Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I will show how a particular space, namely the highways in the Lyonnais Region in the 18th, were ‘produced’ by the interaction of trade, social tensions over fiscal issues, and the operations of a state institution charged with social and territorial control, the Maréchaussée.

Paper long abstract:

The Lyonnais region in the 18th century was located at the centre of the French kingdom's main transportation routes, called les grands chemins. These pre-modern highways were populated by individuals and goods moving on and across them. The maréchaussée, the main police force of the French Monarchy, was in charge of policing such mobility, the grands chemins being its main territory of jurisdiction.

This paper will show how the grands chemins were 'produced' by a wealth of actors. Some were merchants animating the small distance trade between Lyon and the countryside. Some were travellers that were part of long distance trade that traversed the Lyonnais region but went beyond its boarders. Some were Bourgeois of Lyon interested in manipulating these highways for financial reasons (they were relevant for taxation, as I will explain).

This paper will then be able to show how these different actors and networks acted and interacted in unexpected ways with the result of shaping a space that represented an important state jurisdiction. It will also address the central role of the maréchaussée in such processes.

By proposing a methodologically innovative study of social space, this paper also challenges traditional narratives of state formation. When considered from the standpoint of my case study, the establishment of social control on the part of the state does not appear as following a well-defined national project: my study points out the influence that local and global networks of actors, by modifying social space, had on a fundamental process of state-formation.

Paper short abstract:

By analyzing a global institution entitled to identify the legitimate heirs of mobile individuals within the early modern Spanish world, this paper will examine how social interactions produced individuals’ personal identity, and how this was reconstructed by actors during judicial trials.

Paper long abstract:

My paper will analyze the documentary sources of the "Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos," a global institution of the early modern Spanish Empire appointed to collect the assets of deceased migrants and identify their legitimate heirs. The main purpose of this paper is to examine how social interactions produced individual's personal identity, and how this was reconstructed by actors during judicial trials.

Firstly, I will examine how individual's social identity was created in actual spaces (e.g. the homeland parish, the workplace) through performances (i.e. acting like "father and child" or "legitimate groom and wife") widely and publicly recognized by their networks of people. Secondly, how this social personal identity was used both by heirs, in order to claim inheritance rights, and by institutions, for the purpose of identifying them. In effect, social networks were summoned by individuals in order to bear witness and certify their identity in Spanish tribunals; at the same time, without the aid of a network of people, the authorities could not identify migrants.

Therefore, the paper aims to show that social identity appears to some extent to be, "local knowledge," tied to actual spaces and places where individual's personal identity is recorded in the memory of those networks of people into which s/he is incorporated. However, people's mobility continuously creates new spaces, beyond the original place where individuals are recognizable. Thus, social identity proves to be also "trans-local knowledge," as embodied by people who are constantly on the move.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents my work in progress on the networks that the Mercedarian Order established in the Andes north of Lima and on the spaces its friars created in Oyón area: ‘doctrinas’ with communally built chapels where knowledge transfer took place and new social identities emerged.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents my work in progress on the networks that the Mercedarian Order established in Lima region in the 17th century and on the spaces its friars created in Oyón area (in the Andes north of Lima). These spaces took the form of two 'doctrinas de indios', San Juan Bautista de Churín and Santiago de Andajes, which became sacred landscapes as well as places of cultural exchange and reconstruction of social identities. They were landmarked by doctrinal chapels which today count amongst the best preserved colonial structures in South America, with their mural paintings, polychrome altarpieces, and coffered wooden ceilings, despite of which they remain virtually unknown outside the area, and therefore vulnerable to natural- and human-caused destruction. I am studying these chapels -their arrangement and iconography- and the sacred areas built around them as a coherent whole designed to impose Christianity to the local populations, but also as places of social networking, knowledge transfer, and economic interaction. An analysis of the spaces generated by religious networks in the central Andes can give an useful insight into the creation of new social identities (such as 'Indians', 'villagers', 'brethren', or 'idolaters') that accompanied the first evangelization of the area and the -often brutal- campaigns for the extirpation of local beliefs.

