Max Weber Presentations
21 and 28 October 2020
PROGRAMME
21 October 2020, sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati, via Bolognese 156, 50139 Florence
1st panel Chair: Nicolas Guilhot
10:00 Christos Aliprantis: Intelligence networks and circulation of information in nineteenth century Europe
10:30 Andrés María Vicent Fanconi: A transnational history of the first Carlism (1833-1845)
11:00 Coffee Break
2nd panel Chair: Federico Romero 11:15 Joy Neumayer: Visions of the End in Late Socialism 11:45 Maria Diveke Syve: Still relevant? Re-examining the New International Economic Order
12:15 Tommaso Milani: Planning for the Nation and Beyond: Socialism, Internationalisms and the Global Politics of the Great Depression
28 October 2019, sala degli Stemmi, Villa Salviati, via Bolognese 156, 50139 Florence
1st panel Chair: Giorgio Riello
14:30 Anna Sekulić: Landscape as Ritual and Polemical Space: The Case of Early Modern Ottoman Empire
15:00 Maria Vittoria Comacchi: Guillaume Postel and the Ottoman World: Voyages, Sources, and Ideas of Global Harmony
15:30 Lavinia Maddaluno: For the natural effect of emulation’: Technological Transfers, Emulation and Jealousy of Trade in Enlightened Europe (1750s-1800s)
16:00 Coffee Break
2nd panel Chair: Alexander Etkind
16:15 Maria do Mar Gago: Making Coffee Global: World Collections, African Forests and Geopower (1933- 1961)
16:45 Roberta Biasillo: Fascist Colonial Ecologies. An environmental history of the colonization of Libya (1922-1943)
17:15 Ben Goosen: The Year of the Earth (1957-1958): Cold War Science and the Making of Planetary Consciousness
Max Weber Presentations
21 and 28 October 2020
ABSTRACTS
Christos Aliprantis Intelligence networks and circulation of information in nineteenth century Europe
This presentation summarizes my research background as well as my present agenda and aims for the current academic year. My PhD dissertation and broader research interests focus on transnational policing of politics in nineteenth century Europe. I am using the two central European Great Powers, Austria and Prussia to analyze how states developed interstate surveillance mechanisms and police cooperation practices against political dissidents abroad between 1830 and 1870. I am therefore interested in a history of the contacts and entanglements between the Austrian and Prussian police apparatuses with those of other European polities (Great Britain, France, the Italian and German states, the Ottoman Empire). I approach these processes in a variety of ways, which include biographies/microhistories of secret agents abroad (in cities such as London, Paris or Istanbul), the transnational exchange of police bulletins and techniques, the emergence of interstate extradition agreements, as well as the joint policing of borders. While my dissertation dealt with the mid- nineteenth century, in the coming months I aim to turn backwards and in a non (or less) western setting investigating the Austrian and Prussian police measures against the Greek revolution of 1821-30. Besides the intelligence role exercised by official state actors on Greek/Ottoman soil, I am paying particular attention to the agency of para- and non-state actors, such as consuls, secret agents or ship captains. My ultimate aim to combine the above material into a monograph on transnational political policing in Europe between the congress of Vienna (1815) and the German and Italian unification (1860-1870). Furthermore, I also plan to study pertinent topics such as surveillance and border controls against Philhellenes across Germany and Austria in order to produce a number of academic articles next to the aforementioned book manuscript. Finally, I shall shortly refer to my secondary professional occupation as a historical consultant. After briefly introducing the basic aspects of consultancy in general, I will outline the project I am currently employed at, i.e. the Great Powers and the Circassian Question (1800s-1870s).
Roberta Biasillo Fascist Colonial Ecologies. An environmental history of the colonization of Libya (1922-1943)
The aim of my research is to reconstruct the trajectory of the Italian colonization of Libya under fascist rule from 1922 to 1943 from the perspective of environmental history. During this period, nature and its domestication via agriculture played a paramount role in shaping political and administrative rule and uneven social relations. There were restricted areas of the colony that underwent dramatic material transformation and nature was differently conceptualised by the regime’s propaganda machine to serve the colonial agenda.
