Tuesday 21st February, Senior Parlour, Gonville and Caius College, 5.15-6:45pm
Professor Alexander Schunka (Freie Universität, Berlin)
Supported by the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (FFO)
Recent events currently seem to be leading to a growing interest among scholars in the history of migrations and population mobility. However, the history (and historiography) of migrations is not a new phenomenon. Numerous well-documented examples illustrate that mass migration as well as the regular daily mobility of people figured prominently in early modern Europe. This lecture addresses early modern migrations on the European continent with a certain focus on the Habsburg Lands in the ‘long’ seventeenth century. It situates the movement of thousands of people within the patterns of day-to-day mobility, taking into account the socio-economic options of individuals as well as their different confessional alignments. Special attention will be given to strategies of adapting and self-fashioning deployed by immigrants and minorities vis-à-vis the ‘migratory regimes’ of the territorial states receiving them.