Presentations by Fellows

Wednesday, 12 October 2016

Sala degli Anelli, Villa Salviati

Programme

9:15 Introduction : Ann Thomson

Session 1. Chair: Jorge Flores 9:30 Jonathan E. Greenwood : Miracles and Hispanophobia in the Early Modern Iberian World 10:00 Sinem Casale : Courtly Encounters in War and Peace: Ottoman-Safavid Gift Exchange, 1501-1660 10:30 Audrey Millet : The Protection of Drawings and European Modes of Manufacture: France and Switzerland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

11:00 Coffee-break

Session 2. Chair: Stéphane Van Damme 11.30 Alexandra Chadwick : The Moral and Political Implications of Materialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century Thought 12.00 Katalin Straner : A Hungarian Sensation? Vestiges of Creation in Central Europe 12.30 Eva-Maria Muschik : Building States through International Development Assistance: The United Nations between Sovereignty and Trusteeship, 1945-1965

13:00 Lunch

Session 3. Chair: Federico Romero 14:30 Giulia Bonazza: Connecting the Mediterranean and the Atlantic: Slaves, Trajectories, Conversions and the Involvement of Italian Noble Families (1750-1850) 15:00 Jose Juan Perez Melendez : A Market in Migrants: Companies and Colono Trades in the Early-19th- Century Atlantic 15:30 Mate Rigo: Imperial Elites After the Fall of Empires: the ‘Long First World War’ and Central Europe’s Business Elites

16:00 Coffee-break

Session 4. Chair: Alexander Etkind 16:30 Andrej Milivojevic: The Rise, Purge and After-Life of ’s 1960s Liberals 17:00 Veronika Pehe: Articulating the : A Cultural History of the Economic Transformation in Central Europe, 1989-1999

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Abstracts

Jonathan E. Greenwood Miracles and Hispanophobia in the Early Modern Iberian World In this presentation, I discuss my two current research projects: one that examines miracles and another on hispanophobia. Miracles are instances when the Christian God intercedes in human affairs, which manifests as cures, exorcisms, and resurrections. Hispanophobia, in contrast, is the blanket condemnation of all things Spanish. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, accounts about miracles and hispanophobic writings disseminated across the world, works that internalized the political and religious conflicts of the age. By looking through sources that include letters, histories, and newssheets, I explore the space in which reports about supernatural interventions and brutal atrocities travelled between the Old World and the New. My work furthers the historiography on early modern globalization by challenging assumptions that miracles and hispanophobia were nothing more than propaganda and expressions of religious tension. Instead, they were vehicles for historical actors, be they priests or adventurers, to record their experiences taken from firsthand experience (or so they claimed) and then circulate this news to the four corners of the earth.

Sinem Casale Courtly Encounters in War and Peace: Ottoman-Safavid Gift Exchange, 1501-1660 The Shii Safavids of Iran and the Sunni Ottomans of Turkey, two of the most powerful early modern courts, developed a complex relationship in which tenuous peace alternated with bloody conflict. This is the first book-length study of this relationship from the perspective of visual culture. The project’s broad periodic scope and its emphasis on the countless diplomatic gifts exchanged show that it was not just the wars fought and treaties signed that defined diplomacy and political interaction in the early modern Islamic world, but that objects actively shaped interactions by forming, strengthening, and even breaking ties. Exploring Ottoman-Safavid gift exchange also encourages a fresh consideration of significant political concepts such as masculinity, sovereignty, and imperial and religious identity.

Audrey Millet The Protection of Drawings and European Modes of Manufacture: France and Switzerland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Questions of intellectual property today feature widely in the media. In a context of globalization, the need to protect inventions and inventors ranges between strict protectionism (property , patents, etc.) and total (open access, shared facilities, etc.). Yet, such a debate is not recent and is surely not the fruit of nineteenth-century . The discussion of intellectual property goes back as far as ancient times and by the eighteenth century had assumed national relevance in different European countries. This was particularly the case of images (drawings) intended for decorating consumer goods such as silks, porcelains, tapestries, calicos, wallpapers, etc.

Alexandra Chadwick The moral and political implications of materialism in seventeenth and eighteenth-century thought I have given this presentation a very broad title since I intend to talk about my previous research which focused on the work of Thomas Hobbes, as well as a new project which considers the relationship between Hobbes’s philosophy and that of . My PhD thesis examined Hobbes’s role in the early modern transformation of ‘soul’ to ‘mind’, developing an account of how his materialist model of human nature affected his moral and political theory. Part of my work at the EUI will involve completing two papers extending this research: one examining the concept of ‘human nature’ in the seventeenth century, and the other asking whether Hobbes’s view of man and of politics can be labelled ‘Augustinian’. Moving into the eighteenth century to consider Hume for my new project may seem like something of a jump. However, the similarities between the model of man’s cognitive and motive abilities presented by Hume in his Treatise and by Hobbes a century earlier is often remarked upon, but very little studied, particularly from a historical perspective. Furthermore, the different conclusions both philosophers draw from their accounts of human nature make the comparison a potentially fruitful one for exploring the possible ways in which ‘materialist’ models of human cognitive and motive faculties have been used in moral and political theory.