First, I define those material and non-material sites of transformation as ecologies, networks of human and non-human elements embedded in specific power structures. Secondly, I demonstrate that those sites represented laboratories where the regime could plan, play out and adjust its colonial enterprise in both the colonial and metropolitan spaces. Finally, I argue that Libyan regions became, on the ground, an assemblage of different and, what is most relevant, competing schemes far from the fascist showcase and teleological view of the colonization.
A close analysis via ecological elements of those sites reveals an innovative understanding of the making of an Italian Libya, unsettles well-established narratives about the fascist regime and interprets fascist Libya as a negotiated, diverse and hybrid formation.
Maria Vittoria Comacchi Guillaume Postel and the Ottoman World: Voyages, Sources, and Ideas of Global Harmony
Guillaume Postel (1510-1581) was a sixteenth-century French polymath, an eclectic scholar and philosopher, who traveled across the Ottoman Empire and held the first chair of Arabic in Europe. In 1544, Postel wrote and published his De orbis terrae concordia, a four-chapter treatise in which he longs for a pacific world union between Muslims, Jews, and Christians under one law and a primordial faith. Whilst most scholars have focused on Postel as a Christian Kabbalist and mystic, the research I will carry out during this year as a Max Weber Fellow aims to investigate his interest in the Ottoman culture and society and in the Muslim religion, investigating whether it can be considered as the most distinctive feature of his idea of global harmony. In particular, I argue that Guillaume Postel’s quest for global harmony provides us with some significant evidence of the impact of his travels across the Ottoman Empire on his philosophical, religious, and political theory, by framing it in the context of his educational background, the French cultural milieu, and, above all, specific humanistic sources and ideas. Thus, after a brief overview of my past academic experiences, I will outline the main research question, specific objectives and features, working methods, and expected outputs of my current research on Guillaume Postel.
Maria Diveke Styve Still relevant? Re-examining the New International Economic Order
My research project will examine the aims, contradictions and contemporary relevance of the G-77 drive for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s. The first part of the project will include an examination of the key elements of the NIEO vision, and the internal and external challenges that were faced at the time. The second part of the project will attempt a contextualization of the propositions of the NIEO within the intellectual debates that took place at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1960s and 1970s, concerning the relationship between the state, imperialism, and international finance capital. The third and final part of the project will look at the contemporary relevance of the NIEO proposals regarding the regulation of international finance capital, state sovereignty over national resources and the operations of international financial institutions. In order to examine their contemporary relevance, I will attempt a comparison between a selection of the NIEO proposals and some of the proposals that are now being presented by global civil society groups such as the newly established Progressive International, for reforming the way that sovereign debt crises are managed, and for regulating and taxing global capital flows.
Maria do Mar Gago Making Coffee Global: World Collections, African Forests and Geopower (1933-1961)
Scholars have already made coffee into a major player in histories of imperialism, globalization and capitalism. This project aims to further investigate this theme by approaching it through the lens of scientific practices. How did coffee and scientists contribute to imagine new political relations at the global scale? This is the main question this project wants to address. It proposes a detailed analysis of the knowledge making practices of four scientists identified in my PhD dissertation as key to understand the process of making coffee global during the 20th century. The objectives of this transnational and multi-sited archival research are: 1) to analyse scientists’ role in making coffee a crop that sustained particular geopolitical arrangements; 2) to explore the ways African forests in Ethiopia and Angola, the cradle of coffee, influenced political narratives about Africa; 3) to contribute to a better understanding of the interconnections woven through scientific practices between European imperialism (specially the Portuguese), American hegemony and international institutions. Ultimately, this research aims at contributing to a growing scholarship that puts emphasis on science and plant agency in order to rethink narratives of global governance and circulation. In this presentation I will introduce myself, put my work into context, talk a little bit about my PhD thesis and explain from where this project comes from.
