Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean ed. by Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd (review)

In the Introduction to Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean, editors Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd argue that the “cultural history of empires must be studied relationally rather than in isolation or even comparatively” (4). Further, they contend that the “imperial imaginary” is a crucial conceptual space that must be extrapolated and dissected through various disciplinary lenses (4); this volume seeks to articulate and complicate the “distinct rhetorics” of imperial rivalry via a broadened model of Ferdinand Braudel’s Mediterranean (3). The intended contribution of Representing Imperial Rivalry, Fuchs and Weissbourd write, is to expand “the archive of Mediterranean texts and problems,” so that scholars of the “inner sea” might assess its imperial resonances as intersecting, reaching, and provocative (4). They offer a model for studying imperial interconnectivity, and seek to “recover” the “complex registers” of competition between empires and would-be empires (4).

Divided into two sections, the contributors to the first half of the book explore English, Spanish, Neapolitan, and Ottoman representations and manifestations of imperial vision and rivalry through early modern theatre, maps, woodcuts and engravings, “propaganda” pamphlets, poetry, and administrative and institutional documents. The authors of the second half of this collection focus their attention on early modern England specifically and the “imagining” of a possible and probable future English empire. Using theatrical works and literature alongside personal letters and diplomatic documents, these contributors demonstrate how England’s development as an empire was “intimately bound up” with Mediterranean rivalries and reverberations (6).

Ania Loomba’s piece acts as an expansion to the Introduction by emphasizing the crucial legacy of Braudel’s Mediterranean monographs for world-systems theories and histories, and by challenging scholarship that has subsequently built off the work of the master of the Annales school. She reminds her readers that scholars are still asking: “What shape did the early modern world take in consciousness? What tools helped early modern peoples conceive of it in the manner that they did?” This introductory framing is highly useful, as Loomba goes on to use The Tempest to show how connections between northern Europe, the African continent, the Mediterranean basin, and the greater Atlantic in the play formed the distinctly ambivalent “colonial modernity” of Shakespeare’s time. The Tempest, and the early modern world, centred in the Mediterranean, was defined, she argues, by contact trajectories and crisscrossing frontiers, both real and imaginary.

Larry Silver’s piece provides further evidence of early modern ambivalence. Using the engravings of Albrecht Dürer and others, he argues that, ultimately, “most images of Turks from the Holy Roman Empire necessarily blended opposing qualities: fear of and loathing for a formidable enemy that defined Christian Europe through contrast, alongside fascinated, careful observation” (73). While the Ottoman empire was the foil to the Holy Roman Empire’s supremacy, both of the latter’s rulers and common citizens desired and consumed exoticized and menacing representations of Islamic power.

While the authors argue that Christian-Islamic rivalries were productively fraught, so too were the relations between and within Christian territories. Pieces by Andrew W. Devereux and Elizabeth R. Wright show how rhetorics of Christian universalism and unity coloured competition with France, in the case of Devereux’s work, and interpretations of exterior rivalries as haunting reminders of internal problems, in the case of Wright. Discursive techniques of imperial legitimation, whether administrative tracts or literary productions, were tools of both approximation and distancing no matter the ideological slant.

Shifting to the second section of the volume, which convincingly expounds on how “discursive formations participate in the building of empire,” the opening essay by Jan Hwang Degenhardt reminds the reader of how rivalry rhetorics assert their legitimacy (7). Degenhardt discusses three theatrical pieces from the turn of the seventeenth century, emphasizing their “meta-theatricality”—self-awareness of the artifice of the stage—to argue that early modern English theatre made “knowledge public” (170). Further, the contributions of Eric Griffin...