Download PDF | Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood, Mohamed-Salah Omri - Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean_ Braudel's Maritime Legacy, I.B.Tauris Publishers, 2010.
334 Pages
Maria Fusaro is Senior Lecturer in History and Director of the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies, University of Exeter.
Colin Heywood is Honorary Research Fellow, Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull.
Mohamed-Salah Omri is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, Washington University in St. Louis.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Salvatore Bono, Emeritus Professor, University of Perugia and President of the “Société internationale des historiens de la Méditerranée”
Maria Fusaro, Senior Lecturer in History and Director of the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies, University of Exeter
Molly Greene, Professor of History and Hellenic Studies, Princeton University
Gelina Harlaftis, Associate Professor in Maritime History, Ionian University
Colin Heywood, Honorary Research Fellow, Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull
Donna Landty, Professor of English and American Literature and Director of the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century, University of Kent
Fatiha Loualich, Maitre de Conference in Modern History, University of Algiers
Eloy Martin Corrales, Professor of Modern History, Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Nabil Matar, Professor of English, University of Minnesota
Simon Mercieca, Director, Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta
Mohamed-Salah Omri, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature, Washington University in Saint Louis
Daniel Panzac, Directeur de recherche emeritus, CNRS-University of
Provence, Aix-en-Provence
Ann Williams, Honorary Research Fellow, Exeter University
AFTER BRAUDEL
A Reassessment of Mediterranean History between the Northern Invasion and the Caravane Maritime , Maria Fusaro
Sixty years after the publication of the French first edition of Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen a lépoque de Philippe II,' and nearly forty years after the extremely influential English translation of its second French edition,* there is no doubt that Braudel’s masterpiece truly marked “an epoch in world historiography”. In fact, if anything, the intellectual reverberations in response to its novel interpretative scheme have amplified during the last two decades,* a phenomenon that has involved several disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.°
As is the case with seminal works — which, by their own intrinsic nature, raise more questions than they answer — Braudel’s Mediterranean stimulated scholars to take up, but also to extend and challenge, his AFTER BRAUDEL A Reassessment of Mediterranean History between the Northern Invasion and the Caravane Maritime
Maria Fusaro
Sixty years after the publication of the French first edition of Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen a lépoque de Philippe II,' and nearly forty years after the extremely influential English translation of its second French edition,* there is no doubt that Braudel’s masterpiece truly marked “an epoch in world historiography”. In fact, if anything, the intellectual reverberations in response to its novel interpretative scheme have amplified during the last two decades,* a phenomenon that has involved several disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.°
As is the case with seminal works — which, by their own intrinsic nature, raise more questions than they answer — Braudel’s Mediterranean stimulated scholars to take up, but also to extend and challenge, his methodology and interpretative angle. From Immanuel Wallerstein on the global pre-modern economy, to Kirti Chaudhuri on the Indian Ocean and Anthony Reid on South Eastern Asia, there have been several attempts at testing the ‘Braudelian approach’ to different topics or geo-historical realities.© More recently Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell published The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History, the first part of a twovolume project aiming at testing Braudel’s interpretation over the extreme longue durée. Of all the works inspired by Braudel, this one is probably the most ambitious, and also the most comparable to The Mediterranean in its painstaking attempt at building a strong interpretative framework supported with a wealth of minute and accurate details based on primary evidence. Horden and Purcell’s volume has, in its turn, fostered a general reappraisal of the topic of the ‘Mediterranean’ at large, and reawakened a stimulating international dialogue of scholars on how best to approach and develop this kind of analysis.’
Within Anglophone historiography, critical engagement with Braudel’s work has been mostly concerned on the one hand with an ongoing debate on the value and limits of the Anais’ methodological approach, and on the other with the evaluation of ‘the Mediterranean’ as a viable field of investigation. Outside Anglophone academia the situation is reversed and, whilst over the last sixty years there has been a constant stream of contributions aiming at detailing specific subtopics, there has been no comparable attempt at engaging with the ‘larger picture’.