Andrés María Vicent Fanconi A transnational history of the first Carlism (1833-1845)
Carlism is a Spanish counter-revolutionary movement. Carlism began in 1833 and was highly influential in Spanish politics until 1939, that is to say until the end of the so-called Spanish Civil War. Even today, there are a few Carlists. Such a long history has created a number of stereotypes, symbols, names and characters relating to Carlism. Nowadays, Carlism is often quoted in current debates about the depopulation of rural Spain, Basque and Catalan nationalism and even about Church-State relations. In these discussions, Carlism explains everything and nothing at the same time. Historiography has been quite fragmentary about Carlism. On the one hand, there is a Carlist memory cultivated by the Carlists themselves. On the other hand, scholarship on Carlism has been focused either on the late periods of Carlism (1870s, 1930s) or on some specific regions. In my PhD, I have tried to tackle the absence of a general interpretation regarding the first Carlism (1833-1845) based on massive archival research and in line with the most recent scholarship about the Age of Revolutions (1750-1850). By doing this, I was addressing this big question of Spanish history and, at the same time, I was studying the making of an enduring political culture. I tried to study the first period of Carlism without being influenced by how it developed in its later period. That was a key argument of my research. Many of the common-place understandings about Carlism were created some decades after its emergence. For example, the most known slogan of Carlists was “Dios, Patria y Rey” (God, Homeland and King), but no Carlist wrote that phrase during the first decade of Carlism. In some sense, I study Carlism before its “invention”, in the Hobsbawm sense of “invention of tradition”.
My approach to Carlism tries to link its origins with some global processes, such as the emergence of financial capitalism, the culture of Romanticism, the crisis of aristocracy and the redefinition of the Catholic Church in relation to liberalism. However, the most decisive global process for the rise of Carlism was the dissolution of a multi-century and multicontinental polity, that is the imperial Spanish monarchy, within the time span of a few years. During this year at the EUI, I plan to complete my monograph on the history of the first Carlism, expanding my chronological frame until 1848.
Ben Goosen The Year of the Earth (1957-1958): Cold War Science and the Making of Planetary Consciousness
Collective human knowledge about Earth as an environmental system has expanded since the Second World War in tandem with accelerating human interventions in the natural world. My project examines this intertwining of Earth science and environmental exploitation through a global analysis of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY), a worldwide program to collect massive quantities of data related to more than a dozen research disciplines. Scientists and policymakers associated with the Western security establishment initiated the IGY as a data gathering venture designed to facilitate sophisticated US weaponry, such as nuclear submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles, while also feeding a scientific-technical revolution that strategists identified at the heart of global competition in the burgeoning Cold War. Since Western policymakers coveted environmental information from areas outside of their territorial control, they used the IGY to enlist cooperation from as many of the world’s countries as possible. The IGY produced two seemingly contradictory legacies in global environmental politics. First, masses of data gathered by tens of thousands of professional scientists and citizen volunteers helped nation-states, militaries, and corporations develop natural resources more efficiently than before. Second, environmental research became widely touted as a non-political and universalist undertaking, ostensibly unencumbered by interstate antagonisms associated with decolonization or the Cold War. This disparity between public perception and practical use of planetary knowledge has constrained humans’ capacity to address present-day ecological crises.
Keywords: Cold War, environment, science, international relations, nationalism, geophysics
Lavinia Maddaluno For the natural effect of emulation’: Technological Transfers, Emulation and Jealousy of Trade in Enlightened Europe (1750s-1800s)
‘Jealousy of trade’ and emulation were part of broader discourses on how to appropriate foreign models of wealth production and bring about improvement at the time of the Enlightenment. They echoed the tension between political dreams of state self-sufficiency, autarky and absolute sovereignty on the one hand, and cosmopolitan views of society and commerce, trade and explorations, exchanges of knowledge, objects and expertise on the other, mediating between political economy models as diverse as Physiocracy, Mercantilism and Cameralism. This talk will shift attention from the theory to the material practices of jealousy of trade and emulation, by taking into account two contemporary case studies which highlight the pivotal role of technological transfers (and of practices of silk production in particular) in the European states’ struggle for recognition on the international market. The first one is about the appropriation of the silk-making techniques of the French expert Louis Tabarin by the silk factory’s supervisors of the Prince Andrea Doria Pamphilj Landi, in the periphery of the Papal States (1787); the second one has to do with Milanese silk artisans fleeting the Lombard city of Como to join the East India Company vessels sailing to Bengal in 1789, in search of a better future.
