Foreigners, subjects and protégés are conceptual categories . . . Belonging to one category or another determined the place someone occupied in society, their social status, and the manner in which they were seen and judged by others. . . . The need, characteristic of the eighteenth century, for information and communication opened the way to mobilities: people, objects, ideas, recipes, remedies, albums, gazettes, and books circulated and contributed to the development of a new sort of knowledge (xxii, 40).
Constanƫa Vintilă is a historian at the New Europe College in Bucharest and author of many studies about early modern communities and societies in the region, which, with the formation of nation-states in the late nineteenth century, would be then referred to as Balkan Studies by international historiography in the early twentieth century.
In her latest volume, Vintilă presents a sound analysis of fluid identities in the Ottoman principalities Wallachia and Moldavia from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Her focus is on mobility, the status of foreigners, their relationships with the locals, their career possibilities, and local and foreign women's negotiations of their personal fortunes and material wealth.
Vintilă' presents sources from nine European archives in France, Austria, and Romania. Here, I am wondering what material she would find in Turkish archives, informing the reader about the Ottoman official view of the principalities Wallachia and Moldavia. However, her chapters offer the reader a hitherto unknown tableau, hence an insight into the lesser-known history of a lesser-known European region in a lesser-known historical epoch.
The volume's four parts speak for themselves: Foreigners at the Phanariot Court; Loyalty and Subjecthood in the Eighteenth Century; Seeking a Home: People and Destinies in Southeastern Europe; and Women, Consumption and Patronage. Each of the four parts is complemented with a biographical chapter that functions as an exemplary illustration of the preceding analytical chapter. The contextual biography method the author applies demonstrates how a person, political subject either to the principalities’ princes or the Porte, faired in the historical epoch under scrutiny and what career possibilities they had at their disposal. In a region that was not yet industrialized and whose level of institutionalization of state offices was very low, a person required networks and personal relations to get ahead. These networks could be established via marriage into a local family or a high position at the principalities’ courts. In their endeavour to make a life for themselves, many foreigners, but also local boyars (aristocracy), had to play the game of favouritism, a rational but also emotional way of career planning. One's good reputation as a merchant, for example, was as important as one's education and professional acumen as a private tutor to the prince's offspring.
I immensely enjoyed reading the story of the Hartulari family (241–269); especially fascinating to me was to learn that the “Ottoman yoke,” a familiar concept in Bulgarian and Balkan historiography, proved to be sometimes more beneficial to women, who travelled to the Porte's capital Stambul to get justice at the highest court.
Today, “diversity” is THE key word on social media and political movements. The author shows us how diverse the early modern people were in this region. The level of diversity spans from language to family, to the place one had been born, to the family one married into, the place one had moved to, and the prince one served. Equally distinctive were the tax laws, a watershed for subjects and foreigners alike. That region and the people who lived there are a superb example of true diversity in religious, ethnic, national, and cultural terms. One could even change one's identity, or rather perhaps allegiance, with regard to confession, language and profession. But the difference between identity, which is a nineteenth century political concept, and allegiance is probably a perennial philosophical question.
Vintilă's book is a superb example how to engage in historiography: by careful study of the archival material, meticulous analysis, and sound judgement. Bravo!
