Interview with GHI Visiting Fellow Laurelin Middelkoop

Laurelin Middelkoop is a Ph.D. Candidate at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She will soon defend her thesis on early modern theories of (con)federal unions of states, with a focus on the writings of French philosopher the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743). Alongside her doctoral research, she is currently co-editing two collections about the work of the late historian J. G. A. Pocock (1924–2023), to which she is also a contributor. She obtained her BA in History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, after which she completed an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History, jointly administered by University College London and Queen Mary University of London.

IK: Could you start by telling me a little bit about your background, your academic career, and your research interests?

LM: I have been studying history ever since my undergraduate degree and there already I was focused mostly on intellectual history and the history of political thought, and I have specialized in that ever since. I’ve been covering various periods, but I mostly study early modern European history up to the nineteenth century and American history. In my undergraduate studies, for example, I focused mostly on the Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius. For my MA, I studied the American painter Thomas Cole, trying to see his paintings as making an argument in the political sense of the word. The way I did that was by looking at both the visual imagery and several textual sources such as his writings, what he was reading and different discourses which were circulating at the time, mostly about time in The Course of Empire. More recently for my PhD, I’ve done a study on the French thinker the Abbé de Saint-Pierre and more broadly about “perpetual peace” texts, which essentially proposed to form a European federation and thus offered an alternative to many other ways of international thinking about how to manage interstate relations. This has then grown into my postdoctoral project, in which I examine the reception of these perpetual peace texts in Colonial America to understand if there are deeper, longer reception histories to these.

IK: What initially drew you to the field of intellectual history and political thought?

LM: Early on I realized that people have always been trying to make sense of their circumstances and I’ve been really interested in those attempts to make sense of what lived political reality is and should be and how we might think about these constructs. For me, this is what intellectual history does and can do. It is giving you a peek into past modes of thinking and making sense of such worlds. I have always just found that fascinating because I think it can fundamentally challenge the way we now think and it can make sense of our present in that it questions the extent to which we are good at that as human beings.

IK: What kinds of sources do you use in your research and what are some of the biggest challenges in researching your topic?

LM: A lot of intellectual history is focused on books, treatises, etc. If you are lucky, there is plenty of manuscript material which you can use to explain how arguments have been adjusted over time. For example, in my PhD thesis that became very clear when I was looking at earlier manuscripts of the final text in which, instead of a European union, one thinker actually proposed an almost global union. We can very easily miss that these ideas existed at the time, but it is important for the intent of the whole piece even if the final product is something else. I think it directly impacts how you read a final product like a treatise which is setting out a particular argument. In the eighteenth century, thankfully, there is a growing number of periodicals which you can make use of. They give you really interesting insight into what people were interested in and what they considered worthy of reporting and discussion.

I would say the difficulty is that although a lot of these materials have been digitized – which has changed the game to such a tremendous degree – it still is not necessarily easy to find sources if you are looking for a small topic or theme. Digitization does not necessarily mean you can word search, especially if texts are handwritten rather than printed and processed with OCR. I would also say that digitization creates new demands on our accuracy as historians, which is a good thing. You have fewer excuses because it is all out there, everyone can access it.

IK: Do you think there is a risk that people overlook sources that have not been digitized because they tend to simply use what is convenient and easily accessible?

LM: Absolutely. Especially when a lot of material on a given topic or by a certain author has been digitized, it can be difficult to get a sense of what has and has not been digitized and what may still just be sitting around in archives. There is also a different worry, which is if you are trying to find sources on a very specific topic, you can easily lose sight of the larger context. What I mean by that is that it can be really valuable to get a very broad idea of what sources there are and what they are discussing. If they are discussing another topic much more than the particular one that you are looking for and you miss that because you are only laser-focused on the one thing, that can lead you to unintentionally misrepresent the importance of some other questions or events. That is also why I do think it is still valuable to go to archives and talk with archivists who really know what their archives have and what those materials can offer. It’s just very time-intensive! 

IK: Your current research project is titled “Unions before the Union: Perpetual Peace Plans before the American Founding.” What questions you are trying to answer with it?

