Cornel Zwierlein. Imperial Unknowns

Cornel Zwierlein’s Imperial Unknowns is the first detailed study of British-French relations in the Mediterranean basin. While there have been numerous economic, naval, and diplomatic studies of each of the two countries in the early modern period, this book examines them side by side. It appraises a vast amount of material: the bibliography is over fifty pages long and includes sources in English, French, German, Italian, and Greek, with special attention to the British and French archives. The book is lucid and carefully referenced: it is magisterial in its breadth. “Empires are built on ignorance” (1). With this sentence, Zwierlein begins his book and proceeds in four extensive chapters to examine “the four epistemic fields of politics and economics, religion, general knowledge and history of the Levant regions, and science” (2). His emphasis is on the “communication of ignorance” (3) that underpinned British and French religious, commercial, and intellectual efforts in Britain’s and France’s rise to imperial power in the period under study. The author challenges thereby the arguments in colonial and imperial historiography that empires—in this case, “trade empires”—came into being because of the collection of knowledge that prepared the way for conquest and domination. Rather, Britain and France grew into empires despite limited knowledge. Throughout the various discussions in this book, Zwierlein emphasizes the “history of ignorance.”

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Economic history · German · Historiography · Ignorance · Intellectual history · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law