The Geneva Case Study
Email: john.condren@history.ox.ac.uk
Dr John Condren | Faculty of History (ox.ac.uk)
John Condren was Research Associate (Geneva Case Study) and is now Departmental Lecturer in Early Modern European Social and Cultural History, St Hugh's College, Oxford.
John's research centres upon politics, warfare, and diplomacy in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europe. In particular, he focuses upon the duchies of the Po plain (Parma-Piacenza, Modena, and Mantua-Monferrato) which were governed by princely dynasties with limited military and financial resources and an acute awareness of their dwindling geopolitical significance. His PhD dissertation assessed the understudied roles of these small states in Louis XIV’s foreign policies between 1659 and 1689. A book based on this research, 'Louis XIV and the Peace of Europe: French Diplomacy in Northern Italy, 1659-1701', will be published by Routledge in 2023 (series link here: https://www.routledge.com/Politics-and-Culture-in-Europe-1650-1750/book-series/PCE ) Court culture, dynastic politics, the significance of female rule at princely courts, and changes in diplomatic practice are all topics of enormous interest to him.
His research for the European Fiscal-Military System project examines the Republic of Geneva’s significance as a financial hub, as both France and the Allied powers sought to profit from its neutral status in order to harness flows of credit which were facilitated by wealthy merchant-banking families for the purposes of war-making Geneva was thus part of a transalpine chain of financial centres, which also included Genoa and Amsterdam. This “Protestant Rome” was both an important expediter of the designs of larger powers, and a successful “small state” in its own right. This research will be published by Palgrave, in their History of Finance series, in 2023 - monograph title: 'The Alpine Vault of Europe: the Republic of Geneva and Military Finance, 1685-1815'
Publications
‘Un héritage compliqué : le feu Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV, et les petits états italiens après 1661’, in Yvan Loskoutoff and Patrick Michel (eds.), Mazarin, Rome, et l’Italie (Paris, forthcoming, 2019).
‘The role of women in Louis XIV’s relationship with the Gonzaga-Nevers di Mantova between 1665 and 1691’, in Diplomatica, published by the Don Juan Archiv, Vienna (forthcoming, 2019).
‘The dynastic triangle in international relations: Modena, England, and France, 1678-1685’, in The International History Review, 37:4 (August 2015), pp.700-720.
