Towards the West. Conflict and Settlement in the Maniot Diaspora (17th‑18th Centuries)

This article analyses the interaction between Mediterranean mobility and the internal colonisation policies promoted by European countries in the modern age through the events of the Greek‑Maniot migration flow that unfolded from the 1660s to the 1760s. It is a dispersion of population that spread from the eastern Mediterranean to the western one and then to North America through the Atlantic, involving six chancelleries that sought to intercept it and employ it in their respective internal settlement plans (Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Genoa, Kingdom of Sardinia, Kingdom of Spain, Great Britain, and France). The article seeks to show that these human mobilities were not only the result of colonisation policies promoted by European chancelleries to strengthen the territorial body of their respective states, but also and above all the result of projects for the social promotion of the migrants themselves, who agreed to become settlers to ensure the satisfaction of specific social, political, and economic objectives, both individual and communal, even resorting to the manipulation of the history of their own personal and family origins.