Empire in the Balance: The Venetian Maritime State in the Early Modern Mediterranean

FAIN: FT-53408-05

Monique Elaine O'Connell
Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC 27109-6000)

I am requesting support to visit archives in Croatia and Greece to complete a stage in my larger project, which explains how Venice managed to rule over a physically and culturally fragmented Mediterranean empire. I argue that part of the explanation for Venetian success is the operation of its judicial system. Judicial proceedings, combined with the possibility of multiple appeals, offered an open-ended method of conflict resolution and negotiation with subjects. The records in Zadar and Corfu provide an invaluable perspective on how subjects negotiated within the parameters of Venetian power. More widely, my project contributes a historical dimension to the renewed interest in studies on empire.

Associated Products

Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice's Maritime State (Book)
Title: Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice's Maritime State
Author: Monique O'Connell
Abstract: The city-state of Venice, with a population of less than 100,000, dominated a fragmented and fragile empire at the boundary between East and West, between Latin Christian, Greek Orthodox, and Muslim worlds. In this institutional and administrative history, Monique O'Connell explains the structures, processes, practices, and laws by which Venice maintained its vast overseas holdings. The legal, linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity within Venice's empire made it difficult to impose any centralization or unity among its disparate territories. O'Connell has mined the vast archival resources to explain how Venice's central government was able to administer and govern its extensive empire. O'Connell finds that successful governance depended heavily on the experience of governors, an interlocking network of noble families, who were sent overseas to negotiate the often conflicting demands of Venice's governing council and the local populations. In this nexus of state power and personal influence, these imperial administrators played a crucial role in representing the state as a hegemonic power; creating patronage and family connections between Venetian patricians and their subjects; and using the judicial system to negotiate a balance between local and imperial interests. In explaining the institutions and individuals that permitted this type of negotiation, O'Connell offers a historical example of an early modern empire at the height of imperial expansion.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/men-of-empire-power-and-negotiation-in-venices-maritime-state/oclc/234257247&referer=brief_results
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0801891458
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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