Katalin Straner A Hungarian Sensation? Vestiges of Creation in Central Europe My book project, “Darwin in Hungary”, is a study of translation as a form of cultural encounter: I examine the reception of Darwinism and evolutionary theory in the context of the transforming public sphere in Hungary from the 1850s to the 1870s. In my analysis of interrelated case studies of early texts of Hungarian Darwinism, I engage with questions of authorship, the role of translators as well as other agents of reception, and the foreign and domestic influences on their work. I examine the strategies that formed and informed the early reception of Darwinism; the ways in which scientific ideas infiltrated the public sphere and ‘popular’ culture; and the position of the agents of reception in the context of the transformation of the Hungarian scientific community and its institutional structure. A very important aspect of my work is the development of the urban press and the role it played in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge. In this

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presentation I will focus on the Hungarian translation and reception of Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (originally published in 1844; in Hungarian translation in 1858). I will connect this story to the work of Jácint Rónay, a Benedictine monk living in exile in London after the fall of the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-49, whose writings on natural history from the early 1860s provide an interesting perspective on the flexibility and uncertainty of the modes of and approaches to translation and especially authorship in the literary traditions of mid-19th century Central Europe. Moreover, the case of the Hungarian Vestiges shows that engagement with the natural sciences, despite the limitations and repression placed on academia and its institutions by the authoritarian neo-absolutist regime, remained an important part of scientific and public culture in the 1850s and 1860s.

Eva-Maria Muschik Building States through International Development Assistance: The United Nations between Sovereignty and Trusteeship, 1945-1965 Post-war internationalist cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. Located at the intersection of the history of international organizations, development and decolonization, my research shows that the establishment of United Nations development aid in fact supported the proliferation of the nation-state form on a global scale, while simultaneously rendering state sovereignty a less meaningful barrier to outside intervention. My dissertation, “Building States through International Development Assistance: The United Nations Between Sovereignty and Trusteeship, 1945-1965”, approaches the UN as a significant historical actor driven by international personnel rather than as a mere intergovernmental forum. It examines past UN interventions – in the former Italian colonies of Libya and Somaliland, in Bolivia, and in newly independent Congo – that sought to develop stable, sovereign nation-states. Approaching state-formation as a technical challenge for international experts rather than as a political process, I argue that the UN pioneered a new form of state-building through development assistance between 1945 and 1965.

Giulia Bonazza Connecting the Mediterranean and the Atlantic: Slaves, Trajectories, Conversions and the Involvement of Italian Noble Families (1750-1850) The aim of my research hypothesis is that captivity and slavery persisted in Italian cities – namely Palermo, Naples, Rome, Livorno and Genoa – until the first half of the 19th Century. Some Italian families, such as the Neapolitan Carafa and Mormile, but also families from Verona, for example Miniscalchi and Giusti, were involved in slave trade as well as in campaigns for the religious conversion of slaves. Moving from a top-down view provided by court and catholic records, I intend to investigate local records, and specifically family archives, to reconstruct the life stories of slaves, and the managerial and religious practices of their masters. I wish to focus on religious problems, living conditions and ransom of slaves to explore how prominent families negotiated the practice of slavery. I would thus like to present specific cases of slavery in relation to the problem of Mediterranean and Atlantic trade, which have enjoyed less attention so far compared to specific studies on Mediterranean captivity that are separated to the Atlantic trade. In some cases, slaves in Naples came from the Atlantic and not directly from North Africa. In 1825, for example, a slave called Pasquale, baptized in Naples, was born on a Portuguese vessel and his mother was an African slave. Pasquale’s case is an example for the connection between Mediterranean and Atlantic trade Routes

Jose Juan Perez Melendez A Market in Migrants: Companies and Colono Trades in the Early-19th-Century Atlantic Brazil had one of the highest numbers of foreign incomers during the era of mass migrations (c. 1870-1920). Yet this robust influx of Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and German migrants near the close of the century was far from spontaneous. Nor was it a mere causal result of macrostructural forces such as the transport revolution, industrialization or the opening of Liberal exit regimes. This presentation will focus on early 19th-century migrations to Brazil as the result of political processes, business windows of opportunity and ad hoc regulations that aggregated into a gradual “migration policy” from the very moment of Brazilian independence from Portugal in 1822. From their inception, migration policies were inseparable from the private interests of those in charge of regulating human flows. As they worked to build the institutional foundations of the Empire of Brazil, Brazilian statesmen exhibited a remarkable enthusiasm for receiving migrants by advancing legal measures that sponsored private migration schemes and by starting their own colonization companies. This presentation will offer an overview of the factors that gave rise to migration promotion initiatives during the 1830s paying particular attention to the case of colonos, or settlers, from the Azores who were at the center of a privately driven but state-directed niche market in migrations.

