Sometimes it is difficult to do justice to an article in our #RetroConflictsInspirations, when it is as rich as Ian Forrest’s and Anne Haour’s contribution to the history of trust. For now, let us focus on their answer to one popular question: How did pre-modern merchants overcome challenges of long distance trade?

Generally, trust serves as a central component for explaining pre-modern trade since it reduced the risk and contingency of dealing with far-off, unmonitored partners. Much less effort, however, is taken to explain trust itself. Often, it is treated as given, resulting naturally from merchants’ common culture, i.e. common language, kinship, and faith. Yet, by turning to individual actors and their practices on a micro-level, Haour and Forrest suggest a reversal of perspective. ‘We might say that the work of creating trust was the work of creating culture. It was a matter of skills, knowledge, practices and learning, rather than possession of some essential similarities.’ Creating and preserving trust required constant attention and fostering on an individual level through language and performance, making it a core-competence for successful merchants. When we consider trust a main component of conflict-prevention and the central role trust-related language played in Hanseatic communication, the inspiration to #retroconflicts is clear. [....]

The sources documenting premodern conflicts have a specific materiality. Sometimes they are council books, sometimes legal proceedings or reports from embassies and meetings. Yet very often, they are letters.

In today’s #RetroConflictsInspirations, we take a look at ‘The Material Letter in early modern England’ (2012) by @JamesDaybell. He draws attention to interesting choices in letter writing: tools, conventions, ways of posting letters, keeping them (partially) secret or copying them. These were certainly not random, but instead all constituted a thoughtful part of the communication. The focus in the book is primarily on letters in diplomatic (elite) exchange or in connection to military operations in England, but the observations are just as applicable to mercantile letters and correspondence between city councils. For instance, we can add that cryptography occurred also in the Hanse area. Around 1558, a Hanseatic father provided his son with a code where the English Queen Mary, the Reichskammergericht and the Polish King were referred to in symbols. While not as common yet as in diplomatic exchanges and in later times, such peeks from sources show that Hansards were aware of the epistolary possibilities.[....]

This #RetroConflictsInspirations takes a step back from individual Hanseatic case studies (which currently has a leading role in the daily research of today's @retro_conflicts's twitterstorian), and looks at the geographical and cultural context of the North Sea & Baltics, and themes of natural boundaries & human agency, as inspired by the discussion in Blockmans & Heerma van Voss, ‘Urban networks and emerging states’ (in particular pp.10-16) where the concept of a N-Sea culture is placed alongside the impact of urban networks specifically N-Sea & Baltic coastal cities as "nodal points of an area characterized by intensive exchanges, cultural interaction, competition and innovation."

This connection to the sea remains a central point, as demonstrated by referencing F. Braudel re: the Mediterranean being, despite its natural boundaries, a man-made entity, as "[it] has no unity but that created by the movements of men, the relationships they imply, and the routes they follow". This focus on cultural links, urban networks & geography is, of course, important in Hanseatic research, just as the authors' thoughts on the matter: "[...] it seems very difficult to isolate [N-Sea Culture] either from its Baltic or Atlantic connections. If anything, the overlap between the two economic systems … may then circumscribe the specific North Sea Culture." [....]

Our first 2021 microreview is Whaley’s classic urban case-study: Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg. Over three centuries of religious life in one of the Hanse’s most important cities, he shows the key role conflict plays in urban history.

The book argues for the emergence of toleration in Hamburg from the contingencies of conflicts between its government, churches, and inhabitants, in contrast to an idea which emerged after 1785 of religious toleration as an intrinsic and ancient part of Hamburg’s social life. The book illustrates how a singe subject of conflict – religious toleration – can be approached through numerous conflict management strategies, as the issue of toleration brought Hamburg’s government into conflict both with its religious minorities and the Lutheran majority. Some minority religions approached the conflict indirectly, worshiping in nearby Altona to avoid risky confrontation. On the other hand, those with the means sometimes left the city in protest, threatening economic losses to which the city’s leaders were highly sensitive. Religious toleration wasn’t only a local issue either. Catholics could leverage the city’s diplomatic importance, gaining support from diplomats of Catholic powers who could pressure local magistrates, thus, integrating Hamburg’s conflicts into higher level politics. Thirty-five years after its publication, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg remains a good demonstration of both the plurality of conflict strategies, and the long-term effects of conflict management for shaping culture and politics. #RetroConflictsInspirations [....]

#twitterstorians, ready for some pre-Christmas #RetroConflictsInspirations? Just, instead of giving, it is about taking. When studying conflicts in late medieval Northern Europe we inevitably run across the term pirate (seerover).

But too easily, Gregor Rohmann argues, have historians taken such accusations of piracy in the sources at face value, presuming a strict opposition between the criminal ‘pirate’ and the economy-minded merchant. Yet, how could the private use of force be illicit when there was no state with claims to a monopoly on violence? And when most instances of violence on sea actually stemmed from conflicts between merchants not shy to actively partake in it? ‘Piracy’, so Rohmann, was part of the economic system of late medieval Europe, not a threat from the outside; ‘pirate’ was less a defined legal category than it was a defamatory term undermining the reputation of an opponent. Only when wealthier merchants became sedentary and part of the urban elite, did they gain interest in a hierarchical monopoly on violence to protect their property: ‘The state legitimized itself by latching onto the economic elites’ altered demands for order and by criminalizing […] violent conflict practices.’ For #retroconflicts these are important considerations when looking at alleged escalation, the language of conflicts, but also institutional change over time.[....]