The fortunes of Mediterranean history have been rather varied in the major European historiographical traditions. In Italy the Mediterranean (even before Braudel’s magnum opus appeared) had always enjoyed a position at the centre of historians’ concerns, and it is difficult to overestimate the role played in this continued interest by the geographical position of the peninsula itself, as Italy can easily be described as a pier dividing the internal sea in two halves.® In Spain, the traditional interpretation has been that, starting in the 1580s, Philip II’s attention and cares turned towards the Atlantic, which then became the focus of Iberian commercial and political interests. Braudel himself not only supported this view, but it can even be argued that his own dissertation on Spanish policy in the Mediterranean (which was the basis for the book) acted as a brake to further investigations on the Mediterranean dimension of Spain. This might indeed have been the case, but for another factor which has contributed to this neglect: the pulling power of Anglo-American scholarship. This, in the last forty years, has fostered a growing attention towards the Atlantic as the new global centre of economic and political development, to the point of creating a new field of investigation: ‘Atlantic history’.? Its creation has not only influenced Anglo-American historiographical production, a special cause for regret in that England in particular played a crucial role in the early modern Mediterranean, a role which is still underestimated by its historiography.'° This trend also acted as an additional incentive for generations of historians of early modern Spain to concentrate on the Atlantic and not on the Mediterranean side of Spanish policy and trade. As regards to France, which like Spain enjoys a double sea exposure — Atlantic and Mediterranean — scholars there have instead divided their interests between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic dimensions of French history.!!
If the history of the Mediterranean has therefore been the preferred topic of engagement for Anglophone scholarship,” the course of history 7 the Mediterranean has been favoured by other traditions. However both are necessary components for the organic development of the field, especially as the history of the Mediterranean needs histories in the Mediterranean to base its arguments on, and for this reason it would be a good augury for the future of the subject if the proponents of these traditions were to engage more frequently in dialogue and exchange.
In discussing the historiographical fortunes of the Mediterranean, there is also the need to consider that in the last decades of the twentieth century there has been a general tendency to treat early modern Mediterranean history as a ‘spent force’, lacking the energy and vitality to compete for historians’ attention not only with the New World, but also with Asia. The historical trope that, with the conclusion of the Spanish-Ottoman truce of 1580, the great powers withdrew from the Mediterranean,'> has been so fully internalised by contemporary scholarship, that it has almost been forgotten how the internal sea remained in reality an essential element of intra-European power and hegemony throughout the early modern period and beyond. The seventeenth century was indeed a period in which no hegemonic maritime or naval power emerged in the area,'+ but this should not be interpreted as the result of a lack of interest by the European powers in its control, more a reflection of the fact that this century represented a period of transition and reassessment of the strategies employed by the traditional powers active in the Mediterranean (Ottomans, Venice, France and Spain), whilst the newcomers (England and the United Provinces) were busy carving for themselves a role within such a complex environment, and_ taking advantage of the economic crisis that had southern Europe in its grip. Even the Ottomans themselves experience a hiatus in naval activity between Lepanto (1571) and the war of Candia (1664-1669) — a period of only relative peace at sea, as corsairing activities boomed, becoming a sort of substitute for open naval war! — but with the successful attack on Venetian Candia they actively re-entered into the fight for the control of the eastern Mediterranean.'° Because of these activities, both military and naval historians have instead long acknowledged that maintaining a military and commercial presence in the Mediterranean remained strategically crucial throughout those centuries in the fight for European supremacy.!7 Just to provide one example, in all the wars fought by Britain during the eighteenth century, “it was superiority in European waters which made possible successful operations overseas”, a premise supported by the fact that the British Navy’s presence in the Mediterranean was second only to its presence in Britain’s home waters.'® In reality the strategic importance of the Mediterranean for all the European powers always remained a paramount concern, as it still is to this day.
It is important therefore to underline that, notwithstanding a continuing production of ‘Mediterranean histories’, especially in countries bordering that sea, it has been only in the last decade that post-sixteenth century Mediterranean history has started to emerge from a period of relative historiographical neglect, a turn which has interestingly coincided with a new-found interest in the investigation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the period of the so-called ‘decline’.!°
In this substantive ongoing dialogue between different national historiographies, and between different disciplines, the editors of this volume believe that ‘maritime history’ as a field has a special contribution to make, as it can be utilised to bridge the differences between approaches: maritime history being both history 7 the Mediterranean — through the analysis of trade and conflict in these waters — and history of the Mediterranean — as the sea creates links between societies, economies and cultures.