LM: The United States and its founding has always had a great deal of exceptionalism about it, some of it rightly so! More recently, I would say in the last 20 or 30 years or so, this has been questioned and there has been more attention drawn to the kind of models that the founders of the American republic were working from. Of course, I am not saying that the way the United States was founded was not extremely extraordinary, not least because of the way aims changed in the process of its founding, and there certainly was a significant amount of political innovation. But I still think that the Americans had a lot of models to work from, European models specifically. More so, I would argue, than American models. It’s now a bit fashionable to point towards the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as a model, for example, and that is fair up to a point because there is something almost natural in confederations, in that if you exist in several political unions you might need to come together to resist a larger political entity. But the Founders were working from very particular models and these models were European, and not just British either. They were mostly confederate types of republics, which includes the Holy Roman Empire as well as the United Provinces and the Swiss Confederation. My interest in connecting that with the perpetual peace texts is that perpetual peace texts offer a very particular model of founding a political body which is not unlike the United States and which begins with a treaty. And it is also immediately framed in a very positive light: if we can federate, this is the way we can manage our relations and ensure that we keep them peaceful. I have found Framers who knew about these texts who mostly refer to it as the plan of Henry IV of France. I think that is another aspect that we tend to forget: their reference points were still very much formed by their seventeenth-century background, by ideas and debates we are not really familiar with anymore but that were definitely still alive then. So the question is, did these texts offer a very particular roadmap, did they play a role? Were they seen as a handy intellectual resource in this process, contributing to the notion that you can have an extended confederated republic? In the eighteenth century, most thinkers thought republics could only be organized on a relatively small scale. Confederation was one way in which you could overcome this, suggested by Montesquieu for example, from whom the Framers could then have taken it. I am trying to see how all these things fit together. Rather than assume that they played a role – it might have been very modest indeed! – I am trying to see whether they could offer a very particular configuration of things to the Founders.

IK: Is it your sense that the fact that we do not talk or even know about these European influences today when we study or teach the founding of the United States has its roots in a deliberate omission on the part of the Founders because this republic was the new American project, conceived in contrast to the old European monarchies?

LM: Yes, we know that because some of their discussions have already been reconstructed. For example, Joshua Livestro published a book titled A More Perfect Union: Federal Union in Political Thought and Practice, 1500-1951 in 2024 in which he looks at the idea of a union of states and how this is taken up by the Americans. His argument is that initially, these European models were much more important, but then the Founders let go of them in the process – understandably so, because when you are founding a new state or a new union of states, there is good reason to emphasize its originality. Of course, the Declaration of Independence was a unique document, and setting up this kind of federal government was completely new as well, but the process of becoming independent itself was less so. There are significant precedents for this. I am thinking especially of the United Provinces, which follow quite a similar trajectory in forming a union, declaring independence from the Spanish Empire and following through on it. I believe it is actually helpful to think of these developments together and to consider how by the time that independence is won in America, circumstances have changed to such a degree that it is no longer really a question whether this new political body is going to be a monarchy or a republic. They know almost from the get-go: we will overthrow our king and we are going to form a republic. This was not the case with the United Provinces in the late sixteenth century. They asked at least three different candidates if they wanted to become their sovereign and they all said: “no thanks, it looks like this would be an uphill battle.” So they sort of accidentally became a republic. It is helpful to think of these histories in the long term and to think of them together because it reveals something about such historical particularities.

IK: You are currently finishing your PhD in Florence, Italy. You received your BA and your MA in the UK, and you grew up in the Netherlands. How have these different academic environments shaped you and your work?

LM: I have found a real appreciation for the way that these different academic traditions do different things really well, which does not mean that they do the other things poorly, of course. I would say they are so different that there really is something to learn from all of them. The experience at the European University Institute in Florence is rather unusual, because it is designed to prepare you for an international academia that does not really exist anywhere. Academia still has very much a national flavor. I think being at such a European institute gives you a good insight into these different traditions, understanding what German historians do really well, for example, or what French historians do really well, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon academic tradition. Continental Europeans are excellent at writing detailed histories driven by archival work. Meanwhile, Anglo-Saxons historians are a bit more focused on the narrative, and maybe also slightly better at telling a larger story. I feel lucky that I can look at these different academic cultures and aspire to take from them what I can.

IK: What kind of archival research or other work are you hoping to accomplish during your time here at the GHI Washington?

LM: I am currently going through a lot of digitized materials. In the larger New England area there are also many periodicals kept in local societies which can offer interesting insight. The Library of Congress has a lot of very niche materials that are definitely harder to get in Europe, even published writings by Founders and Framers from 1810, for example. So, I am hoping to collect a lot of this material and make the most of that archivally. I have also realized just how much material is kept at local historical societies all over New England, in Philadelphia and in Boston, there is a lot of great material in these places.

IK: Finally, what do you like to do when you are not working on your project? 

LM: I really enjoy the offering of museums here in DC, I think it is fascinating. I find it tremendously interesting how these museums try and tell a very particular kind of story. I also enjoy just wandering around town and I like to row. I have tried to do that here in DC, but it is a bit more difficult than in Europe. I went once in September, but there is a very long winter pause here. The U.S. winter is something else!