In his contribution to the The SAGE Handbook of #Diplomacy, Noe Cornago (@NoeCornago), writing about ‘Diplomatic knowledge’, brings together insights on 1) the role of historical conditions which make diplomatic knowledge and diplomacy altogether flourish and evolve; 2) a reflective and constructive attitude towards the Other in diplomacy – when gathering knowledge is the objective; 3) statecraft, e.g. how diplomats’ reports abroad are far more telling and personal than writs produced at ministerial desks, and 4) anthropological approaches to diplomacy, showing diplomats as the ultimate pragmatists.

All these aspects can be @RetroConflictsInspirations, but perhaps two interwoven arguments about diplomacy stand out most: the cultivated ability to constantly switch perspectives in order to reach a (#conflictmanagement) goal, and the recognition that face-to-face interaction is needed for this purpose. In our #medieval and #earlymodern mercantile settings, these approaches can be traced in the sources. Hanseatic #conflictmanagers knew that gathering and disseminating knowledge about conflicts required both writing and travelling. How did they deal with disruptions of activities through plagues, how do diplomats deal with it today?...[....]

Research on merchants abroad easily lends itself to analysis of the urban laws & institutions of their host cities – and questions of urban autonomy and its influences. In today's #RetroConflictsInspirations, the spotlight is on Portuguese merchants abroad.

Flávio Miranda provides a test of recent historiography with empirical data, by examining the processes of (commercial) conflict management: how did Portuguese merchants protect their interests, what problems/disputes did they face, what strategies were applied? The question then is, if it is possible to confirm the existence of any link between significant differences in rules, laws & institutions, and the merchants’ choice of markets? A question just as relevant for our Hanse merchants. One observation intrigues from the viewpoint of our project: “... ‘privilege’ seems to have been the keyword, rather than anything else, measured in terms of the economic advantages [Portuguese] merchants could have for trading in a specific territory.” (p.28) The inter-connectivity between foreign urban institutions, urban autonomy, legal/diplomatic networks and mercantile interests/privileges abroad, in relation to #conflictmanagement, is one to keep in mind on this (rainy) Monday afternoon.[....]

We like to stress the variety of medieval conflict in our #retroconflictsinspirations but sometimes conflict is just what you expect: revolts, riots, and rebellions.  This week’s microreview is about that kind of conflict, Samuel K. Cohn’s ‘Lust for Liberty’.

Subtitled ‘the politics of social revolt in Europe 1250 to 1425’, the book compares the testimonies of many medieval chroniclers to present a picture of group conflict in both its qualitative and quantitative dimensions. One of the first comparative studies of this kind of conflict, the book’s quantitative elements provide valuable context for our project, charting the relative growth and decline of different kinds of conflicts, using a typology of conflicts based on their motivations. The comparison highlights the city as the main stage for medieval conflict, with 90% of Cohn’s revolts happening in urban settings. In its qualitative dimensions, the books also prefigures some of our interest in how strategies and tactics affected conflicts. Cohn emphasizes the economic and social determinants of conflict, but he is also sensitive to the ways that conflicts are shaped by their participants. Even as we look at conflicts outside the realm of political revolt, Lust for Liberty’s account of the skill of managing communication and symbolism during a conflict offers both an valuable example and an illuminating comparative point for our history of conflict management.[....]

Competing legal orders without clear hierarchies and different overlapping institutions in every city and state: merchants of pre-modern long-distance trade in middle and western Europe must have been anxious to overcome this state of ‘legal fragmentation’ in order to solve their conflicts quickly and orderly. Or were they?

Time for more #RetroConflictsInspirations! In their contribution to the Oxford Handbook of European Legal History, Albrecht Cordes and Philipp Höhn argue that the negative connotation associated with medieval legal pluralism are ‘ex post description influenced by paradigms of modernity.’ Instead, medieval merchants were happy to use all options available to manage their conflicts.  And the coalescing spaces of legal and extra-legal conflict management provided them with a multitude of such choices and tactics - from courts and arbitration to the threat of feuds - to enforce their interests, to sustain communication in conflicts, and to contain escalation.
For #retro_conflicts, there is much to take away from this article but its focus on actors and choices, not on institutions, stands out. To not presume that conditions differing from the ideal-type of the modern state were perceived as negative and as something to overcome allows to consider the interests of individual merchants and their strategies to pursue them.[....]

In Language and Conflict. Selected issues, the sociolinguist Karol Janicki constructs bridges between linguistics, communication studies, philosophy, social psychology and conflict studies. The result is a highly original structure. We integrate it into our #RetroConflictsInspirations due to a number of reasons. Historians study past conflicts through language in #primary sources, so the role of language in conflict and of conflict is crucial.

Language activates frames in the mind, and as such can both fan the flames of conflict and remove the fuel. Also, the same words can mean different things to people due to the underpinning that personal life experience provides. The use of symbolic language by humans is thus a mixed blessing. We know it for the present and the past, though it does not mean we pay enough attention to it. In  our project, this translates into a conscious effort to analyse the conflict discourse, with a caveat. As Janicki also points out, somewhat tongue in cheek for a linguist, that symbolic language is overrated in communication: p. 44 'Language is extremely simple compared to the complexity of the non-linguistic world'. It has a tendency to organize the world into binaries like us/them, good/wrong, though in fact there is a range of experience in between. He adds an important remark for historians: when looking at the past, all the complexities of the use and interpretation of language are amplified. What is the way forward, then? For the present, Janicki posits that we have to take this fuzziness of language in conflict into account. For us as historians of conflict, it is of interest to see to what extent people in the past were aware of it. [....]