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