[Bilimsel Haber] CfP: Bourgeois Seas: Middle Class Eastern Med Port Cities (Florence, 19-20 September 2008)

[onurinal at onurinal.com]

Subject: Call for Papers: Bourgeois Seas: Middle Class Eastern Med Port
Cities 

International Conference 
Call for Papers 

Bourgeois Seas: Revisiting the Middle Classes of Eastern Mediterranean Port
Cities 

European University Institute, Florence 
19-20 September 2008 

We are seeking proposals for papers willing to revisit, expand, challenge
and invigorate the discussion on Eastern Mediterranean port bourgeoisies.
Initiated in the mid-1980s this discussion focused on some of the "classic
hybrid Eurasian port cities of the nineteenth century", and approached the
emergence of bourgeoisies in the Eastern 
Mediterranean as a corollary of the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire -as
a periphery- to the core of the world economy. More than twenty years on,
there are few historians nowadays willing to subscribe to class formation
and the emergence of a single bourgeoisie in Eastern Mediterranean port
cities as a mere product of increased trade. The abandonment of this
explanatory model has nevertheless been accompanied by an unwillingness to
examine class formation and class relations altogether. Although there has
recently been a notable surge of interest in the study of non-European
middle classes as well as of Eastern Mediterranean port cities, most
historians working on the field of the Eastern Mediterranean rarely treat
port cities as sites where power was 
articulated and exercised, where classes were formed, lived, and contested,
and where bourgeoisies asserted their class hegemony. The conference
therefore aims at bringing these two critical, but so far parallel,
historiographical trends together. 

Following recent historiographical trends but without ignoring the
achievements of the previous generation, we therefore welcome proposals on
any port city of the Eastern Mediterranean during the long nineteenth
century, until about the aftermath of the First World War. We approach the
"Eastern Mediterranean" as a historically defined social and 
economic space spanning from the ports of Trieste in the West to the ports
of Odessa and Alexandria in the East. Class is the focus point of the
conference, but class formation is not taken as a given historical
development waiting to happen. Rather, research on the "middle classes", or
"bourgeoisies", of these ports is an opportunity to rethink its 
usefulness as a category of analysis for the Eastern Mediterranean
historical realities. Questions we would like contributors to address
include: 

1. * the ways, sites and character of port city bourgeois hegemony and its
contestation; the harbour and quay as distinctive sites of changing
economic practices, middle class cohesion and conflicting labour relations; 
2. * the interplay between class and other aspects of identity (such as
gender, religion, ethnicity and occupation), and how these different
aspects of identity infuse each other and structure power relations in the
ports of interest; 
3. * the relationship between state and class, namely the impact of
governance (central and municipal) on middle class identities; 
4. * the relation between older and newer forms of social ordering, in
particular the relation between class and community and the functioning of
class as both an intra-communal form of social differentiation and an
inter-communal form of identification; 
5. * the emergence of the 'social' itself as both a discursive category and
a demarcated field of collective action in Eastern Mediterranean port
cities; its constitution through and its interaction with discourses on the
"middle classes" and "middle-class" practices (such as philanthropy). 

Although our emphasis is on a close analysis of the particular workings of
class in the various Eastern Mediterranean port cities, we would also like
to think about possible new integrative frameworks of analysis. Port cities
have recently been identified as one of the most promising fields in the
attempt to connect social history with global history. We therefore hope
that an examination of middle classes inhabiting a maritime environment
comprised of port cities that belonged to different administrative entities
(whether to centuries-old empires or to emerging nation states), will allow
us to place Eastern Mediterranean experience within a global history
context. 

The conference will take place at the European University Institute in
Florence in September 2008. Applicants are welcome to send abstracts of
about 350 to 500 words by the end of January 2008. Authors will be notified
by the end of March 2008. Papers will be circulated in advance in order to
facilitate discussion among participants and it is expected that the
conference will lead to a publication of an edited volume. For 
information and submission of abstracts please contact 

Paris Papamichos Chronakis 
University of Crete 
pchronakis at gmail.com 

Dr. Athanasios (Sakis) Gekas 
European University Institute 
Athanasios.gekas at eui.eu 
 


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