Facilitating, controlling and excluding from movement: religious orders, organizational networks and mobility infrastructure in the early modern Mediterranean

Through an analysis of the network associated with the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, this article challenges overly positive narratives of early modern mobility and of the role played by networks more generally. It reconstructs the functioning of the Franciscan network, focusing on its ‘immobile infrastructure’ and showing how the latter facilitated and at the same time controlled and limited friars’ movement. Building on this analysis, the article postulates the existence of an ‘organisational migration infrastructure’, which enabled, addressed and controlled people’s movement according to organisations’ interests. The article also suggests a new methodological approach to the study of early modern networks, centring its analysis on ‘organisational migrants’ and using the notion of ‘infrastructure’ as an analytical tool. From a wider perspective, the article deepens our general understanding of early modern mobility, particularly with regard to the role of networks and organisations, and to the entanglement of mobility, immobility, control and exclusion.

This article has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme (Grant Agreement 101001857) as part of the project ‘HOLYLAB – A global economic organization in the early modern period: The Custody of the Holy Land through its account books (1600–1800)’.