Cosmopolitanism. The Mediterranean Archives

Despite the relevance of comparative studies in order to understand Empires and imperialism, the existing postcolonial literature largely privileges the British and French imperial/colonial history over other traditions and archives. These British- and French-centered accounts of imperialism largely mirror the ongoing debate on the relationship between cosmopolitanism, universalism and imperialism. Both the imperialism and the cosmopolitanism debates, in fact, implicitly take for granted the Kantian and Hegelian hierarchy of European civilizations, hence marginalizing the Southern shores of Europe and the broader Mediterranean space. Drawing on Mignolo’s notion of ‘border thinking’ and on Isin’s account of the city as a ‘difference machine’, this article addresses the issue of how imperialism, colonialism and cosmopolitanism come together and relate to each other, in the context of the Mediterranean (allegedly) cosmopolitan cities. In particular, cosmopolitanism is read as the outcome of the reciprocal adjustment of interior and exterior borders in the making of modernity/coloniality in the Mediterranean. Focusing on the Ottoman millet system, the paper’s main claim is that cosmopolitanism worked as a peculiar dispositif within the urban difference machine, enabling the city to sustain the tension between different accounts of citizenship.