THE BLUE WEB:
SOCIAL NETWORKING IN THE PRE-MODERN MEDITERRANEAN WORLD
SOCIAL NETWORKING IN THE PRE-MODERN MEDITERRANEAN WORLD
Concepts such as Social Network Analysis (SNA), spatial mapping, and connectivity offer stimulating new resources for the academic analysis of political, economic, and cultural contacts in historical contexts. The great diversity of populations, traditions and religions around the pre-modern Mediterranean provides a multi-faceted laboratory for the application of these new theories. How did networks of cities, ports, religious centers, colonies, diaspora-communities, diplomats, Grand Tour travellers, or letter-writers contribute to the construction of Mediterranean communities and worlds? What role did the sea itself play in the rise and maintenance of these networks? How and by what means can we best map these networks across the "Blue Web"?
Over the past century, the field of Mediterranean Studies has been dominated by two paradigms: the bifurcated Mediterranean of the battlefield, and the bustling, connected Mediterranean of the bazaar -- as historian Eric Dursteler has alliteratively phrased it in a recent review article. This latter paradigm of connectivity and exchange has a long history that is closely connected with historian Fernand Braudel's 1949 masterpiece La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II [English translation by Sian Reynolds, 1972]. For Braudel, the pre-modern Mediterranean was above all characterized by a fundamental unity and coherence: thanks to a ceaseless circulation of people and goods, ideas or armies, religious ideas or languages, the lands surrounding the sea 'lived and breathed with the same rhythms'. The unity of the Mediterranean was, for Braudel, built upon a dense network ('réseaux') of these connections, both regular and casual, which constituted the 'life-giving bloodstream of the Mediterranean region'.
The pre-modern Mediterranean can be seen to have functioned as a space of common meanings and means of exchange, connection, encounter, interaction, and accomodation, albeit in different ways and to different degrees across the centuries. Globalization, the decline of the nation-state paradigm, the rise of the World Wide Web, and the ascent of social networks like Facebook have drawn more attention in recent years to these sorts of 'middle grounds' (to cite Richard White's 1991 study of overlapping and interacting Native American and European worlds around the North American Great Lakes in the 17th and 18th centuries). In 2000, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell helped revitalize the study of this connected Mediterranean 'middle ground' with their magnum opus, The Corrupting Sea. Their work, like Braudel's, traces dense networks of interaction emerging from the circulation and movement of people, ideas, technologies, and goods, often on a very local scale. This constitutes the background-noise of what they label Mediterranean 'connectivity'.
The past decade-and-a-half has seen a rich and growing literature on Mediterranean connectivity, including an influential 2007 issue of the Mediterranean Historical Review curated by Irad Malkin and dedicated to applications of network theory in the archaic Mediterranean. Works such as S.D. Goitein's A Mediterranean Society (1967-85) or Jessica Goldberg's 2012 study, both of which mined the correspondence and documents of medieval Jewish traders discovered in the Cairo Geniza at the end of the 19th century; Giovanni Ruffini's 2008 mapping of social networks in Byzantine Egypt; Francesca Trivellato's examination of Livorno-based Sephardic trading networks in Goa; or Natalie Rothman's and Eric Dursteler's studies of interpreters, converts, and renegades, all reveal these sorts of connectivities in practice across the Mediterranean -- and beyond, reaching deep into the Atlantic or Indian Oceans. These networks-in-practice point to the important roles of colonizers, textual communities, and diaspora communities in connecting the sea and its surrounding lands and peoples.
This course asked how we, as students of the pre-modern Mediterranean, can move from chiefly descriptive approaches of connectivity to using networks as a tool of analysis. In the field of historical Social Network Analysis (SNA), a social relation is anything that links or is shared by two or more interacting units. This link can consist of personal relations, such as kinship, friendship, patronage, or co-membership, or a good, a debt, an artistic style, or a correspondence. These links can reveal a great deal about how networks form and function, how they are sustained, how proximity or distance affect their development and growth, how they affect individuals, societies, and communities, or how different networks interact with each other. Analyzing networks asks us to shift from the study of individuals and states to the study of social relationships, patterns of connection, systems of relations, and processes (such as how patterns of relations and transactions can affect individual behaviors or historical systems, or how resources, ideas, services, goods, risks, or information can flow through relations, and in what ways). Studying networks and relations can reveal and highlight histories of interaction and interconnection, and can help us to understand how the Mediterranean world as we know it today came about.