Paper short abstract:

In order to trade, late medieval merchant needed to create a protected space, based on trust, and build a network of reliable agents and partners. Thanks to the case of Renaissance Venetian merchants, the paper will explain how networks were created and trust built and maintained.

Paper long abstract:

How merchants in the late Middle Age overcame cultural and geo-political boundaries? Were they able to create tools and spaces in order to protect their trades? Merchants weren't usually willing to loose their cultural and social identity, even if this happened in some cases. Despite the need of integration in the local markets, indeed, the specialisation of traders and the importance of their origin (as representation of certain standards and values) pushed them to elaborate tools and spaces that allowed them to, relatively, safely exchange good and capitals in different cultural and geopolitical markets. The tools used were specific forms of accountability, merchants letters and financial instruments. These were necessary to "communicate" with partners and agent at the same "level" and create network of reliable people in order to carry out exchanges. However, these tools were also necessary for the creation of trust, together with the knowledge of a person reputation. Trust created a safe new place, that went beyond borders and allowed the exchange good and, most important, information to carry out their business.

In order to prove the existence of this "space of trust" I will use the case of Venetian merchants in the Renaissance. Thanks to the use of different sources, as letters, trials and accountability I will show up to which point traders were willing to extend their network and include new actors into their trust space. Moreover, I will explain how this trust was created (thanks to familiar bonds or personal acquaintance) and maintained.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines strategies of governance involving taxation and the commons on Terceira island as they interfaced with Atlantic socioeconomic vectors in the mid sixteenth century, yielding key insights into the intersection of local politics, overseas economic networks, and imperial expansion.

Paper long abstract:

When Manuel Corte Real, captain-general of the Azorean port city of Angra, wrote to Portugal in 1537, he noted that a Castilian expedition led by Pedro de Alvarado had arrived on Terceira island from the "very rich lands" of Guatemala and Honduras. Despite its glowing tone, the report carried a mundane quality. From the early sixteenth century, European expeditions with sights set on the Americas, West Africa, and the Indian Ocean regularly touched on the Azores during the course of their journeys. Routinely, mariners purchased provisions from Azorean vendors, ordered new caravels from local carpenters, and traded for basic and luxury items. A cosmopolitan plurality of interests made Terceira both a point of convergence and a site of diffusion for wealth and political power. Island dynamics could potentially alter the cohesion of maritime networks, and the balance of European imperial claims, across and beyond the Atlantic.

Using rarely consulted Azorean municipal and notarial records alongside documentation from continental Iberia, this paper assesses the place of Terceira in international socio-political and economic vectors in the mid sixteenth century. A focus on the municipal administration of public infrastructure (roads, communal lands, urban provisioning, and taxation) brings into relief key themes at the intersection of local politics, overseas economic networks, and imperial expansion. How did tax collectors seek to capitalize on interactions between island agriculturalists, artisans, and itinerants? During a period of imperial escalation, what changes can be discerned in spaces of Terceira that served as nodes of wealth accumulation and dispersal?

Paper short abstract:

Through the analysis of notarial deeds recorded in the Republic of Venice, this paper aims to highlight financial tools capable of constructing new economic space, in which agents from different political, economic and religious cultures reshape their individual and collective identities.

Paper long abstract:

During the XVIth century the western expansion triggered relational dynamics among distant territories and civilizations facilitaded by the development of the international trade.

This paper aims to consider the analysis of mercantile circuits to highlight the material reality of commerce, stressing the tangible and recurring dimension that finds action in defined places.

The focus is on the financial tools (insurances, companies, bills of exchange) considered as economic resources which commercial agents can have at their disposal to construct networks that shape variable spaces.

The structure of the network is perceived as a definition of a space of economic action that produces a rift from preexistent political and territorial space. The objective is to observe the commercial circuits that linked the places of action of economic agents, that, breaking up predeterminate political, economical and religious cultures, contribute to reshape individual and collective identities of the social groups or single individuals involved.