Mate Rigo Imperial Elites After the Fall of Empires: the ‘Long First World War’ and Central Europe’s Business Elites The present dissertation traces the maneuvering of transnational European business elites, who managed to survive the cataclysm of World War I and perpetuate their influence in a post-1918 Europe of nation-states. Recently, Thomas Piketty has argued that the Great War was decisive in eliminating the majority of capital in circulation in Europe. As conventional wisdom has it, 1918 was a radical break in history, which ushered in the fall of three empires and the creation of unstable nation-states in their stead. How and why did some sections of imperial business elites fare so successfully in a Europe of nation-states? Why did the Entente’s Versailles settlement enable the prosperity of former “enemy” elites after four years

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of bloodshed and material destruction? I follow a group of businessmen across Europe during the turbulent first two decades of the twentieth century in order to make sense of their political, cultural, and business practices that enabled them to recreate and even surpass their prewar social and economic status in a Europe that turned increasingly hostile to ethnic minorities and economic elites. Superseding the east-west divide in European historiography, my research concentrates on two border regions, Alsace-Lorraine and Transylvania, and analyzes their business elites within the shifting national and European contexts of politics and economy. While it is not common now to think of these two regions together, Alsace- Lorraine and Transylvania were the westernmost and easternmost territories of the two major Central Powers, and shared overlooked similarities after 1918, too, when part of two closely allied countries, France and Romania.

Andrej Milivojevic The Rise, Purge and After-Life of Yugoslavia’s 1960s Liberals Scholars agree that purging reformist cadres in the early 1970s represented a major juncture for Yugoslavia’s communist party, but little archival research examines the reformist platform and how it emerged, how cadres were affected, or the consequences for the party as an institution, let alone for self-management, Yugoslavia’s distinctive economic policy. The selective abandonment of Soviet practices after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split actually deepened the schism between reform- oriented and conservative cadres. Reformers believed that Yugoslavia needed to prioritize productivity and openness to maintain its independence from the Superpowers and thus supported greater regional self-rule and more debate and transparency, especially in financial decision-making; conservatives believed that independence required a unified party overseeing a military-industrial complex and burden-sharing among regions, and thus feared that the absence of party discipline was clearing the way for the reemergence of as well as nationalism. Events in Croatia during the early 1970s seemed to confirm conservatives’ fears, motivating a purge aimed at containing similar outbursts before they engulf the rest of the multi-ethnic country. Among the several hundred elites directly affected by purging were cadres whose ouster loosened the connection between the party and its heroic struggles against Hitler and Stalin and cleared the way for younger elites who lacked the authority to pass unpopular measures, let alone stand up to Tito, the indomitable leader. Among the larger group of cadres affected by purging ̶ some two to four thousand in each republic in 1972 alone ̶ my archival research indicates a distinct patter of persecution in the three republics, Slovenia, Croatia and . While all of the reformers supported markets at home and openness internationally, supporters of this economic platform permitted nationalist outbursts in Croatia, thereby leading to harsher disciplinary measures, but not in Serbia or Slovenia, where cadres disenrolled, or were permitted to disenroll, from the party. In a mere decade, the purged party doubled in size and the newly promoted cadres permitted the quintupling of the country’s foreign debt. The ensuing debt crisis in the 1980s thus counts as an avoidable long-term effect of purging that took place in the previous decade. The analysis presented deepens our understanding of socialism by showing how relatively minor cadre changes can have major consequences for governance by effecting a party’s capacity for internally-driven reform. What is more, while in Slovenia and Croatia the reformers nowadays appear as harbingers of political and , in Serbia the reformers are conspicuous by their absence from public space, a puzzle that points to the significance of analyzing smaller purges in scholarship still heavily focused on large scale and highly coercive purges.

Veronika Pehe Articulating the free market: a cultural history of the economic transformation in Central Europe, 1989-1999 This presentation will serve as an introduction to my new post-doctoral project, which excavates how cultural production was influenced by and interacted with the introduction of free market mechanisms in Central Europe after 1989. Concentrating specifically on the 1990s, the project will make a case for studying this decade historically, rather than being understood as part of a present “post-communist” condition. The collapse of state socialism and (re)instatement of democracy has been theorized from an economic, political, and social perspective, but its significance for cultural production has been neglected. But the radical change of the economic system in Central European countries through shock therapy brought about not only new forms of political and social behaviours, it also affected culture industries, both in terms of the field of production and the possibilities of representation. In this research, I am to analyse how this economic change was perceived and rooted in society through cultural representations. Specifically, I will investigate how the fields of cinema and television responded to the introduction of a free in Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The project’s original intervention lies in applying historical questions to an area that has been primarily dealt with in the disciplines of political science, economics, and sociology. It sees the meanings and connotations of economic change and free market mechanisms as products of cultural discourse and social constructions. Its main object of investigation is thus the reciprocal relationship between the effects of economic change on cultural production and this production as an agent in economic change. The resulting research will place film and television production in a robust contextual framework of contemporary economic thought and social processes in order to achieve an understanding of the symbolic meanings and narratives that gave the economic and political changes coherence and social validity at the time

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