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WiSe 20/21: France from Monarchy to Revolution, its Mediterranean and Global Trade, 16th to 18th c.

Cornel Zwierlein

Comments

The Hauptseminar will first concentrate on the institutions of the early modern French Monarchy. Then, different forms of French expansion, entanglement and also empire-building on a Mediterranean and then on a global scale will be studied. During the sixteenth century, the several unsuccessful attempts of building colonies in the Americas are more of interest in terms of their entanglement and intersections with the confessional divide and the French wars of religion: were the attempts to conquer Brazil a form of ´Calvinist soft imperialism´, different from the Spanish? Under Richelieu and then Colbert, the divide into two large zones of the commercial expansion, Northern and Atlantic trade (Le Ponant) and the southern, first of all Mediterranean trade (Levant) led to an important reorganization of the administration, privileging Marseille for the southern trade. The establishment of a consular system in the Mediterranean was an important tool of commercial politics, government as well as communication that was transferred only late, after the American war of Independence to the American East coast. Since the 17th century, the French were in "Search for an Empire" (Pritchard) in Québec, while the most important colony in economic terms remained always St. Domingue. The Compagnie des Indes was the most important corporative actor to support the French outreach into Asia (17th/18th century), though one should not underestimate the terrestrial connection of the Asian trade by caravan trade with the Mediterranean. Having established thus an understanding of the global network and outreach of the early modern French monarchy, we will try to understand also non-commercial and non-political forms of interaction: French missionaries, often profiting from that commercial-political infrastructure and the royal protection, were describing foreign religions and writing home letters describing their host countries which are valuable sources, often still un-edited but easily readable in manuscript, which are an interesting starting point for individual research. All this cannot be studied exhaustively, but the course tries to combine an introduction into the framework on the one hand and individual thematic case studies on the other. close