Taking the Republic of Venice as a point of observation, border region as a bridge between the West and the East - that includes also the regions of South-East Asia - and political entity different from the multi-territorial empires that surrounded it, this paper aims to understand how the space of cross-cultural trade is built and controlled by economic actors that own financial resources whose use is amply shared in their space of action. Through the analysis of notarial deeds, it aims to comprehend the dynamics of interactions that permit to tie alliances, overtake conflicts and guarantee continuity.

Paper short abstract:

The role of craft guilds has been widely debated in recent decades. Using a large database of empirical evidences, and analysing them with consistent economic reasoning, this paper will challenge prevailing theories and the role guilds played for knowledge transfers in pre-modern times

Paper long abstract:

The role of craft guilds has been widely debated in recent decades. Social and economic historians have argued that craft guilds improved technological transfer, facilitating labour mobility and the circulation of knowledge, giving incentives to innovators and disseminating information across existing geo-political borders.

However, many studies are normally based on normative, rhetorical or scattered court cases on what actually craft guilds did for technological transfer, while detailed analysis on guild activities in a long-term perspective and day-to-day basis are few. Using a large database of empirical evidences from a single case study (a woollen guild industry in northern Italy), and analysing them with consistent economic reasoning, this paper aims to shed new light on the role of institutions as craft guilds in transferring knowledge in pre-modern markets and to highlight the role of economic agents in shaping new spaces.

On the one hand I will investigate indeed the reality of guild activities on this issue, showing the attitudes toward the imposition and, especially, the control of labour mobility. On the other hand I will show how economic agents - especially migrant workers - were able to use their socio-economic networks to create new bounded spaces, which were often in conflict with existing institutional ones. Cross-country European comparisons will help us to challenge prevailing theories about craft guild and the role they played for knowledge transfers in pre-modern times.

Paper short abstract:

Moving from the diasporic networks to the processes of economic acculturation and knowledge transfer involving Greek merchants in the Kingdom of Naples during the eighteenth century, this paper aims to overcome some conventional representations of diasporic space.

Paper long abstract:

During the last decades diaspora studies have basically translated the concept of trans-nationality into two opposite cultural and social representations: one implying a clear-cut separation among different cohesive organizations, the "trading diasporas", each interacting across state borders with a number of "external" networks (political, cultural, trading…); and the other one built up on the notions of hybridism, in-betweeness and fragmentation as intrinsic features to diasporic experience.

Moving from the diasporic networks to local context, I suggest, it is possible to grasp a more multifaceted reality behind these two contrasting and univocal views. By focusing on the case of the Greek-Epirot merchants living in Naples and in Terra di Bari during the eighteenth century, I will show that the business and commercial activities they run throughout this region were based on a double arrangement of relationships. The trade of Levantine coats across the central Mediterranean was largely managed by exploiting the intra-group relations connecting the diasporic communities scattered along this commercial circuit. At a local level, instead, processes of mutual economic acculturation and knowledge transfer involved the same merchants in the creation of Greek-Neapolitan coat-factories and agricultural farms.

The space charted by these two different sets of business relationships is one where the cross-cultural interaction does not take place between two groups socially separated, nor it inevitably produces hybrid identities. The interplay with the "other" engenders new knowledge, economic synergies and social roles, which re-shape the space - rather than the identities - according to contingent and functional dynamics.

Paper short abstract:

The main purpose of the paper is to define the process of intercultural relations between Portuguese and Indians in Malabar mainly focused on the transfer of military an technological practices.

