Consuls-of-State and the Redemption of Slaves: The Dutch Republic and the Western Mediterranean, 1616–1651

Itinerario ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-90
Author(s):  
Erica Heinsen-Roach
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Local Conditions ◽  
Global Commerce ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Customary Practices

At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch Republic developed a trade empire of global proportions. The Dutch government played a substantial role in building and sustaining merchant enterprises by allowing chartered companies to act on its behalf. In the Mediterranean, however, the authorities relied on a variety of commercial-diplomatic agents to promote commerce. This article argues that Dutch consuls in the western Mediterranean transformed from merchant-consuls into state-representatives and played a crucial role in sustaining diplomatic relations with states in the Maghreb. By comparing the conditions under which consuls liberated captives in Algiers and Morocco during the first half of the seventeenth century, the article examines how consuls continuously had to adjust their mission to the interests of different institutions and individuals. The article concludes that the expansion of Dutch global commerce in the Mediterranean did not evolve according to a standard script but in consuls’ interactions with local conditions and customary practices. The article contributes to the New Diplomatic History that emphasizes how successful diplomatic relations in the early modern world depended on a range of different diplomatic actors who created forms of state diplomacy beyond treaty making and alliances.

The Sixteenth-Century World War and the Roots of the Modern World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Northwest Africa ◽  
Military Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Military

This essay examines several world historical events from an unfamiliar perspective, that of sixteenth-century Morocco. It seeks to provide a new way of conceptualizing empires, one that builds upon recent work, while imagining them differently. As a key player in the struggle over the western Mediterranean, Morocco’s neglected history has much to tell us about both the power and the limits of the military revolution of early modern times. Moreover, Morocco’s success in withstanding Iberian efforts to extend the reconquista to Northwest Africa served to deflect the expansionary energies across the Atlantic and around Africa. More generally, Morocco provides a useful vantage point for thinking about the emergence of the international structures of power that define the early modern world.

Nieuwe diplomatieke geschiedenis van de premoderne tijd

2014 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 541-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurits Ebben ◽  
Louis Sicking
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Dimensions ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
Territorial States ◽  
Cultural Turn

Abstract New Diplomatic History in the Premodern Age. An IntroductionThe study of medieval and early modern diplomacy has long been considered one of the most conservative subdisciplines in the field of history. During the last three decades, however, diplomatic history has undergone profound changes. This introductory article shows how these changes were triggered by developments in other disciplines and happened under the influence of the cultural turn. Until recently most general histories of diplomacy were based on the conceptions of Donald Queller and, more particularly, of Garrett Mattingly. Scholars working on medieval and early modern history have applied new international relations theories and moved away from analyses that were strictly oriented towards diplomatic relations between sovereign territorial states. The cultural turn gave rise to a range of innovations in diplomatic history, leading historians to focus on the diplomatic process and its cultural dimensions rather than on the results of diplomatic activity. The special issue for which this article serves as an introduction shows that historians working in the Netherlands have also been influenced by these developments.

Building with Water:

2019 ◽  
Vol 78 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-166
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Kassler-Taub
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Mediterranean Basin ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Alternative Path ◽  
Western Mediterranean Basin ◽  
New Strategy ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The City

From the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, military engineers in the Mediterranean devised a new strategy for defending a city built on a peninsular site: a navigable canal was excavated through the neck of the landmass, severing the city from the coast and isolating it within the sea. In Building with Water: The Rise of the Island-City in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Elizabeth Kassler-Taub traces the development and dissemination of this overlooked urban type. She details how the “island-city” first emerged in the Adriatic and Ionian territories of the Venetian stato da mar and later swept across Spanish and Portuguese outposts in the western Mediterranean basin, where it was absorbed into a shared Iberian vernacular. By reconstructing the circulation of the island-city through this sprawling network of colonial frontiers, Kassler-Taub argues, we can chart an alternative path of architectural influence in the region, one that shifts our attention beyond the Italian and Spanish mainlands.

Diplomacy

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Time Window ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Regular Feature ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Many

