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业殖民地不仅是进出口贸易商品和其他形式经济交换的网络节点，也是一种非常独特的知识单位形式。至少在有关黎凡特贸易和活跃在其中的（西方）欧洲行动者的大部分文献中，对文化和认知功能特征的研究在很大程度上被忽视了。这些商业殖民地在文化交流和表现方面的表现和功能，大多处于布罗德雷尔式的宏观历史或反布罗德雷尔式的微观历史地中海历史的阴影之下，这些历史主要集中在现实的纯粹经济部分。该项目是一个支持海森堡奖学金的小型Sachbeihilfe单位，旨在对知识历史，文化生产，书籍收藏，原始考古推广和与英国，法国传教士的交流做出贡献，并与17世纪至19世纪初在黎凡特的意大利和荷兰商人殖民地进行比较。主要的假设和主要的启发式假设，用“近距离”的矛盾修饰法来表达，是在几十年强调“混合”和所谓的高度相互联系的文化接触形式之后，我们不需要完全扭转局面，而需要微调我们的分析视角：尽管在与希腊人、奥斯曼人、亚美尼亚人和其他人的日常交流和贸易方面有着高度的专业知识和语言技能，但我们必须重新关注西欧商人之间的中断和认知距离，以及他们在地中海沿岸暴露的忏悔化、原始资产阶级和原始民族文化之间的认知距离。也许正是保持距离的力量，在某种程度上忽视彼此，创造了这些原始殖民和原始帝国共存形式的特征。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，该项目的结果被认为有助于比较前现代欧洲贸易帝国不同类型的商业殖民地的文化特征。

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.