Cornel Zwierlein - Böcker

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.

The Seven Years' War, the Battle of Plassey won against the Nawab of Bengal, the acquisition of the Bengal Diwani Rights and the Act of Regulating set the stage for the Second British Empire in Asia between 1756 and 1773. These events and the growing settlements had brought an ever-increasing number of soldiers to Bengal and the other factories of India. The French had largely lost the geopolitical game in Asia, but remained numerous in Pondichéry and even in Bengal (Chandannagar).The cultural history of these major shifts in global power deserves more attention: an increase in the number of European libraries abroad is not surprising for either nation. But the British case is special: a very different form of high culture society was now established in Calcutta, with the first common law court of record ever established outside Britain, the Supreme Court. A long tradition and recent scholarship have largely clarified our ideas about how political-economic leaders like Warren Hastings and major scholars like William Jones supported and influenced the study of Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts and indigenous legal traditions at this moment. But the book also shows that at the same time, as Europe's population grew, a more standardized form of libraries and a Western reading culture emerged. With the arrival of more soldiers and company servants, a Western world canon began to form. This differed from the period up to 1750 in the Mediterranean and India, studied in the first volume Western Libraries and Reading, where a multiplicity of small libraries, individual in size and selection, prevailed. One of the first massive manifestations of this Western canon, with a particularly Franco-British character, can be traced in the serial documentation of post-mortem household inventories. The results of a first detailed analysis of the bestsellers of the late eighteenth century among Europeans in India until 1800 are surprising: A "world literature" in the ambiguous Goethean sense becomes visible, and almost no European medieval author survives (until nineteenth-century Romanticism). In today's world, a "Western canon" is usually criticized, debated, and decentered, and with good reason, but as a historical process, the impact of such an imported canon cannot be ignored. No one denies the strong dynamics of autonomous forms of print and reading culture now emerging simultaneously in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, and many other languages, sometimes hybridizing with British production. To some extent, however, it must also be acknowledged that British Bengal early on provided an immense space for this Western canon abroad, comparable ultimately only to the American East Coast.

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.

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.

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.