Jean-Frédéric Schaub - Biography#

My academic background is based primarily on training in the early modern history of Catholic societies of southern Europe (15th-17th c.). This training relies upon two pillars: on the one hand, the new social history of the Annales in France, and on the other, legal history and anthropology in Portugal. My first fieldwork (PhD thesis) was a study of the political embeddedness of Spanish and Portuguese societies and institutions in the 16th and 17th centuries. Immediately after, I studied the case of the Jewish community of the Spanish North-African city of Oran, the only Jewish population tolerated in the entire Hispanic Monarchy after 1492. These first two books (1999, 2001) helped me to better understand the extent to which it is wrong to set apart the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in Early Modern European history.

Close collaboration with legal historians then led me to co-edit three volumes on the multiple relationships between political history and legal history of the Ancien Régime monarchies (1993, 1996, 2005). More recently, I explored the question of whether the model of judicial monarchy developed in this work remained useful for analyzing the evolution of the island societies of the Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic. It resulted in the publication of a monograph on political conflicts and legal framing in the Azores in the 16th and 17th centuries, when Portugal and Spain were united (2014).

By taking Spain and Portugal together, and by taking the Iberian dominions in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic together, I turned my back on the national (and nationalistic) historiographies of both countries. This led me to examine jointly the Spanish tradition (including the complex question of the “Black Legend”) with the political tradition of its archenemy: France. The book La France espagnole (2003) addresses the problem of the Iberian roots of the French absolutist regime in the 17th century. Contrary to the generally accepted narrative, France’s imitation of Spanish politics (and, in particular, its hardline Catholicism) was not only a reaction to Protestantism attributed to Louis XIV, it was also a legacy that the Sun King himself was proud to accept. My conclusion, then, was that it is impossible to understand the system of the Versailles monarchy by silencing its Hispanic dimension.

After the first part of my academic career, I developed a rather different project about Oroonoko, the novella written by the first English professional female play-writer, Aphra Benh. Oroonoko tells the story of the first completely positive Black hero in European literature. Feminist and post-colonial scholarships had insisted on the novelty of this book. My approach was quite different, as I have attempted to trace the archaic (and often Iberian) probable sources of Behn’s inspiration. Writing this book (2008) pushed me also to compare British and Irish historiographies about the processes of “internal colonialism” with Iberian research about the ethnic cleansing in the Peninsula against converted Muslims and Jews. Since then I have been teaching a graduate seminar on plantation and war in Elizabethan Ireland and about the processes of “purification” of the Spanish and Portuguese societies in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

On these bases, I began to teach the early modern history of the formation of racial categories (politics, law, ideologies) in the long term of the history of Europe and its colonies. To do so, I decided to join the EHESS’ research center Mondes Américains, in which I am the only “Europeanist.” This proved to be a wonderful combination and the best way to decenter inevitable Eurocentric biases in European studies. The book L’Europe a-t-elle une histoire? (2008) was a plea to renew efforts to think about the history of Europe differently, against the authors who imagine that the best way to criticize Eurocentrism consists in ignoring the European history.

After the methodological essay Pour une histoire politique de la race, which came out this year (English translation at Princeton UP in 2016), I am currently writing a larger book on racial categories in Europe and its colonial empires from the 14th to the 18th centuries, co-authored with Silvia Sebastiani. Developing this research on Early Modern Europe in a Center of American Studies (North and South America) has been a terrific opportunity. In Paris, some of my graduate students are specialized in European studies, others in American studies. The diversity of their approaches and sensibilities provides me invaluable feedback, as the project on racial categories progresses. At the same time, both groups collaborate and shape each other with remarkable fluidity.