Who was a Venetian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How did “true” Venetians look upon the diverse “nations” then living in the city? How did the “foreigners” negotiate their acceptance as “true” Venetians? Brokering Empire takes a major step towards answering these questions by underscoring the complexity of the ethnic and religious identities at stake. Such complexity clashes with putative rigid boundaries, excessive distinctions, and absolute binaries where individuals, groups, and hierarchies are concerned. That said, the refusal of essentialized communities and categories in early modern Venice need not translate into acritical praise of the tolerant and multicultural character of the Serenissima and the Mediterranean.
In this well-researched and nicely argued book, Rothman rightly rebuts both essentialist and Golden Age views. Together with recent work by scholars like Filippo De Vivo, Eric Dursteler, Giancarlo Casale, Molly Greene, and Bronwen Wilson, Brokering Empire helps us reconsider the history of Venice, Venetian-Ottoman relations, and the “Mediterranean world.” Since the phenomena Rothman discusses are not that different from contemporary developments in the New World or in maritime Asia, her book also should galvanize historians of interactions between early modern European empires and non-European societies.
The author anchors her study of the intricate social landscape of Venice between ca. 1570–1670 in a new concept that seems to go beyond the prevailing “contact zones” (Mary Louise Pratt) and “middle grounds” (Richard White) as an effective analytical tool. She introduces the “trans-imperial subject,” defined as “an intermediary group of individuals, neither fully Venetian nor foreign, who actively engaged a host of Venetian institutions … that allowed them to act as effective intermediaries between Venetian and Ottoman elites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (248). This group is portrayed in a vivid and convincing manner throughout the book, and while some may feel that Rothman overuses this neologism, at times too eagerly molding her material to fit the parameters of a catchy label, the majority of readers will be convinced by her formulation.
Instead of resorting to the classical trilogy of patricians, citizens, and plebeians to approach Venetian society of her period, Rothman places “unstable” groups such as commercial brokers, converts, and translators (dragomans) at center stage. Each of these groups is allocated one part of the book, while the last part (“Articulation”) concerns their interactions. The latter section is a particularly important one, for the author skillfully shows how Venetian officials and institutions gradually came to accommodate those “foreign” communities, and the ways in which “the categories ‘Venetian’ and ‘Ottoman,’ ‘European’ and ‘Levantine,’ were picked up and recalibrated within specific institutions in Venice and beyond” (26).
These people “spoke” mainly through petitions, and notarial, baptismal, and inquisitorial records, which consequently constitute the core evidence of Brokering Empire. The dragomans surely deserved more than a twenty-page chapter, all the more so because some of them seem to have made themselves useful in the Serenissima by writing relazioni, a type of source somewhat neglected in the book. Besides the famed Michele Membré (author of Relazione di Persia, 1542), there is the case of Giovanni Battista Salvago and his Africa Overo Barbaria (1625), well known to Rothman from an earlier study. Are not such materials valuable to elaborate on the Venetian translators' profile, along the lines of what Natalie Zemon Davis did in Trickster Travels for Leo Africanus/al-Hasan al-Wazzan and the Descrittione dell' Africa (1526)? Rothman's homepage states that she is currently working on a book manuscript titled The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Making of the Levant, and one may look forward to her treatment of these questions there.