This volume has two ambitions: to introduce to an Anglophone readership the results of recent work on topics that have been the subject of research in other Mediterranean historiographical traditions, and to clarify and discuss some aspects of the socio-economic history of the early modern Mediterranean that stand in need of re-assessment, in that it is on their more precise analysis that a revision of more structural and encompassing arguments will need to be based in the future. To this end, contributors to this volume have focused on three major areas of study. The first is the organizational and structural nature of intra-Mediterranean eatly modern trade, which recent studies have shown to be much more complex than has been acknowledged either by Braudel himself, or by traditional economic historiography. The latter — taking as its unit of analysis the nation-states — has sometimes contributed to some misunderstandings regarding the real Mediterranean economic dynamic, and a re-evaluation of the protagonists of these trades helps to shed new light on the later economic development of several regions in the area. Connected to this is another topic at the centre of this volume: the interplay of economic and military activities in the Mediterranean, where commercial navigation — the ‘maritime’ element — was sometimes rather difficult to disentangle from aggressive military action — the ‘naval’ element. This leads to the third major topic covered in this volume: Mediterranean corsairing and slavery, both closely linked to the two above-mentioned issues, here their peculiarities are analysed also for the role they played within the economic and cultural exchange between the southern and northern shores of the internal sea.
Geographically, we will focus only on the waters and coasts of the Mediterranean, on what Braudel called “the very heart of its bewildering activity”.*° But even if we will not attempt to encompass the entirety of the Braudelian ‘greater Mediterranean’, our analysis will include the whole of the basin, extending into the Black Sea — which was reconnected to the Mediterranean for the first time since 1453 only after the 1774 Kutchuk Kainardji treaty re-established freedom of navigation there for non-Ottoman subjects — and also including the area of the socalled ‘Mediterranean of the Atlantic’, that is to say the African and Iberian coasts from Agadir to Lisbon, which in this period was structurally integrated with Mediterranean commertce.”! Contributions in this volume will focus especially on Malta and on the North African Coast — the socalled Barbary States — centres, respectively, of Christian and Muslim corsairing, dedicating space to some less known aspects of their institutional, social and cultural history.
Chronologically, we will direct our attention to the entirety of the eatly modern era from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century, but a substantial amount of space will be given to the period between the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the beginnings of what Braudel called the ‘Northern Invasion’ of the Mediterranean — when English and Dutch ships started to trade in the internal sea — and the eighteenth century, when the phenomenon known as the Caravane Maritime — the trade between different parts of the Ottoman empire performed on Western European ships — reached its quantitative apex. The editors of this volume believe these two maritime phenomena to be of special importance, as they created and fostered a series of sustained contacts between Mediterranean and non-Mediterranean regions and cultures that played a crucial long-term role in the future development of the area, not only economically but also politically, socially and culturally.
Thematically, we shall concentrate on maritime history, and our interdisciplinary interests mean that we take this interpretative angle to go beyond its traditional technical and operational interests. “Braudel was not a maritime historian”, as Garrett Mattingly remarked in reviewing The Mediterranean, and it has been argued that, in it, the maritime dimension has been relatively neglected.” Our goal, as editors of this volume, has been to try and partially fill this gap, as it is our contention that the maritime dimension can be profitably employed within different areas of specialization to clarify issues of political and institutional development, political economy and cultural interaction: the Mediterranean is for us a social, economic and cultural space. We are concerned with how the maritime Mediterranean functioned in practice, and we also believe that ‘maritime’ and ‘naval’ are two categories of analysis in constant interaction and that one is not conceivable without reference to the other. Sea-trade and sea-conflict have coexisted side by side for centuries, and the aim of this volume has been to discuss both these elements, giving special attention to ‘corsairing’ activities — what Michel Fontenay has termed the “Mediterranean corso” — which in those centuries was their most frequent point of contact.
