Parution : Anastasia Stouraiti, War, Communication, and the Politics of Culture in Early Modern Venice

Weaving together cultural history and critical imperial studies, this book shows how war and colonial expansion shaped seventeenth-century Venetian culture and society. Anastasia Stouraiti tests conventional assumptions about republicanism, commercial peace and cross-cultural exchange and offers a novel approach to the study of the Republic of Venice. Her extensive research brings the history of communication in dialogue with conquest and empire-building in the Mediterranean to provide an original interpretation of the politics of knowledge in wartime Venice. The book argues that the Venetian-Ottoman War of the Morea (1684-1699) was mediated through a diverse range of cultural mechanisms of patrician elite domination that orchestrated the production of popular consent. It sheds new light on the militarisation of the Venetian public sphere and exposes the connections between bellicose foreign policies and domestic power politics in a state celebrated as the most serene republic of merchants.

• Presents an alternative reading of the history of Venice, focused on the imperial nature of Venetian colonialism
• Uses a rich and diverse range of sources – textual, visual, and material – that expand our knowledge and understanding of Venetian culture and society
• Brings together a wide range of national historiographies, including Italian, Greek, French, and Anglo-American scholarship, and methodological and theoretical perspectives

Cambridge University Press, February 2025, Paperback, 307 p., ISBN: 9781108971355