CFP: A Global History of 18th century Trieste

Conference in Paris, 28 June 2019

A Global History of 18th century Trieste:

What materials? What Methodology? What Scales?

https://www.helsinki.fi/sites/default/files/atoms/files/cfptrieste_30-01-2019.pdf

In 2009, Jan Morris’ Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere illustrated of a certain renouncement

to analyze the history of the city in the historical context of its development. ‘An allegory of

limbo, in the secular sense of an indefinable hiatus,’ Trieste seems as if it were an object in an

offshore history between Central Europe, the Italian Peninsula, and the Balkans, without

belonging to any.

However, the literary picture of Trieste is not the one of historians, whom, over the last two

decades have been slightly emphasizing the complex economic, social and political history of

the city and its territorio. This was particularly characterized by the two first volumes of the

Storia economica e sociale di Trieste respectively published in 2001 and 2003. Economic

historians have contrasted from each other the local, regional and global dynamics supporting

the demographic and economic take-off of the city, and they particularly paid attention on

maritime litigation settlement, the development of insurance companies, and mercantile

practices in a cross-cultural context. At the social level, trading diaspora historians have

provided a better understanding of the process of immigration; they have highlighted the

flexible building of national communities and assessed the citizenship issue in an urban society

strongly shaped by international mobility and trans-regional exchanges. As for them, Habsburg

historians have tried to understand how the development of the free port of Trieste fitted in

with the Austrian state-building, reflected the transition of the political economies elaborated

in Vienna and how the city was concretely governed, paying a particular attention to the

governor Karl von Zinzendorf.

Today, the renewal of the history of Trieste in the 18th century is located at the cross-road

between the new economic history of early modern free-ports, the history of cross-cultural

Mediterranean circulations, and the socio-political history of empires. Over the last two

decades, historians have strongly renewed the history of the city and its free port. Because of

the large diversity of the materials that have been recently examined the history of Trieste

appears kaleidoscopic, and, at some point, we still miss the global picture.

This workshop aims to put into the light the diversity of the materials available, and the

necessity of criss-crossing the different Trieste deposits with the National Archives in Vienna

or in other depots of former Habsburg capitals, the different consular collections in London,

Paris or College Park, and private papers. Taking such valuable materials into account strongly

challenges the promethean narrative of a self-made city, and the cosmopolitan one of the

allegedly “city of nowhere”.

Focusing on the different and unexplored materials that can contribute to the history of Trieste

in the 18th century, we invite historians to confront these historiographical trends and to

present, develop and disseminate new approaches.

We particularly invite scholars to:

- engage with the methodological issue of the diversity of academic points views and national

backgrounds to build a coherent history of Trieste. How to write a trans-national/trans-imperial

history of rising city?

- question the classical chronology of the Trieste’s expansion. Was the creation of the free-port

the beginning of the story? How and how much the old municipality participated to this

process?

- examine the city’s fabrique and with it to analyze the relation between the citizens of the old

municipality and the merchants of the free-port, the Habsburg subjects and the protected

foreigners, the wealthy community and what Johann Kollmann named the Lazzaroni of the

portal area.

The workshop will be held in Paris on 28 June 2019.

Scholars wishing to participate should email an 1-page abstract along with a short academic

CV to David Do Paço (david.dopaco@sciencespo.fr) and Christine Lebeau

(christine.lebeau@univ-paris1.fr) no later than 22 February 2019.