Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline?

I spent some time this weekend with Ben Anderson and Mirela Ivanova’s thought provoking little book: Is Byzantine Studies a Colonialist Discipline: Toward a Critical Historiography (2023). It was the kind of book that cut through the moralizing and sometimes too-simple approaches to the almost universal call to decolonize to reveal the complex legacy of Byzantium and disciplinary history of Byzantine Studies. 

For the contributors to this little book, the end of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century absolved it from any association with the kind of Early Modern colonialism so often associated with calls for decolonizing. Moreover, Byzantium’s legacy as a constituent influence over the emergence of Orientalism as both the object of the Orientalist’s gaze, but also as an influence over the definition of the Orient ensured that Byzantium (variously defined) was decentered and decentering. It was both exotic and familiar, an empire, but also conquered, distant in time, but somehow almost contemporary in its influence, and spatially European, but also “Levantine.” As a result, Byzantium is situated at an inflection point in how we think about colonization (and decolonization) across the humanities.

Again, there are no simple answers in this book.

For example, Nathan Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff noted that Hieronymus Wolf, who is often credited as the founder of Byzantine studies, relied on the Austrian Fugger banking family for patronage. The Fugger family owed their wealth to banking and mining with mining concessions often traded in exchange for loans. They eventually acquired a near monopoly on the mercury trade in Europe and this element was vital to refine new world silver. Thus, the Fugger’s benefited directly from the Spanish silver trade from the New World and turned some of these profits into providing patronage for Wolf’s efforts to collect and publish manuscripts that remain central to the study of the Byzantine world.

It was also fascinating to consider the role that Byzantium has played in creating post-colonial identities. Maria Mavroudi traces the the influence of Byzantium on such diverse subaltern movements as Rastafarianism to the art of Mark Doox which uses Orthodox iconography to canonize American civil rights leaders and musicians. The role that such iconography plays in “subaltern Byzantiumism” further emphasizes the potential of Byzantium (and Orthodoxy) as a decolonizing discourse.

Sebnem Donbekci, Bahattin Bayram, and Zeynep Olgun, however, showed the disciplinary limits to this decolonizing potential as they drew my attention to the troubled relationship between Byzantine Studies in Turkey and the International Congress of Byzantine Studies which withdrew its quinquennial congress from Istanbul partly because of the restoration of Ay. Sophia as a mosque in 2020. 

Anthony Kaldellis in his contribution to the volume likewise acknowledged that the development of the disciplinary status of Byzantine Studies required it to adopt certain colonial priorities including the privileging of a European perspective on Byzantium that emphasized its role as “other” to the emergence of European rationalism, states, and culture. This effectively reduced the Byzantine state and society to a a cautionary tale or a study of decline that serves as a foil to a triumphal European narrative. In this role, Byzantine Studies gained admission to the community of disciplines in the modern academy.

There is much more in this thin volume with papers dedicated to the history of collections, Byzantine archaeology as both colonial and decolonial practice, and the role of Byzantium in ethnogenesis and modern ethnicity. It largely avoided the more obvious, problematic, and potentially anachronistic discussions of whether the Byzantine State through policy or practice anticipated the colonial relationships  that define the modern era. 

The contribution and the book itself was short. This encouraged me to read it and digest its messages and ideas. The plurality of voices in the book make it useful for a classroom setting and ensure that its brevity doesn’t produce a book that relies on authority to make concise observations.