Booklaunch for European Press and News in the Mediterranean and India, c. 1650-1800: Global Renaissance and Enlightenment, by Cornel Zwierlein, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.
Speaker: Cornel Zwierlein (Ruhr University Bochum)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)
This book is part of a trilogy resulting from research that began several years ago. The book reconstructs the first attempts to integrate Europe and Asia in terms of newspaper distribution, reception, and news coverage during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The East India Companies shared news via the “overland route” from Aleppo through Persia to India using professional runners, riders, and postal relay systems. The book highlights the unique nature of European handwritten and printed newspapers in Italy, Germany, France, and England, which merchants in India and the Levant were likely to miss abroad. Comparative sections address the relationship between these newspapers and the Moghul newsletter system (akhbārāt), as well as the possibility of a “meeting” between the European Enlightenment and a global Indian Renaissance in terms of news circulation.
This event is part of the Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium organized by the Department of Italian and sponsored by the European Institute.
