Business History Special Issue (Web); Guest editors: Luca Andreoni (Independent Scholar), Luca Mocarelli and Giulio Ongaro (University of Milan, Bicocca), and David Do Paço (Sciences Po, Paris)

Proposals by: 3004.2020

In recent years, the economic and social role played by ethnic-religious minorities in early modern Europe, especially in the Mediterranean, is at the center of growing historiographical reinterpretation (Baghdiantz and al. 2005; Harlaftis 2011; Christ and al. 2015; Do Paço 2015; Monge and Muchnik 2019).

Looking especially at the role of Jews, and starting with the work of Israel (1985), their economic role has been analyzed by many researchers, who stress especially the importance of networks and family ties, their involvement in the credit market and their functions in other fields of commerce (Penslar 2001; Karp 2008, 2009; Trivellato 2009; Levine 2010; Reuveni 2011; Hilaire-Pérez, Oliel-Grausz 2013, 2014; Kobrin, Teller 2015; Romani 2017).

Besides Jews, other minorities – such as Armenians or Greeks – have also played a fundamental role as economic intermediaries in international trade (Grenet 2012; 2016; Fusaro 2012; Aslanian 2014; Trivellato, Halevi, Antunes 2014).

Their enterprises often operated by sea – the best commercial route in early modern times – with private fleets that were sometimes very considerable. Seaports were the areas where Armenians, Greeks and Jewish communities flourished; just think, for the Italian case, of Venice, Trieste, Livorno, and Ancona and the other ports of the Papal State (Davis-Ravid 2001, Dubin 1999; Gatti 2008, Frattarelli Fischer 2008, Trivellato 2009, Fettah 2017, Tazzara 2017, Bonazzoli 1998, Andreoni 2019).

What is more, products unloaded from the ships on the seaside moved to the inland cities through navigable rivers and then spread in the inland territories. Remaining in the Italian peninsula, this was in part the role played by the Jewish communities (on the Po River) of Mantua and Ferrara (Graziani Secchieri 2014), again with families with private fleets aiming to connect the Adriatic Sea and the inland areas. Finally, we should not forget that the movement of products and goods often followed the opposite path, from the productive centers (in terms both of agricultural production and manufactural one) of the mainland to the seaports, ready to be sent around Europe and the world. Read more … (Web)

Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea (Web); Issue 44; Editor: Elisa Tizzoni, Guest Editor: Roberta Biasillo

Proposals by: 15.04.2020

In 1988 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published her most influential essay in post-colonial studies and critical theory “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.

Spivak went behind the scene of academic scholarship on colonialism and beyond its issues at stake: she argued for historical accounts explaining why a single-narrative of reality was established as normative and also opened pathways to overcome such normalization (Spivak, 1988). “Can the Subaltern Speak?” posed questions about silenced, colonised, unheard, invisible and unrepresented groups and, since its publication, it has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued (Morris, 2010).

Spivak’s questions seem to us crucial and topical in emerging research foci in environmental history and urge environmental historians to be critical, to speak to and through current ecological emergencies, to reconnect with the environmentalist roots of the discipline (Egan, 2002; Offen, 2004; Armiero, 2008; Barca, 2014). Indeed, recent trends of nature-culture and environmental history research highlight the past of human beings whose perspectives have been neglected and not stored in official archival files, the agency/role of ecological subjects in shaping pasts, potential ways to decolonise research practises and philosophies (Thorpe, Rutherford and Sandberg, 2017).

Moreover, any colonial and imperial enterprise – which is an essential component of subaltern studies – is inseparable from the history of global environmental change. Historians have explored, among other phenomena, flows of raw materials; new methods of farming; displacement of indigenous peoples; the foundation of colonial cities (Beinart and Hughes, 2007; Beckert, 2014).

With this special issue we aim at redirecting and broadly interpreting the term subaltern in relation to the environment and we envision this issue as a forum for ideas and discussion within the subfield of colonial and post-colonial environmental history. The editors expect contributions addressing these two overarching issues: Read more and source … (Web)