Close Distance. A History of Knowledge of European Merchant Colonies in the Levant, 17th to 19th century

前现代贸易帝国的商人殖民地不仅是贸易货物进出口和其他形式经济交换的网络节点，也是一种非常独特的认识单位。至少在有关黎凡特贸易和活跃在其中的(西欧)行为者的大部分文献中，对文化和认识论功能特征的研究被大大忽视了。这些商人殖民地在文化交流和表现方面的表现和作用大多笼罩在宏观历史的布劳代尔式或微观历史的反布劳德尔式的地中海历史的阴影下，主要集中在现实的纯粹经济部分。该项目是支持海森堡联谊会的一个小型萨赫贝希尔夫单位，旨在对知识史、文化生产史、藏书史、原始考古学宣传史以及17世纪至19世纪初在黎凡特的意大利和荷兰商人殖民地的传教士进行的原始考古推广和交流做出贡献。主要的假设和主要的启发式假设，通过“近距离”的矛盾修饰法表达出来，是--几十年来强调“混血”和据称高度相互关联的形式的文化接触--我们不需要完全颠倒图景，但需要微调我们的分析视角：我们必须重新关注中断，西欧商人之间的认知距离，他们忏悔的、原始资产阶级的原始民族文化，然后暴露在地中海海岸他们的“本土”环境方面，尽管我们在与希腊人、奥斯曼帝国人、亚美尼亚人和其他人的日常交流和贸易方面有很高的专业知识和语言技能。也许正是这种保持距离的力量，在某种程度上忽视了彼此，创造了那些原始殖民和原始帝国共存的特有形式。通过与世界其他地区(大西洋历史、印度洋)专家的合作和交流，该项目的成果被认为有助于比较不同类型的前现代欧洲贸易帝国的商人殖民地的文化特征。

The Merchant colonies of premodern trading Empires were not only Network nodes for Import and export of trading goods and other forms of economic exchange, they were also a very distinct form of epistemic units. At least for much parts of the literature concerned with the Levant trade and the (western) European actors active in it, research on the characteristics of the cultural and epistemical functions has been much neglected. The performances and functions of those merchant colonies on what concerns cultural communication and representation have been mostly in the shadow of a macrohistorical Braudelian or a microhistorical anti-Braudelian Mediterranean history concentrated foremost on the pure economic part of the realities. The project, being a small Sachbeihilfe unit in support of the Heisenberg Fellowship, aims at a contribution to the source analysis and research concerning the history of knowledge, of cultural production, of book possession, of proto-archaeological outreach and exchange with the missionaries of the English, French, comparitively also of the Italian and Dutch merchant colonies in the Levant between the 17th and the early 19th century. The main hypothesis and leading heuristical assumption, expressed with the oxymoron of ´Close Distance´, is that – after decades of stressing the ´hybrid´ and allegedly highly inter-connected forms cultural contact – we need not to reverse the picture completely but to fine-tune our analytical perspective: we have to re-concentrate on the hiatus, the cognitive distances between Western European merchants, their confessionalized, proto-bourgeois then proto-national culture exposed on Mediterranean shores in respect to their ´native´ environment, despite of a high degree of expertise and linguistical skills on what concerns the everyday exchange and trade with the Greeks, Ottomans, Armenians and others. It was perhaps just the power to maintain distance, to ignore each other to some degree, what created the characteristical forms of those proto-colonial and proto-imperial forms of coexistence. By collaboration and exchange with specialists for other world regions (Atlantic History, Indian Ocean), the results of the project are thought to contribute to a comparative cultural characteristics of different types of those merchant colonies of premodern European trading empires.