Brian Brege - MAP FORUM

Описание: MAP FORUM - 8 June 2021

The Empire That Wasn't: The Grand Duchy of Tuscany's Global Ambitions

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was not an imperial power, but it did harbor global ambitions. After abortive attempts at overseas colonization and direct commercial expansion, as Brian Brege shows, Tuscany followed a different path, one that allowed it to participate in Europe’s new age of empire without establishing an empire of its own.

The first history of its kind, Tuscany in the Age of Empire offers a fresh appraisal of one of the foremost cities of the Italian Renaissance, as it sought knowledge, fortune, and power throughout Asia, the Americas, and beyond.

Dr. Brege will reveal the strategies that allowed Tuscany to punch well above its weight in a world where power was equated with the sort of imperial possessions it lacked. By finding areas of common interest with stronger neighbors and forming alliances with other marginal polities, a small state was able to protect its own security while carving out a space as a diplomatic and intellectual hub in a globalizing Europe.

Brian Brege is Assistant Professor of History at Syracuse University. His Stanford University dissertation, “The Empire That Wasn’t: The Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Empire, 1574-1609” was awarded the Ezio Cappadocia Prize for "Best Unpublished Manuscript." His monograph, Tuscany in the Age of Empire, will come out with Harvard University Press on July 13, 2021. As a fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti (2019-2020), he conducted research on his second book project, which is provisionally entitled The Global Merchants of Florence: Florentine Patricians Families and Early Modern Capitalism.