2016 MWF Presentations

Presentations by Max Weber 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 Yugoslavia’s 1960s Liberals 17:00 Veronika Pehe: Articulating the Free Market: A Cultural History of the Economic Transformation in Central Europe, 1989-1999 1 ■ EUI 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 rights, patents, etc.) and total freedom (open access, shared facilities, etc.). Yet, such a debate is not recent and is surely not the fruit of nineteenth-century liberalism. 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 David Hume. 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 2 ■ EUI 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)

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