Close Distance. A History of Knowledge of European Merchant Colonies in the Levant, 17th to 19th century

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Cornel Zwierlein
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Classical, Roman, Christian and Islamic Archaeology ; History of Science
• Term: from 2018 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 402836780

The Merchant colonies of premodern trading Empires were not only Network nodes for Import and export of trading goods and other forms of economic exchange, they were also a very distinct form of epistemic units. At least for much parts of the literature concerned with the Levant trade and the (western) European actors active in it, research on the characteristics of the cultural and epistemical functions has been much neglected. The performances and functions of those merchant colonies on what concerns cultural communication and representation have been mostly in the shadow of a macrohistorical Braudelian or a microhistorical anti-Braudelian Mediterranean history concentrated foremost on the pure economic part of the realities. The project, being a small Sachbeihilfe unit in support of the Heisenberg Fellowship, aims at a contribution to the source analysis and research concerning the history of knowledge, of cultural production, of book possession, of proto-archaeological outreach and exchange with the missionaries of the English, French, comparitively also of the Italian and Dutch merchant colonies in the Levant between the 17th and the early 19th century. The main hypothesis and leading heuristical assumption, expressed with the oxymoron of ´Close Distance´, is that – after decades of stressing the ´hybrid´ and allegedly highly inter-connected forms cultural contact – we need not to reverse the picture completely but to fine-tune our analytical perspective: we have to re-concentrate on the hiatus, the cognitive distances between Western European merchants, their confessionalized, proto-bourgeois then proto-national culture exposed on Mediterranean shores in respect to their ´native´ environment, despite of a high degree of expertise and linguistical skills on what concerns the everyday exchange and trade with the Greeks, Ottomans, Armenians and others. It was perhaps just the power to maintain distance, to ignore each other to some degree, what created the characteristical forms of those proto-colonial and proto-imperial forms of coexistence. By collaboration and exchange with specialists for other world regions (Atlantic History, Indian Ocean), the results of the project are thought to contribute to a comparative cultural characteristics of different types of those merchant colonies of premodern European trading empires.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants