"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 cultural characteristics of surveillance, spying and covert action.

In applying this bottom-up approach, this research will also engage with questions surrounding the culture of secrecy in early modern society. On this matter, historians have proposed two overlapping approaches: those of surveillance and vigilance. The former refers to the role of state bureaucracy and administration in building a top-down surveillance culture, while the latter, developed in the recent Italo-German historiography on Vigilanzkulturen, describes a culture of alertness and circumspection involving all members of the community. These concepts would thus be tested across different populations within the empire.

The main focus will be on primary material from Venice's state archive, though the project will also examine sources from local and regional archives in selected parts of the empire. Qualitative analytical techniques will primarily be used, looking at language and context around intelligence practices, since the archival material is often patchy and difficult to use in a quantitative way.

Furthermore, the social and cultural focus of the proposed project invites incorporating elements of microhistory, to reconstruct the experiences of the Venetian subjects practicing intelligence and to better understand cultural tropes and social attitudes towards espionage and surveillance. This will be achieved by examining contemporary accounts discussing intelligence-related concepts.

This project will draw not only from historiography, but also from the discipline of intelligence studies, to contextualise the social and political potential of intelligence. In turn, by engaging with this body of theory, and providing a rigorous historical example, this thesis hopes to contribute to an interdisciplinary conversation, particularly relevant in today's digital society, on how intelligence and surveillance can and have been exploited by policymakers, and experienced by populations.