Refugee “nations” and Empire-Building in the Early Modern Period

Abstract This article investigates to what extent the early modern period as the Confessional, Imperial and Economic Age was also an age of tolerance, how much early modern empires depended on religious minorities willing to migrate and settle overseas, how much in the words of Jonathan Israel religious migrants were “agents and victims of empire”. Jonathan Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World of Maritime Empires, 1540–1740 (Leyden: Brill 2002), 1. I will take the example of Sephardi Jews and Huguenots to analyse the agencies of persecuted religious minorities in negotiating terms and conditions for their (re-)settlement – more often than not as separate nations or at least separate communities within the ever-growing European empires.