13158

SoSe 20: Early Modern Mediterranean History, regional, global

Cornel Zwierlein

Information for students

digital formats will be used; further information will be available via Blackboard/email

Comments

Since one of the greatest post WWII historians, Fernand Braudel, had published his landmark study on the Méditerranée, the Mediterranean belongs to the core themes of early modern history and has become a model for other regions and epochs. This seminar will first introduce into the relationship between European powers and the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean, the trade and its organization by the European trading empires (France, England, Netherlands, later also other nations as Hamburg), who all established factories in the larger cities of the Mediterranean. From the ´expansion into the Mediterranean´ (since c. 1580) we learn much about the governmental structures of the European countries and we can study also many cultural and scientific relationships between Europe and the Mediterranean. The North African Pirates and Corsairs of the so-called Barbary states (Tunis, Algiers and Tripolis) were a constant threat to the Christian traders (2 million Christian slaves taken during the early modern period) which was answered by (less frequent) enslavement of Ottomans and Barbary sailors in Europe. This was stimulating the development of international law: for the first time, non-Christian lordships and ´states´ had to be integrated by a system of capitulations and treaties in a very frequent manner into the State system. The Mediterranean was strongly connected with the Atlantic trade and by way of the caravans also with the India and Asia trade. By that, this is part of an early modern global history. Current methodological debates are concerned with the question whether one can transfer the approaches studied and used for the Mediterranean as a special kind of multi-ethnic and pluri-religious maritime zone to other similar world areas with many islands and in touch with larger continental coasts such as the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. close