Introducing: Tamsin Prideaux
Tamsin Prideaux recently joined the Institute for History as postdoc. Below she introduces herself.
I am delighted to have joined the Institute for History at Leiden for the duration of my post-doctoral Marie Curie project Armenian Trading Communities between Amsterdam and Venice, 1650-1730. My project is mentored by Professor Cátia Antunes and I’ve already benefitted from feedback and conversations with the lovely and lively group of scholars in social and economic history and beyond. Not only am I delighted to join the Institute for History, which has proved a very supportive and stimulating environment, I am also delighted to be living in the Netherlands for the first time in my life, meeting new people and learning a new language! My previous lives have mostly been in Scotland and Italy, where I have spent many happy years in very different climates and food cultures.
My project arose from some serious questions I started to ask myself during my PhD about the nature of identity, who defines a minority, and how this shaped the way that people navigated mobility in the early modern world. My previous work was on the way that foreign merchants, mostly from the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, conducted their negotiations with authorities in Venice. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, groups of people successfully campaigned for specific trading rights and privileges – such as tax exemptions and the right to live in the city for prolonged periods of time with the protection of the political authorities. These people identified as co-religionists or imperial subjects in order to be recognised as a specific trading group, such as Levantine Jews and Muslim Ottoman subjects. However, I became particularly curious in understanding how these definitions took place, and on what ground such identities were conceived.
Armenians, who became a specific and legally recognised trading community in Venice in the seventeenth century, were a particularly important group for understanding this phenomenon since they generally came from two different empires (Safavid and Ottoman), had varying religious practises (Catholic, Armenian Apostolic, and Muslim) and very wide trading networks across different cities. Since discovering links between the Armenian traders in Venice and Amsterdam, for this Marie Curie project I decided to take the two cities of Amsterdam and Venice to compare, contrast and analyse the formation of Armenian communities, and the networks between them.
I try to understand early emerging legal and societal concepts of what a minority community is and the tension with how in actual fact these “communities” were often flexible and very diverse. During this project I am also writing my first book, provisionally titled The Politics of Mobility: trading communities, identity and the Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia in Venice, 1550-1700. Despite the early modern context of my work, I believe that questioning the history of our understanding of identity helps us to think more critically about identities and how they are shaped in the current political and social imagination.
I would be very happy to meet with anyone who would like to chat about these topics or hear stories / speak in Italian with me!