The role of religious and ethnic identities in the making and breaking of trust in the late medieval Mediterranean.

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The interactions of people of different ethnic and religious identities were central to the functioning of the medieval world. Yet there has been little exploration of how trust, or distrust, was negotiated among and between cultural groups. This project will address the following questions: How did religious and ethnic identities impact commercial relationships, including those with an "other"? How were trusting relationships negotiated within and between groups? How did questions of trust and distrust impact the life and work of medieval merchants?The late medieval Mediterranean world is an exciting arena for exploring such questions. I will use comparative analysis to examine how trust is formed across and within groups, and the role that local institutions played. Case studies will be selected from evidence concerning merchants in three major trading cities: Barcelona, Venice, and Alexandria. In each, I will examine the ways in which trust was created and negotiated between or within ethnic and religious groups to consider how trusting commercial relationships were established and sustained, and how identity was affected in the process. Group labels will be constructed carefully, based on the evidence, to explore how ethnicity and religion can combine to create inter-religious difference. I will examine commercial, legal, and diplomatic documents as study of commercial disputes and notarial records can reveal how trust functioned in personal relationships and how institutional contexts affected, sustained, or hindered trust.Investigations into cross-cultural trade have a rich historical past and long-distance relationships have been central to Global History. However, recent work on trust adopts a productive new angle. "New Legal History" approaches explore a culturally-inflected economic history, considering the effects of institutional and legal contexts but also the extent to which culture can be seen as a predeterminant of trust, dismissing essentialising views of intra-community relationships. Forrest (2018) and Forrest and Haour (2018) show trust to be multifaceted, subject to constant negotiation through physical and linguistic performances. Trust is seen as cultural as well as economic, a human decision and emotion. Created in specific moments rather than arising naturally from culture, trust requires learning and negotiation, rather than possession of an essential similarity. I will combine these approaches to trust with a performative understanding of identity, constantly negotiated and constructed rather than a given category.This study will change our understanding of medieval inter-cultural contact by centring individual/small-scale inter-group relationships, instead of understanding cultural contact as group-to-group contact. Exploring how emotional and performance-based trust was shaped by identities allows us to consider medieval communities in a more complex and actor-centric way and address historical discussions of the conceived transition from medieval to modern forms of economy and trust. I will locate this work within important research regarding the development of world systems at the end of the medieval period, questioning the extent to which the late medieval functionality of trust differed from what are conceived to be later forms of state, institutional, and actor-based trust.Co-existence in increasingly multi-cultural contexts brings questions of how modern-day communities react to and form trusting relationships with "the stranger" and the state across and within state/national boundaries. Despite popular perceptions of the medieval as backwards and cruel, notions related to the lamentable yet tenacious characterisation of the "dark ages" coined by renaissance philosophers, this was a time of complexity and development from which much can be learned.