History of and history 7 the Mediterranean are both intrinsically linked with a landscape intersected by permeable frontiers,%+ far more frequently than by a clash of civilizations. What characterises the Mediterranean, after the end of the Roman empire broke for ever its unity, has been the coexistence on its shores of different cultures and civilizations — competing states and empires which constantly interacted commercially and culturally on land and on sea, even when they were formally at war with one another. The fact that this wealth of differences was, and is, contained within a relative small space is a generally acknowledged peculiarity of this area, the foundation of its cultural and social diversity. In the words of Horden and Purcell “the only way in which the Mediterranean is differentiated both from its neighbours and from comparable areas much farther away is [by] the sheer intensity and complexity of the ingredients”’.*> We take this to be the background of the researches here presented, but it is not the intention of this volume to enter into the heated debate on Mediterranean ‘exceptionalism’.”° Its ambition is to contribute to the history of the maritime activities peculiar to the area, and the way these impacted the social, economic and cultural history of some European and African societies that had a strong engagement with the maritime dimension.
A Microhistorical Approach? These apparently trivial details tell us more than any formal description about the life of the Mediterranean man.?’
A frequent Anglo-American critique of Braudel’s methodology has centred on his supposed disdain towards the so-called événementielle level of historical analysis.?8 I personally disagree with this interpretation, after all Braudel himself declared that “there is more to history than the study of persistent structures and the slow progress of evolution [...] I am by no means the sworn enemy of the event”.*? The problem is that frequently, many of his critics seem to be confusing the événementielle level of historical analysis — concerned with ‘great battles’ and ‘great men’, a kind of history that already at the time of Braudel could be defined as ‘traditional’ —° with something conceptually rather different, that is to say with the detailed investigation of small episodes and case-studies, whose analysis throws light on larger phenomena by connecting individual stories with the bigger historical picture.*! In one way or the other, most essays in this volume base their analysis on ‘these apparently trivial details’, which are taken to be the starting point of historical reconstruction, and, through them, highlight the hiatus between the normative institutional level of history and real life on the ground.**
Behind this common methodological choice lies the belief that the employment of micro-analysis is most useful in order to reach larger conclusions, that is to say that it is necessary to concentrate on the smallscale in order to collect the kind of evidence on the basis of which largescale structural issues can be properly investigated, and established interpretations challenged. Seen under this light, the emergence of microhistory in the 1970s, although it certainly “reflects a certain disillusionment with the traditional Grand Narrative of the progress of civilization”, does not always have to be “a critique of macro-history” — as has recently been argued by Peter Burke —** but can also be seen as an alternative way to revise Grand Natratives, hopefully arriving at more nuanced conclusions. To use such an approach in a volume inspired by Braudel is therefore not an aberration: John Marino has perceptively observed that “the possibility of microhistory is already contained within Braudel’s global vision”.*4 Moreover, in recent years the interplay of different scales of analysis within historical scholarship has proved to be one of the most stimulating developments.*°> Consciously and subconsciously, this owes a lot to the Braudelian intellectual heritage, as the micro and macro level of analysis are engaged in a constant dialogue in The Mediterranean and, in fact, the paiting of such a powerful interpretative mainframe with a dazzling display of detailed documentary evidence, remains one of the great achievements and major strengths of that book, notwithstanding the fact that Braudel has been accused of arbitrariness in the choice of his examples and case-studies.
Another reason to privilege this methodological approach, is that microhistory has proved itself particularly useful in analysing phenomena which lay outside the reach of the nation-state,*® in areas in which the hiatus between the ‘normative’ and ‘practical’ is wide, and which therefore display characteristics of fluidity and ambiguity which makes them easily fall outside traditional interpretative categories. This does not mean that the ‘state’ is not a protagonist of these issues; the institutional level provided by state regulation remains in the background of all social and economic activities, and indeed it is in the relationship between institutions and individuals that the results of research are proving to be most fruitful and challenging. In my opinion though, it is crucial to underline how, in the study of trade and exchange in the early modern Mediterranean, it becomes immediately apparent that the constant renegotiation of terms between, on the one hand governments’ regulations that decreed how trade should be organised and, on the other, the choices of the individual actors who traded, was of preponderating importance. Once this approach is put at the centre of the analysis it becomes possible to see, across the various Mediterranean frontiers — political, economic, cultural and religious — the emergence of a series of hitherto unknown customary and well established formal and informal systems of contractual enforcement that complicate the traditional image of a sea divided between different empires and religious blocks, as shown by the contribution of Eloy Martin Corrales to this volume. And the end result is a dazzling display of solutions in the way in which individual trajectories come alive and find a space of economic and social action frequently going beyond traditional system of values, a situation which is typical of periods of economic transition, religious changes and _ general transformations.
