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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.

This article uses the strange and marvellous as a heuristic device to study the relationship between emotions, media and politics in early modern Venice. In particular, it examines how printed news about the marvels of the Levant mediated Venice’s encounters with its colonial subjects and imperial rivals, and analyses the role of wonder and imagination in the creation of an imperial community of feelings. The article argues that a focus on the affective politics of the marvellous can shed new light on the emotional dimensions of the early modern Venetian public sphere and its links with war and empire-building.

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