Paper long abstract:

As stated by Jean Aubin, the Portuguese presence on the Malabar Coast in the early sixteenth century was noticeable for their "learning of India". The main goal of our paper is to define the process resulting from the adaptation of the Portuguese not only to the new cultural, mental and material realities of the Malabar social structures - chiefly in the Kingdoms of Kochi, Kannur and Kozhikode - but also to a physical geography that was totally unknown for them; this study will also be focused on the transfer of military and technological practices, especially within the naval and the pyro-ballistic branches, which have eventually given a decisive contribution to hasten the naval military relevance of the Portuguese in the region.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the New Lazaretto built in Ancona in the mid-eighteenth-century as a case study to explore the role of quarantine stations as sites of creation and disruption of early modern Mediterranean borderlands.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the role of quarantine stations as sites of creation and disruption of early modern Mediterranean borderlands. In particular, it will focus on the New Lazaretto built in Ancona (Italy) after the city became a free port in 1732. In the course of the eighteenth century Ancona became a major port city in the Papal State and engaged in conspicuous trade across the Eastern Mediterranean. After the city became a free port, the increase in maritime traffic led pope Clement XII to commission the creation of a new quarantine station. The famous architect Luigi Vanvitelli was charged with the task of completing the project. The result was the creation of an impressive pentagonal artificial island located in the city's port. Being big and beautiful, the new Lazaretto became a focal point in the city's urban scene. Its history offers a particularly felicitous point of entry into the investigation of the role quarantine stations as liminal spaces that marked physical, social, cultural and symbolic borders, and worked as sites of surveillance, detention and segregation as well as negotiation, translation and exchange. This paper will consider the early life of Ancona's New Lazaretto in order to examine how its spaces and practices participated in the making and breaking physical, social and cultural frontiers. One of my aims is to explore how the New Lazaretto reconfigured relations among urban and maritime spaces, medical knowledge and the regulation of both human and non-human movement in and out of the city.

Paper short abstract:

The paper, focusing on Peru 1532-1581, studies the construction of the space and the creation or extension of previous network groups and the creation of new identities in the New World framework.

Paper long abstract:

The narrative on the conquest and colonization of the new world as to be actualized by new historiographical approaches, and the network analysis seems to be an useful tool in such effort.

The paper aims to approach the construction of the juridical, economical and administrative institutions in the early colonial Peru in a twofold perspective: the Crown attempt to settle down his sovereignty and his effective control and monopoly of violence, but at the same time, the creation or extension of Iberian networks that inhabited the new institutional architectures or deal with them. The colonization and the expansion in the New World could be considered as an opportunity of extending their influence for previous groups of power as well as facilitate the creation of new networks. The case of the Peru, later vice-kingdom of New Castile and then vice-kingdom of Peru, not only is suitable to analyse the creation of new borders and spaces, but also in the acquisition of European and Iberian knowledge and cultural references, as well as rights, political thoughts, economical and merchant issues, but it's also suitable for analysing the creation of new social and local identities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine the influence of José Ferrer, a Spanish merchant-cum-geographer, on the methodology of the first coastal survey of the United States of America. The conceptualization of surveying knowledge as craft, or skilled labor, will be explored.

Paper long abstract:

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, figures within the American Philosophical Society (APS) recognized the need to develop a methodology to accurately and quickly survey the coastline of the United States. Knowledge of the coastline, they believed, was vital both for its contributions to national defense and for its assessment of port cities, hubs of the national economy. A month after Albert Gallatin wrote to Robert Patterson, president of the APS, suggesting the need for developing such a methodology, there had been no response. Indeed, the call fell on deaf ears. Was there no one, prominent figures wondered, qualified to assist in this project? While many skilled surveyors could be found in the newly independent nation, the coastal survey seemed a prodigious undertaking fundamentally distinct from cadastral surveying or the exploration of western territories. A response was eventually solicited from José Ferrer, a Spanish merchant familiar to many within the society through mercantile transactions. The proposal forwarded by Ferrer appears derivative of Spanish surveying methodologies taught to naval cadets at the Naval Academy in Cádiz, an institution with which Ferrer also may be associated. Derivative of early modern pilotage, such hydrographical methodology combined practical mathematics with navigational assessment of coastal inlets. In providing a concrete vision of the eastern seaboard of the United States, Ferrer helped to define that space. Indeed, American actors utilized his methodology, interpreting their own coastline much like Spanish naval cadets across the Atlantic were taught to chart the Iberian coasts.

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