Early modern Europe witnessed profound changes in the institutions, conduct, and personnel of diplomatic relations between polities. In general, there was a shift to diplomacy becoming a constant, regular activity of the state, and, bureaucracies, protocols, and archives related to the conduct of diplomacy emerged across Europe. While it was far from universal, the exchange of resident ambassadors, attached to foreign courts and governments more or less permanently, became a regular feature in European statecraft. Many diplomatic exchanges remained ad hoc, carried out by extraordinary envoys, and asymmetric diplomacy was still common into the 17th century. Although genuine professionalism in diplomatic service was hard to detect, by the end of the 17th century the major European states had developed secretariats of state and foreign ministries, sectors of government dedicated to the prosecution of overseas affairs. A genuine “culture of diplomacy” was in place. This view of an emerging modern European diplomacy was shaped, and largely remains so, by a seminal work from the mid-20th century, Garret Mattingly’s Renaissance Diplomacy, first published in 1955. While Mattingly did not evince a comprehensively Burckhardtian break between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, he did locate the origins of modern diplomacy in 15th century Italy, with the use of residency by Italian territorial states. He saw the Habsburgs as the chief heirs to the Italian diplomatic system in the 16th century, with a Europe-wide model based on the principle of balance of power in place after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The bibliography that follows reflects the deep and abiding influence of Mattingly’s state-centered model, but also the many innovations and departures associated with the “new diplomatic history.” This recent work has embraced a more expansive understanding of what constitutes diplomacy, who qualifies as a diplomatic agent, how diplomatic sources should be interpreted, and what facets of diplomatic exchanges are worthy of study. In so doing it has complicated and refined Mattingly’s vision. Several of the sections below concern specific historiographical thrusts of the new diplomatic history. The best work in early modern diplomatic history, however, remains rooted in the extraordinary richness of its source material, especially the millions of pages of correspondence that provide a real-time window into the early modern world. Vincent Ilardi, who did so much to bring attention to the enormous promise of examining Renaissance Italian diplomatic correspondence, once wrote, paraphrasing Braudel and with tongue wedged only half in cheek, that Renaissance diplomatic history might in fact offer a sort of histoire totale. There is something in it for everyone.

Ransoming Captives

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-123
Author(s):  
Adam Teller
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
Land Of Israel

This chapter describes the process of ransoming Jewish captives. Jewish captives had to be ransomed with money raised by the Jewish communities themselves and paid by them to the captors. Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Jewish society succeeded in creating a broad transregional economic network whose goal was to ransom its members being held captive to be sold as slaves. Largely centered in Venice, from where much of the fundraising was organized, the Jewish ransoming network had other important hubs, particularly in Istanbul and Livorno. This network had grown and developed in the decades before 1648, but it was the flood of eastern European Jewish captives that really put it to the test and tightened the connections between its various components. The ransoming crisis also led to tensions with a second Jewish transregional economic network that was active in the Mediterranean: one tasked with raising funds to support Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. The chapter then assesses why ransoming captives was so important for the Jews of the early modern world, looking at Jewish law and Jewish culture.

Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects: A Study in the Solomonic Tradition. The Magic in History Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, xi, 235 pp., 19 b/w images, 2 tables.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 252-254
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
State University ◽  
Eastern Culture ◽  
Historical Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Objects ◽  
The Middle Ages

Throughout times, magic and magicians have exerted a tremendous influence, and this even in our (post)modern world (see now the contributions to Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2017; here not mentioned). Allegra Iafrate here presents a fourth monograph dedicated to magical objects, primarily those associated with the biblical King Solomon, especially the ring, the bottle which holds a demon, knots, and the flying carpet. She is especially interested in the reception history of those symbolic objects, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, both in western and in eastern culture, that is, above all, in the Arabic world, and also pursues the afterlife of those objects in the early modern age. Iafrate pursues not only the actual history of King Solomon and those religious objects associated with him, but the metaphorical objects as they made their presence felt throughout time, and this especially in literary texts and in art-historical objects.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Dutch Golden Age

This book investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focusses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, its language, and the historical context in which it originated. The book charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism, to determine whether Spinoza’s work on the Bible had any bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should engage with Scripture. Spinoza has received massive attention, both inside and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly over the decades. So has that of fellow ‘radicals’ (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. This book inverts this perspective and looks at how the Dutch Republic digested biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. It takes into account the highly neglected area of the Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The result is that Dutch ecclesiastical history, up until now the preserve of the partisan scholarship of confessionalized church historians, is brought into dialogue with Early Modern intellectual currents. This book concludes that Spinoza, rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity, acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates in Dutch society, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly, at all times, on all levels.

The Paradox of “A High Standard of Public Honesty”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kennedy ◽  
Ronald Kroeze
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
High Standard ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Patronage Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter takes as its starting point the contemporary idea that the Netherlands is one of the least corrupt countries in the world; an idea that it dates back to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In this chapter, the authors explain how corruption was controlled in the Netherlands against the background of the rise and fall of the Dutch Republic, modern statebuilding and liberal politics. However, the Dutch case also presents some complexities: first, the decrease in some forms of corruption was due not to early democratization or bureaucratization, but was rather a side-effect of elite patronage-politics; second, although some early modern forms of corruption disappeared around this period, new forms have emerged in more recent times.

The Oxford History of Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Korean Peninsula ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
North West ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400–1400? How was the past understood in religious, social, and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes chapters on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.

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