Tommaso Milani Planning for the Nation and Beyond: Socialism, Internationalisms and the Global Politics of the Great Depression
The presentation will outline my plans for the 2020-21 academic year by connecting them to my previous / ongoing research on the history of European socialism and the emergence of competing models of national and supranational economic planning between the 1920s and the 1940s. First, I will explain how my interest in planning developed, leading me to spend several years studying the life, thinking, and career of the Belgian intellectual and politician Hendrik de Man (1885-1953). Second, I will emphasise the necessity of broadening the thematic as well as geographical scope of my research by looking more closely at the cross-fertilisation between the national and the international level, paying specific attention to the impact of transnational networks on the workings of international institutions. Third, I will discuss how archival sources located at the EUI will feed into my wider, long-term project aimed at reassessing the role played by the International Labour Organization (ILO) within the evolving global politics of the Great Depression. More generally, the presentation will allow me to introduce my methodology and show how my work lies at the crossroads of political and intellectual history.
Joy Neumayer Visions of the End in Late Socialism
Why did the USSR unravel so rapidly in the late 1980s? Many scholars writing after 1989 saw the Soviet Union as an anachronistic “last empire” that was doomed to fail, while a number of recent studies have argued that the system remained dynamic and reformable until the end. My work integrates new and old approaches by combining the Soviet system’s sense of dysfunction with its cultural and social effervescence. My book project, Dying Empire: Visions of the End in Late Socialism, reveals the centrality of death in the late Soviet imagination and its significance for the demise of the state. From the late 1960s, the heroes of the Soviet Union’s most popular songs, stories, films were shot, drowned, suffocated and stabbed; by the early ‘80s, many of their creators were dead too, leading to the conflation of life and art and a rising sense of crisis. I frame the long 1970s as an “age of dying” akin to the European fin-de-siècle—an era of cultural despair and shifting moods on both sides of the Iron Curtain that, in the Soviet case, ultimately coincided with structural change at the top to produce political disintegration. I argue that by the time Gorbachev came to power in 1986, many Soviet citizens already perceived their world as dying, and that this mood of mourning and melancholia shaped the increasingly pessimistic direction of perestroika and the derailing of reform. My work reveals the roots of the seemingly abrupt changes surrounding the collapse (including the turn to spirituality and the rise of Russian nationalism) while developing a comparative anthropology of “cultural apocalypse” that explores how and why societies come to see themselves as dying. Anna Sekulić Landscape as Ritual and Polemical Space: The Case of Early Modern Ottoman Empire
Interreligious relations in the Ottoman Empire have been central to the understanding of the political and cultural dynamics of this vast early modern polity. So far, the themes of interreligious relations, including communal formation and question of communal boundaries have been explored almost exclusively within the context of top-down administrative, legal, and socio-economic approaches. In this talk, I present part of my dissertation research that takes a ground-up approach to religious history of the Ottoman communities by focusing on landscape as the site of religious and cultural negotiation, demonstrating how local environments and different interventions into them played important role in defining the parameters of communal belonging. By focusing on the rituals and texts around the cult of St. Elijah as instituted by the Franciscan friars from the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in the town of Fojnica, central Bosnia, I will discuss how Franciscans harnessed affective, economic, and legal significance of the mountainous environment in order to define Catholic spiritual repertoire, demarcate communal boundaries, and enact an anti-Muslim polemic.
This discussion is part of a larger story of Catholic communal consolidation around landscape, Christian tradition, and conversion to Islam. The story of a community highlights the significance of the natural world and how different material and textual interventions in it form important strategies of religious control that have hitherto been obscured by strong emphasis on Christian deprivation and lack of infrastructure in the Ottoman realm. More broadly, exploring Franciscan creative responses to the challenges posed by the conquest and conversion allows for new methodologies to understand religious relations outside of the major urban centers as well as to unpack the ubiquitous and seemingly neutral term “land” by highlighting its cultural, spiritual, and poetic potential to understand imaginaries of communal and imperial belonging in the Empire.