"Espionage, surveillance, vigilance: A comparative history of the role of intelligence in the Venetian empire."

The project aims to provide a comparative study of intelligence practices across different areas of the early modern Venetian Republic.
The project will consider the Venetian empire, in line with recent historiographical trends that have shifted attention from the capital's republican institutions to the domination of its far-flung territories. Thus, the research will explore how intelligence -both in matters of internal security and foreign policy- fit within the dynamics of empire.
To this end, the project will consider intelligence not only as an institutional system, but also as a practice within communities, thus grounding the history of intelligence not just in political but also in social and cultural history. This challenges the view -prevalent in the scholarship- that intelligence in early modern Venice was a highly organised, well-oiled machine, in favour of a more fluid approach that considers the limitations of early modern bureaucracy and the informal, social processes through which informants and functionaries interacted.
By focusing on cultural, linguistic, religious and ethnic distinctions throughout the Serenissima, the comparative approach aims to capture the core elements of colonial dynamics. Specifically, I intend to compare intelligence operations in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the Italian mainland dominions, examining differences between Centre and Provinces, Greek-Latin subjects, and Christian-Ottoman neighbours.
Current scholarship has covered the operations and structures of Venetian secret services mostly from a top-down and central perspective. Less literature exists on the social and cultural aspects or on the differences between territories. Thus, the contribution of this thesis would be to expand existing research on Venetian intelligence history, but also to add a further layer to the study of intelligence history more broadly, by proposing a framework of analysis that explores it from below, and focuses on the social and...