Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Natalie Rothman's Brokering Empire is an extraordinary, path-breaking book.Steeped in archival sources and critical social and cultural theory, it both reveals and explains the role of culture brokers, middlemen minorities, and colonial intermediaries in defining linguistic, religious, and geopolitical boundaries across the Venetian-Ottoman field of power in the early modern Mediterranean world.Rothman calls the protagonists in her story "transimperial subjects" -"émigrés from Venetian colonies and borderland regions, redeemed slaves returning from the Ottoman Empire, converts from Islam or Judaism, and merchants and diplomats who regularly traveled across the Venetian-Ottoman frontier" (3) -a neologism for an intermediary category between citizen and foreigner, for those whose relationships between themselves and government institutions defined inclusion and exclusion in Venice, its colonies, and beyond.Trained as an historical anthropologist, Rothman makes theory out of practice as she explores complex networks of alliance and interest through interregional contacts, hierarchies of authority established by legal institutions and the patrician social order, and modes of interaction between the various groups and individuals in her empirical analysis of personal relations that cut across and redefined categories of foreign and local, Muslim and Christian, Turk and Venetian, Levantine and European, and East and West.Setting is significant here, as Rothman explodes the myths of conflict and the clash of civilizations as well as the place of aristocratic paternalism and citizenship in Venice during the period between two wars, 1571-1669, after the Battle of Lepanto during the War of Cyprus and at the end of the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".