Two Mediterranean specialists explore the mobility that have deployed since the evictions of the Jews at XVe century to the beginnings of colonization. They describe displacements which then constitute the standard, and participate in the construction of hierarchical companies.
Mediterranean studies are a very popular field of investigation. Whole journals – the authors count no less than 13 founded between 1985 and 2005 – are notably devoted to this geographic area. Hence the importance of precise synthetic work, and the usefulness of the work of Guillaume Calafat and Mathieu Grenet, who guides readers through numerous, multilingual publications, but also stratified by significant historiography.
Of course, this term of utility should not be reduced in a reductive way, because one of the great merits of the work is its analytical dimension. The book is based on necessary choices, defining a wide field of investigation (the mobility of people and the condition of foreigners in the Mediterranean space in modern times) ; as well as a historiographical and linguistic horizon explicitly delimited (for example historiography on the Muslim world is mainly reached through European languages). However from the collection of selected cases emerge from fundamental interpretative choices and the research avenues formulated or suggested by the authors. Four points, in particular, deserve to be underlined.
Neither clash of civilizations nor unification of the Mediterranean
The first element concerns the overcoming of a sometimes binary logic of the analysis of the economic, social and political structures of the Mediterranean. The authors affirm that neither the shock of civilizations – an expression which presupposes the existence of defined, distinct and a priori different entities – nor the rhetoric of mixture and systematic syncretism between the populations which lived on the banks of this sea did not constitute good keys of interpretation. The origin of this reflection was already at Fernand Braudel:
In short, he (the historian) would be almost ready to follow Gabriel Audisio and to think that the real Mediterranean race is the one who people people people people people people people and cosmopolitan people: Venice, Algiers, Livourne, Marseille, Salonique, Alexandrie, Barcelona, Constantinople, to name only the big ones. Breed that brings them together in one. But isn’t it absurdity ? The mixture supposes the diversity of the elements. Bigarrure proves that everything has not melted in a single mass ; There are still distinct elements, which are found isolated, recognizable, when we move away from the great centers where they entangled with pleasure.
Although very dated, this text does not ask the question of the relationship between the micro and macro scales (on the one hand, the individual port in which different market and religious communities were authorized and on the other hand the policies of the states), by approaching the diversity of the particular legal regimes which governed the different minorities.
Calafat and Grenet consciously resume and convincingly explore the main implications of this co -presence of unity and differentiation. They do this by proposing to understand the Mediterranean space as innervated by contacts, interlacements, trade networks, made possible by mutual recognition which, however, does not evacuate the conflict and never presupposes a fusion of cultures. Except in specific cases, for example linked to religious conversion. The paradigm of pluralism then supplants that of cosmopolitanism or tolerance.
THE “ Community cosmopolitanism »»
In connection with the previous point, the authors erect the concept of “ Community cosmopolitanism ” – Formulated by Francesca Trivellato for the case of Livorno – in the privileged method of investigating the modes of existence and interaction between the different communities, both in their internal dynamics and in their relations with their state of residence and with the other residents of the Mediterranean. Indeed, this notion of community cosmopolitanism makes it possible to escape the abstract character of the term to consider practices located both of living together via shared standards beyond groups, political or religious, and at the same time choices indicating strict belonging to a precise group or minority. It also makes it possible to recall that interactions, especially merchants, do not erase differences and hierarchies.
Thus the ability to tolerance for multiple minorities, particularly marked in certain Mediterranean ports mentioned by Braudel, was justified by precise economic and political motifs, while registering however in the logic of the corporate and hierarchical society of the old regime.
Communities, merchant or religious, are therefore a very widespread social form, benefiting from precise legal statutes, negotiated from time to time, which were used both to guarantee their presence on a territory (a more or less precarious presence, and subject to tax constraints, clothing, etc.likely to evolve), while attributing certain tasks of legal control and management as economic to the community bodies themselves. The underlying logic of these different statutes is therefore the following: placing the minority thus defined within a corporate hierarchy and well-defined power. Thus the coexistence of different minorities in a city or port never caused the boundaries of belonging to collapse.
Deconstruct the community
The third element that emerges is that of a deconstruction of the myth of the community. The book explores the institutional forms which make it possible to build such communities (from confraternity to the churches of the nations), and exposes the mechanisms of internal control which also exercised, without erasing power struggles or exclusions. Doing it, he deconstructs a whole series of easy and almost never real images of the life of minorities. For example, residential unit in a single district or around a religious or cultural radiation center. Similarly, the work releases many counterexamples to homogeneity and solidarity supposedly within the groups.
On the contrary, the authors look at the material and institutional mechanisms that produce and allow the mesh of the connections and exchanges mentioned above. People identifying systems (“ paper technologies »), The functioning of the consulates (in particular the different experiences linked to France) or even the different availability of the products that exchange on one side and the other from the Mediterranean are, among other things, examined. Thus, the Ottoman Empire, which research has emerged from an outdated story which lent it a long decline started from the second modern age, appears innervated by route, interests, and goods transported to the Mediterranean, to other Ottoman regions, or to Asia.
Historical and historiographical asymmetries
Finally, the work addresses the question of asymmetries. The Mediterranean is certainly crossed by exchange circuits, groups and people of different cultures, of free or slave individuals who have themselves circulated between different confessions, voluntarily or not. However, the intensity of these circulation does not evacuate diversity in all its forms or clashes. Likewise, she also does not erase hierarchies, neither between individuals or groups, nor between spaces of exchange and states.
For example, the need to accommodate foreign merchants could give rise to the definition of a well located physical place (in order to better control them for tax or military purposes). However, the creation of these market communities, sometimes said “ nations »Ended up legitimizing and even conferring a certain prestige to the Consul of Nations welcomed. The latter indeed become the representatives of the national community on site, the political and cultural reference for the merchants who resided there for more or less long periods, but also for other individuals of the same nation. They can also play a role for other religious or political minorities without representatives on the spot, which then depended on the state having forged diplomatic relations. This scheme is well highlighted for the Ottoman world. It works less well for the European world, where the Ottoman (or Levantines) consuls were few, at least until the beginning of a change in the middle of the XVIIIe century. It must be analyzed as a hierarchy between different market communities, and therefore an asymmetry between the Ottoman world on the one hand and European on the other.
The study of these asymmetries is carried out with great balance. It is also a question of unmasking certain false evidences. Thus, getting out of the logic of the shock of civilizations is also out of the anachronistic and colonialist logic of a North Mediterranean marked from modern times by greater precocity. Disruptive innovations of XIXe century (from industrialization to nationalism) resulted in increased development of the northern shore of the Mediterranean. This created the impression of a technologically more advanced, economically more solid and politically more powerful states. However, this image has sometimes been retroprojetted, creating the illusion of an ancient asymmetry. On the contrary, the authors reshape periodization. Their chronology upsets conventions, both upstream, by reconstructing the dense network of mobility of the XVe century preceding the expulsion decrees of the Jews and Morisques, in downstream, by analyzing the evolution of the asymmetry of the consular presence at the XVIIIe century.
Finally, the book also accounts for another series of asymmetries, of a more historiographical nature. Not all regions of the Mediterranean have received the same attention. Only one example: studies on the Adriatic world are monopolized by Venice, leaving aside the circuits, the goods and the people who revolve around more peripheral networks. This is also reflected, partially but consciously, in the work. The world of fairs, so important in the Adriatic space (precisely in an anti-Ventian function), although treated in the book, reveals, for example, an intertwining of institutional, economic and political dynamics which could be explored further. This observation is also an invitation to continue research in this area.