundert gängigen Schlagworts von der rücksichtslosen Politik der Machterhaltung als Chiffre für Kontingenz und Empirismus verwandt, die immer wieder in Krisenzeiten der Neuzeit Konjunktur hatte. Von der frühen Rezeption Machiavellis im deutschsprachigen Raum im 16. Jh. über die universitäre Politikwissenschaft im 17. Jh. (Conring) bis hin zur Neubewertung in der Historia literaria, in der Aufklärung und Revolutionszeit, dann von der Realpolitik des 19. Jhs. zum Fehlen eines nationalsozialistischen Machiavellis, zu Friedrich Meinecke, Hans Freyer und René König werden Schlaglichter auf den Umgang mit Machiavelli geworfen. Mit Reflexionen zur Stellung Machiavellis bei Foucault und in der Empire-Theorie von Hardt/Negri wird dann die Brücke zur aktuellen internationalen Diskussion geschlagen. Machiavelli wird so als Politikwissenschaftler, als früher Soziologe, als Republikaner, als Symbol des deutschen Sonderwegs, schließlich gar als Stichwortgeber der Antiglobalisierungs-Bewegung entdeckt.

In Early Modern times fires in populated areas represented one of the most catastrophic events that could occur. Fires destroyed all belongings, burned cities down to their foundations and served as warnings to all of the fallacy of trying to control nature. Fire insurance, an invention of the 17th century, was the forerunner of our modern insurance imperiums and one of the earliest forms of institutionalised observation and documentation of catastrophes. Cornel Zwierlein describes in this volume the extent, character and perception of large fire catastrophes that occurred in Early Modern times, the development of the principle of insurance and fire insurance in Germany and England from the 15th century up until the first signs of globalisation in the 19th century, from Istanbul over Calcutta/Bombay to the United States. This volume is a valuable contribution to the history of catastrophes and safety measures.

How can one study the absence of knowledge, the voids, the conscious and unconscious unknowns through history? Investigations into late medieval and early modern practices of measuring, of risk calculation, of ignorance within financial administrations, of conceiving the docta ignorantia as well as the silence of the illiterate are combined with contributions regarding knowledge gaps within identification procedures and political decision-making, with the emergence of consciously delimited blanks on geographical maps, with ignorance as a factor embedded in iconographic programs, in translation processes and the semantic potentials of reading. Based on thorough archival analysis, these selected contributions from conferences at Harvard and Paris are tightly framed by new theoretical elaborations that have implications beyond these cases and epochal focus. Contributors: Giovanni Ceccarelli, Taylor Cowdery, Lucile Haguet, John T. Hamilton, Lucian Hölscher, Moritz Isenmann, Adam J. Kosto, Marie-Laure Legay, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, Fabrice Micallef, William T. O´Reilly, Eleonora Rohland, Mathias Schmoeckel, Daniel L. Smail, Govind P. Sreenivasan, and Cornel Zwierlein.

Migration is a problem of highest importance today, and likewise is its history. Italian migrants who had to leave the peninsula in the long sixteenth century because of their heterodox Protestant faith is a topic that has its deep roots in Italian Renaissance scholarship since Delio Cantimori: It became a part of a twentieth century form of Italian leyenda negra in liberal historiography. But its international dimension and Central Europe (not only Germany) as destination of that movement has often been neglected. Three different levels of connectivity are addressed: the materiality of communication (travel, printing, the diffusion of books and manuscripts); individual migrants and their biographies and networks; and the cultural transfers, discourses, and ideas migrating in one or in both directions.

Early modern travelers often did not form part of classic ‘diaspora’ communities: they frequently never really settled, perhaps remaining abroad for some time in one place, then traveling further; not ‘blown by the wind,’ but by changing and complex conditions that often turned out to make them unwelcome anywhere. The dispersed developed strategies of survival by keeping their distance from old and new temporary ‘homes,’ as well as by using information from and manipulating foreign representations of their former countries.This volume assembles case studies from the Mediterranean context, the Americas and Japan. They explore what kind of ‘power(s)’ and agency dispersed people had, counterintuitively, through the connections they maintained with their former homes, and through those they established abroad.Contributors: Eduardo Angione, Iordan Avramov, Marloes Cornelissen, David Do Paço, José Luis Egío, Maria-Tsampika Lampitsi, Paula Manstetten, Simon Mills, David Nelson, Adolfo Polo y La Borda, Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Cesare Santus, Stefano Saracino, and Cornel Zwierlein.