Intercultural Contacts, Multiple Identities and Shifting Allegiances: the Caravane Maritime and its Protagonists in the Early Modern Mediterranean

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Summary 'Intercultural Contacts, Multiple Identities and Shifting Allegiances: the Caravane Maritime and its Protagonists in the Early Modern Mediterranean'.Contemporary geopolitical, religious and cultural issues, such as the co-habitation of Christianity and Islam and the integration of the Southern shores of the Mediterranean into the Western European economy after the Treaty of Barcelona (1995) have reinvigorated many of the classic Mediterranean issues that have been at the foundations of historical studies of this area.The commercial network of maritime trade activities across the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa in the early modern period created a web of people of various faiths, nationalities and social classes, which for centuries permitted and fostered a constant exchange of ideas, customs and information, cutting across religious denominations and borders. This maritime trade network was known as the Caravane maritime.By better understanding the Caravane maritime we will better understand the historical roots of our current intra-Mediterranean relations. To do this, we need to bring together all the relevant scholars working on the various different aspects of this maritime traffic, including economic and social historians, literary scholars, specialists of Mediterranean studies and of the Ottoman world, as the Caravane maritime's surviving documentary evidence is spread throughout the Mediterranean in dozens of archives (often not catalogued and difficult to trace) and is written in several different languages. This project will bring together in an international workshop leading academics from the United Kingdom, Italy, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Spain, France, Greece, the United States, Malta and Australia. This will create a framework for the exchange of the latest research methods and evidence. In order to guarantee continuity and maximize the dissemination of research findings and evidence, the project will solicit papers for publication as an edited book, and be the first step in establishing a permanent research network that will create a dedicated website where bibliographies and documents could be stored for public access. There is an urgency and timeliness to this project, due to the recent developments in Southern Europe and North Africa regarding the history of the region and the need for British scholarship to engage with this research, due to the important role played by British maritime and naval power in the Mediterranean at the time.