Final Report Summary - FIGHT (FIGHT – Fighting Monopolies, Defying Empires 1500-1750: a Comparative Overview of Free Agents and Informal Empires in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire)
FIGHT has demonstrated that the refusal of monopolies and defiance of empires by agents and networks was the result of a specific entrepreneurial behavior that differed from Early Modern Western European entrepreneurship as it focused on the use of violence as a means to social and economic competitive advantage. The entrepreneurship of empire was thus culturally diverse, organizationally multifaceted and included the interface between free agents/entrepreneurs and the institutionalized monopolies. In that sense, entrepreneurship has become the central concept to understand the cultural diversification within empire building and the ways in which empires profited from this diversity.
Curiously, and perhaps unexpectedly, institutionalized empires took advantage of the entrepreneurial behavior of free agents and their networks to move along, expand and dominate areas that would have been otherwise closed to them. This conquest and expansion of territories and spheres of influence provided networks with enough creative agency to cooperate, oppose and represent the interests of the central states that commanded empires. This is the reason why, empires reacted but only mildly to the intervention of this non-sanctioned networks that often changed overtime from outsiders (or peripheries) of empire into cores (or centers) of colonial build up. In this sense, the encounter and entanglement of free agents, their networks and the state-imposed monopolies and consequent imperial projects, defined new spaces where borders, culture, ethnicity, place of origin and language did not matter. In a way, a true space of global interactions.