From the Northern Invasion to the Caravane Maritime So the Dutch swarmed into the Mediterranean like so many heavy insects crashing against the window panes — for their entry was neither gentle nor discreet.”
When, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Dutch and English ships started to regularly sail and trade within the Straits, it was the beginning of a new era in Mediterranean history, since for the first time its waters witnessed the growing presence and influence of maritime powers that were not centred on its shores. The onset of Venice’s maritime crisis, which had caused the stoppage of its direct sea trade transporting Oriental and Mediterranean products to England and Flanders, and the crisis of the entrepot of Antwerp, stimulated the arrival of the Northerners in the Mediterranean, a process which was facilitated by the absence of a hegemonic power capable of claiming these waters.** No one argues anymore that their arrival led inevitably and relatively quickly to their preeminence in the maritime trade of the Mediterranean, and it is true that the structures of cabotage shipping remained largely unchanged after their coming, but the Northerners’ arrival had important repercussions particularly on the long-distance maritime trade, which they quickly came to dominate. In evaluating the impact of this invasion it is nonetheless important to distinguish between the activities of the Dutch and those of the English, and also between the various Mediterranean regions which were impacted by them in different ways.
The Dutch role within the Mediterranean economy has been subject to a substantial reassessment in recent years. It is now accepted that their predominant role in the grain trade between northern and southern Europe — which grew exponentially during the southern European grain famines of the 1590s — did not manage to transform itself into a substantial role in the so-called ‘rich trades’, that is to say in the trade of the spices and luxury Oriental goods that moved from Asia and the Middle East towards Western Europe.*? The ‘swarm’ image evoked above by Braudel in reality works better if, instead of applying it to the Dutch, it is used for the English, as their entrance was swiftly followed by their capillary establishment in the crucial commercial nodes of the Mediterranean, in this way dramatically accelerating the demise of the traditional strong commercial leaders of the past.4° The consequences of their arrival on the Venetian economy makes this especially evident, as the beginning of English trading using the sea routes that for centuries had been her traditional ones, accelerated an existing maritime crisis that ended up downgrading Venice’s commerce — and therefore her economy — to the level of a regional player.*!
If the arrival of the Northerners did not substantially change the underlying structure of Mediterranean cabotage, it is true to say that from the beginning of the seventeenth century the English and Dutch started slowly to penetrate the short-distance inter-Mediterranean trade and in this way, over the long-term, they contributed to its change. It is possible therefore to say that the Northern Invasion prepared the ground for the Caravane Maritime. A close reading of the relevant documentary evidence, and the peculiarities of Mediterranean sailing, show in fact that dividing long-distance — international — trade from cabotage is (and was) far less easy than it appears at first glance. Between 1664 and 1740, trying to survey and reorganise maritime trade, and with an eye at devising new forms of taxation through the issuing of increasingly detailed legislation, the French authorities attempted at providing some official definitions of what constituted ‘long-distance’, ‘medium distance’ and cabotage trade. This attempt ended up in confusion, without any satisfactory conclusion to the project, mainly because of the continuous intersection between these different levels of trade.4? English ships especially had a tendency to arrive in the Mediterranean on ‘medium distance’ trade ventures and then to become involved in intra-Mediterranean trade.* As Colin Heywood shows in his contribution to this volume, “a trading voyage which started as a ‘pute’ expression of international trade could seamlessly metamorphose into an equally ‘pure’ manifestation of the Mediterranean catavane, once its initial international cargo had been discharged”. But, even more importantly for the structural transformation of local commercial patterns, English merchants — mostly agents of the Levant Company in Ottoman and Venetian territories, and independent merchants in the rest of the Mediterranean — frequently invested directly in intra-Mediterranean shipping, sometime in association with local merchants and entrepreneurs, and these kind of contacts and deals ended up having a profound transformative power on local trading and commercial practices.+4
