The Familiarity of Strangers

"Francesca’s book is a very recent book and I find it inspirational because her Sephardic merchants show that cross-cultural trade co-existed quite easily with the religious prejudices of the time. I think there is often this idea that if people trade with each other they become friends and if societies are less cosmopolitan then there are automatically higher levels of religious tolerance. She shows that both can exist. Francesca is concentrating in particular on the Sephardic Jews of Livorno who are operating in a very Catholic environment, so we are talking about tension between Jewish traders and let’s say Catholic authorities in Genoa. I found evidence of lots of that in my book as well. In the Mediterranean people have been trading with each other for ever and yet a certain level of enmity remains in place. Christians and Muslims are trading across this Christian-Muslim boundary and, despite all the trading, no one challenges the essential rightness of this ideological vision of the world. They are trading out of convenience but that doesn’t change how they view each other. I also examine the complexities of enmity. Supposedly you have a whole world divided between Muslims and Christians but, in fact, there are divides within Christianity as well. For example, with the corsairs in Malta they hate the Orthodox Christians just as much as the Muslims. And the Greeks, although they have many trading ties with Muslims back in the eastern Mediterranean, they try and downplay these as part of their attempt to receive compensation for their merchandise in Malta. I thought that Francesca was good at looking at the ability of people ordering their business trade through language, customary norms and social networks more than the power of state and legal institutions, and this is something that interests me a lot. I keep writing about the 17th-century Mediterranean because it is a time when nobody was in charge. For various reasons the powers that had been patrolling the sea in the 16th century aren’t there any more. So there is this situation of how people do business in a fairly chaotic environment where no state is in a position to really exercise its sovereignty."