Selected Further Reading:
MKW
Links:
The pre-modern Mediterranean can be seen to have functioned as a space of common meanings and means of exchange, connection, encounter, interaction, and accomodation, albeit in different ways and to different degrees across the centuries. Globalization, the decline of the nation-state paradigm, the rise of the World Wide Web, and the ascent of social networks like Facebook have drawn more attention in recent years to these sorts of 'middle grounds' (to cite Richard White's 1991 study of overlapping and interacting Native American and European worlds around the North American Great Lakes in the 17th and 18th centuries). In 2000, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell helped revitalize the study of this connected Mediterranean 'middle ground' with their magnum opus, The Corrupting Sea. Their work, like Braudel's, traces dense networks of interaction emerging from the circulation and movement of people, ideas, technologies, and goods, often on a very local scale. This constitutes the background-noise of what they label Mediterranean 'connectivity'.
The past decade-and-a-half has seen a rich and growing literature on Mediterranean connectivity, including an influential 2007 issue of the Mediterranean Historical Review curated by Irad Malkin and dedicated to applications of network theory in the archaic Mediterranean. Works such as S.D. Goitein's A Mediterranean Society (1967-85) or Jessica Goldberg's 2012 study, both of which mined the correspondence and documents of medieval Jewish traders discovered in the Cairo Geniza at the end of the 19th century; Giovanni Ruffini's 2008 mapping of social networks in Byzantine Egypt; Francesca Trivellato's examination of Livorno-based Sephardic trading networks in Goa; or Natalie Rothman's and Eric Dursteler's studies of interpreters, converts, and renegades, all reveal these sorts of connectivities in practice across the Mediterranean -- and beyond, reaching deep into the Atlantic or Indian Oceans. These networks-in-practice point to the important roles of colonizers, textual communities, and diaspora communities in connecting the sea and its surrounding lands and peoples.
This course asked how we, as students of the pre-modern Mediterranean, can move from chiefly descriptive approaches of connectivity to using networks as a tool of analysis. In the field of historical Social Network Analysis (SNA), a social relation is anything that links or is shared by two or more interacting units. This link can consist of personal relations, such as kinship, friendship, patronage, or co-membership, or a good, a debt, an artistic style, or a correspondence. These links can reveal a great deal about how networks form and function, how they are sustained, how proximity or distance affect their development and growth, how they affect individuals, societies, and communities, or how different networks interact with each other. Analyzing networks asks us to shift from the study of individuals and states to the study of social relationships, patterns of connection, systems of relations, and processes (such as how patterns of relations and transactions can affect individual behaviors or historical systems, or how resources, ideas, services, goods, risks, or information can flow through relations, and in what ways). Studying networks and relations can reveal and highlight histories of interaction and interconnection, and can help us to understand how the Mediterranean world as we know it today came about.
Selected Further Reading:
- Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranéen a l'époque de Philippe II (1949;
2nd ed. 1966) [The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age
of Philip II, transl. Sian Reynolds (London: 1972)].
- Eric Dursteler, "On Bazaars and Battlefields: Recent Scholarship on Mediterranean Cultural Contacts", Journal of Early Modern History 15 (2011), 413-34.
- Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins , 2006).
- S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1967-93).
- Jessica L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Genizah Merchants and their Business World (Cambridge: 2012).
- William V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford: 2005).
- Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (London: Blackwell, 2000).
- Irad Malkin, A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford: 2011).
- Irad Malkin et al., eds., "Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean", special issue of the Mediterranean Historical Review 22.1-2 (2007).
- Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
- Giovanni Ruffini, Social Networks in Byzantine Egypt (Cambridge: 2008).
- Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Mughals and Franks (Oxford: 2005).
- Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale, 2009).
- Francesca Trivellato, "Marriage, Commercial Capital, and Business Agency: Sephardic (and Armenian) Trans-regional Families in the Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-century Mediterranean", in Trans-regional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle Ages, eds. Christopher Johnson et al. (New York: Berghan Books, 2011), 107-30.
- Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: 1991).
MKW
Links:
- Historical Network Research - http://www.historicalnetworkresearch.org/
- 2013 course - http://bluenetworks.weebly.com/
- University of Groningen BA and MA programs: http://www.rug.nl/bachelors/faculty-of-arts and http://www.rug.nl/masters/faculty-of-arts
- University of Groningen Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) Research Master program:
- 2013 coordinator Dr. Christina Williamson's project mapping civic identity in Hellenistic landscapes: http://citysanctuary.nl
- Coordinator Dr. Megan K. Williams' project on the role of paper in early modern diplomatic networks: http://paperprinces.weebly.com
- Docent Dr. Sabrina Corbellini's projects on medieval textual communities: http://www.rug.nl/staff/s.corbellini/projects
- Docent Dr. Saskia Roselaar's Roman Republic Network: https://sites.google.com/site/romanrepublicresearch/home
- Docent Dr. Anjana Singh's research for the Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Global Histories of Material Progress in the East and the West (URKEW) project: http://www.lse.ac.uk/economichistory/research/urkew/abouturkew.aspx
Image: Piri Reis, map of Venice, from his Kitab-i Bahriye (Book of the Sea), 932 AH/1525 CE (expanded 11th c. AH/17th c. CE)