Tell me about your first choice, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period by Francesca Trivellato.

Francesca’s book is a very recent book and I find it inspirational because her Sephardic merchants show that cross-cultural trade co-existed quite easily with the religious prejudices of the time. I think there is often this idea that if people trade with each other they become friends and if societies are less cosmopolitan then there are automatically higher levels of religious tolerance. She shows that both can exist. 

Francesca is concentrating in particular on the Sephardic Jews of Livorno who are operating in a very Catholic environment, so we are talking about tension between Jewish traders and let’s say Catholic authorities in Genoa. I found evidence of lots of that in my book as well. In the Mediterranean people have been trading with each other for ever and yet a certain level of enmity remains in place. Christians and Muslims are trading across this Christian-Muslim boundary and, despite all the trading, no one challenges the essential rightness of this ideological vision of the world. They are trading out of convenience but that doesn’t change how they view each other. 

 I also examine the complexities of enmity. Supposedly you have a whole world divided between Muslims and Christians but, in fact, there are divides within Christianity as well. For example, with the corsairs in Malta they hate the Orthodox Christians just as much as the Muslims. And the Greeks, although they have many trading ties with Muslims back in the eastern Mediterranean, they try and downplay these as part of their attempt to receive compensation for their merchandise in Malta. 

I thought that Francesca was good at looking at the ability of people ordering their business trade through language, customary norms and social networks more than the power of state and legal institutions, and this is something that interests me a lot. I keep writing about the 17th-century Mediterranean because it is a time when nobody was in charge. For various reasons the powers that had been patrolling the sea in the 16th century aren’t there any more. So there is this situation of how people do business in a fairly chaotic environment where no state is in a position to really exercise its sovereignty. 

This theory leads on well to Robert Ellickson’s book, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes.

That is precisely why I was drawn to this book. Ellickson is interested in how people navigate and solve their problems from the bottom up. He talks about the requirements of neighbourliness in terms of what I do if my cattle have strayed on to your land, and how the people in the area he is writing about are very committed to this idea and those who are not are shunned in various ways and made the subject of gossip. So people set up their own community and he says that people do it not in the shadow of the law but really in ignorance of, or indifference to, the law. 

What is interesting about the book is that it is set in the modern day in a county in California. Supposedly one of the salient divides between the developed and developing world is the rule of law in the developed world and how people know their rights and this creates order, and yet Ellickson shows that the people in this county have no idea of the laws but it doesn’t matter because they work it out for themselves. In that way, he ties in very well with the first book where Trivellato is saying that, actually, the rise of the modern state and legal tribunals are not so central to the story. So it is getting away from that state-centric focus which has particular reverberations when it comes to the Muslim world. 

 Despite the differences in time and geography, there are also definite parallels between Ellickson’s book and mine. At the centre of my book there are these pirates but what really interests me are the Greek merchants who are in this difficult position. They need to get from point A to point B to sell their goods but it is a chaotic sea. So how do they manage it and solve their problems like trying to retrieve their goods and pay the right amount of customs dues? I am interested in looking at it from the businessman’s point of view. In the same way Robert Ellickson is looking at things from the point of view of the cattlemen. And Ellickson talks about how order often arises spontaneously. 

That also appeals to me because there’s a tendency when people talk about the Muslim world, even today and at the time of the Ottoman Empire, to describe this iron hand of the state which was there up until the end of the 16th century, and then when the Sultan died everything is seen as going to hell in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

And you still have echoes of that today when people discuss the Middle East. There is this idea that unless it is ruled with an iron hand the region will spin out of control. And Ellickson takes a focus that is non state-centric and I think I am always drawn to books that do not have the state at the centre. So his book is very much about that. Now, in important ways my book diverges from Ellickson’s. As I mentioned, he looks at how people operate out of an ignorance of the law. But in my study, and I find this fascinating, merchants way back in the 17th and 18th century were aware of the law and did go to court.