How did early modern diplomatic archives form across vast distances? What role did various kinds of practitioners – diplomats, secretaries, scribes, and dragomans (diplomatic translator-interpreters) – play in connecting metropolitan chanceries with colonial outposts, both within and across shifting imperial boundaries? What did it mean for these practitioners, collectively and individually, to make the writings of one imperial chancery accessible, discoverable, legible, and meaningful to readers in other languages, spaces, and jurisdictions? This presentation considers the entanglement of Venetian and Ottoman archive-making in both Istanbul and the Venetian-Ottoman borderlands in Dalmatia to highlight the trans-imperial dimensions of early modern archivality in general and the role therein of specific practices of commensuration in particular.
E. Natalie Rothman is Professor of History and Chair at the Department of Cultural and Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, specializing in the history of the Mediterranean in the early modern period. Her interests include the history of Venetian-Ottoman diplomacy, diplomatic translators and interpreters, the genealogies of Orientalism, the history of archives, and digital scholarship.
On Tuesday morning 11 October, 10.45-11.45, Prof Rothman will also participate in a roundtable discussion of her recent The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism (Cornell, 2021), co-organised by Aslı Niyazioğlu and Filippo de Vivo and hosted at Holywell Manor by John-Paul Ghobrial. Space is limited, if you want to attend please write to Aslı by 8 October.