Once these factors are taken into consideration, the Northern Invasion becomes a necessary preamble to the Caravane Maritime. The same reasons that had caused northern shipping first to enter the Mediterranean, and then to become very successful there — such as the demand for shipping service due to the crisis of the traditional local carriers, and the Northerners’ competitive low freights costs and cheaper insurance — made the utilization of their services desirable also for the growing maritime trade internal to the Ottoman empire, which was expressing an increasing demand for shipping that could not be satisfied through its own resources. This phenomenon is connected to one of the truisms of Mediterranean and Ottoman history: that the beginning of the Ottoman economic decline are to be seen in what Bruce Masters described as the failure of the Islamic community to partake in the early modern maritime revolution.“ Notwithstanding the way in which further investigations into the role of Greek Ottoman subjects within maritime trade have shown that ‘Ottoman’ shipping — albeit ‘non Muslim’ — was active and successful, as detailed in Gelina Harlaftis’ contribution to this volume;*’ together with more recent studies which are starting to show how the maritime activities of the Northern Africans Barbary states were not exclusively confined to corsairing,** the fact remains that the growing maritime commercial needs of the Ottoman empire could not be fully satisfied without a recourse to European shipping. The firsts to get involved were the English and Dutch in the seventeenth century, and it is in fact in the 1675 renewal of English capitulations with the Ottomans that is found the first official mention of the caravane phenomenon. This is evidence not only of the English participation in it, but also shows that already by that time, European shipping was providing such a substantial amount of transport for goods and men between Ottoman ports to warrant the issuing of specific legal clauses to regulate it.4? From the end of the seventeenth century the French got also involved in the caravane, and extremely quickly they came to fully dominate it.*°
Due to the risk of the plague in Ottoman territories, still endemic in the eighteenth century, participation in the caravane entailed rather severe risks for its participants. Plague was certainly an unwanted cargo, but also one that managed to take full advantage of the high connectivity of Mediterranean trade routes. In the words of Daniel Panzac, in his contribution to this volume, “Dutch ships and, to a lesser extent, the English and Swedish ships, made more ‘direct’ trips between their countries and the ports of the Levant thus running fewer risks [to be exposed to the plague] than the French, Venetians and the Ragusans who dominated [the caravane trade]”, so the development of trade patterns can be seen as having important effect also from the epidemiological perspective.
An interesting aspect of the development of the caravane is that throughout the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the freight contracts that underpinned these trades remained remarkably similar, almost standardized, all across Europe and the Ottoman territories.*! This development of legal arrangements, and their continuity over time provide us with evidence of how well the system functioned, and also of the kind of practical solutions devised in the early modern period to manage trade across different legal systems and cultural divides.
Both the Northern Invasion and the Caravane Maritime were phenomena that did not involve swashbuckling adventures and famous protagonists, instead involving slow and humdrum activities. But both of them proved to be powerful agents of social and economic change as they represented the reality of one economic system first infiltrating and then dominating new markets and, in a second stage, helping to transform this economic supremacy into a political one. The penetration of Northern and Western European commercial shipping in the Mediterranean was in fact swiftly followed by that of their navies. The growing dangers of Mediterranean waters in the seventeenth century, when corsairing activities thrived on both sides of the religious divide, pushed merchants towards the adoption of convoys — with merchantmen protected by menof-war — as a practical solution to increase the safety of navigation. In this way fleets started systematically to patrol and defend commercial spaces, an activity which by the nineteenth century was to play an important role in the establishment of European colonial regimes in North Africa. Another example of the connection of maritime and naval affairs is linked to the creation of new naval strongholds, a transformation experienced by several islands — such as Malta and Minorca — where commercial hubs grew out of outposts originally established for strategic and military concerns.
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