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In Brokering Empire, E. Natalie Rothman explores the intersecting worlds of those who regularly traversed the early modern Venetian-Ottoman frontier, including colonial migrants, redeemed slaves, merchants, commercial brokers, religious converts, and diplomatic interpreters. In their sustained interactions across linguistic, religious, and political lines these trans-imperial subjects helped to shape shifting imperial and cultural boundaries, including the emerging distinction between Europe and the Levant.

Rothman argues that the period from 1570 to 1670 witnessed a gradual transformation in how Ottoman difference was conceived within Venetian institutions. Thanks in part to the activities of trans-imperial subjects, an early emphasis on juridical and commercial criteria gave way to conceptions of difference based on religion and language. Rothman begins her story in Venice's bustling marketplaces, where commercial brokers often defied the state’s efforts both to tax foreign merchants and define Venetian citizenship. The story continues in a Venetian charitable institution where converts from Islam and Judaism and their Catholic Venetian patrons negotiated their mutual transformation. The story ends with Venice’s diplomatic interpreters, the dragomans, who not only produced and disseminated knowledge about the Ottomans but also created dense networks of kinship and patronage across imperial boundaries. Rothman’s new conceptual and empirical framework sheds light on institutional practices for managing juridical, religious, and ethnolinguistic difference in the Mediterranean and beyond.

"E. Natalie Rothman introduces the persons and languages of Ottoman lands into the streets, canals, hostels, and political chambers of early modern Venice and puts that amazing city and the whole eastern Mediterranean in a brand new light. Deeply researched and powerfully argued, Brokering Empire makes us rethink the nature of 'belonging' and 'boundaries' in early modern times—and in our own day as well."—Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds

"It has been a long time since a book surprised me, which Brokering Empire did again and again. It represents a rare breakthrough in conception and research. E. Natalie Rothman reveals how early modern Venetian and Ottoman territories and spheres of influence were constantly shaped and reshaped through interactions among people and institutions."—Edward Muir, Northwestern University

"Brokering Empire argues compellingly that 'trans-imperial subjects,' as E. Natalie Rothman terms them, were critical in shaping the ways Venetians and Ottomans came to view each other. Commercial agents, converts, and professional translators all created boundaries as they negotiated across them, in the languages of commerce, law, religion, and diplomacy. This book is deeply original and beautifully written."—Leslie Peirce, Silver Professor of History, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University