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- Title
Entangled History, Vermischungen? Europäische Blicke auf Tunis und Algier in der Frühen Neuzeit.
- Authors
Zwierlein, Cornel
- Abstract
Did the Barbary states belong firmly to the Mediterranean space in the Early Modern Age, were they almost ,Europeanʻ thanks to the many renegades and the high rate of exchange between Southern Europe and Northern Africa - or are we dealing with a European/extra-European relationship? with a strong ,entanglementʻ or with a disconnexion? The article shows that there is no simple yes or no, but that we have to differentiate precisely between the levels of communication between Northern Africa and Europe. Surely, on a first level, there was a strong connection between the regions through the daily exchange of merchants, despite piracy and the ransoming of captives. At the opposite end of the spectrum, on the level of general political and public reasoning about European politics, the peripheric Barbary states were stereotypically dealt with as literally barbarian societies or despotisms. A narrow analysis of the historiae, travel diaries and land descriptions from the 16th to the 18th century - especially the extremely rich and not yet edited travel log of Christian Gottlieb Ludwig 1731/33 - shows that we can determine a medium level of encounter and perception by learned specialists (but not necessarily learned as orientalists): If we analyze how history and the social and political order of Northern Africa is described and how the appropriate knowledge was acquired, we are facing the methodological problem of how to analyze transfers and translations of something without any original: There were no translations of Arabic chronicles or anything like it but the European texts were generated in a rather shaded process from direct observation, oral questioning and compilation of already existing works. But we can analyze the structural historiographic patterns of the texts applied to the Northern African city states, borrowed from classical and early modern political theory and history writing: This way we will gain a much more precise insight into how the European code did determine the ,Africanʻ content; we can make a distinction between code and content, but we cannot separate one from the other in the texts resulting from such an amalgamation. This way we get a more detailed idea of the How of the cognitive relationship.
- Subjects
NORTHWEST Africa; MAGHREB (North Africa); AFRICA; ALGERIA; TUNISIA; MEDITERRANEAN Region; EUROPE; HISTORY of North Africa, 1517-1882; CULTURAL relations; CULTURE diffusion; PIRATES; ALGERIAN history, 1516-1830; TUNISIAN history, 1516-1881; LUDWIG, Christian Gottlieb; HISTORY; SOCIAL history; AFRICA description &; travel; INTERNATIONAL relations
- Publication
Historische Zeitschrift, 2013, Vol 297, Issue 3, p621
- ISSN
0018-2613
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/hzhz.2013.0509