History of European Expansion

The outcome of the Brexit referendum is the apex of a long history of Euro-British relationships characterised by two opposing but coexisting stereotypes. On the one hand, England appears as the freedom-seeking nation resisting restrictive collective policies imposed by a totalitarian EU regime of faceless Brussels bureaucrats. On the other hand, England seems to resurrect its imperialistic superiority against the purported democracy and horizontality of European institutions. Adopting the notion of “cultural intimacy”—with which Michael Herzfeld analyzes the mutual engagement of contrasting positions in political and administrative practices—this paper addresses the equally stereotypical images of an indifferent, inhuman European bureaucracy and of an insular, cynical Great Britain in the works of Malcolm Bradbury and Tim Parks. Be it the allegedly liberal yet nationalistic stance of Thatcherist anti-Europeanism in Bradbury, or the British disaffection with the purported identitarian and cultural levelling within the common borders of the Schengen area and of the single currency, both authors’ symbolic constructions of European institutions and of British Euroscepticism are built as cultural entanglements of these two realities, and show the need to overcome the reductive conception of Europe as a failed super-state.

It is tempting to think of precolonial India as a harmonious society, but was it? This study brings evidence from new and unexpected sources to take position in the sensitive debate over that question. From the investigation of six conflicts in the Deccan region it draws conclusions about group behaviour that put modern clashes in context. Some of the conflicts under investigation appear odd today but were very real to the involved, as the antagonism between Left and Right Hand castes was for about a thousand years. Other conflicts continue to the present day: the seventeenth century saw lasting changes in the relationship between Hindus and Muslims as well as the rise of patriotism and early nationalism in both India and Europe. This book carefully brings to life the famous and obscure people who made the era, from the Dutch painter Heda to queen Khadija and from maharaja Shivaji to the English rebel Keigwin.

The third volume of Dutch Sources on South Asia mentions that there are some late-eighteenth-century Marathi letters, written in the Modi script, preserved in the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia.  Scanned copies of the same were obtained by Lennart Bes (Leiden University) with the kind permission of the Indonesia Archives. Using these scanned copies, this paper gives the complete Roman transliteration of the two letters as well as their translation, and contextualizes the letters within Maratha documentary practices as well as within the contemporary political scene of the late-eighteenth-century Coromandel Coast. In addition, this article provides a commentary on the Maratha perception of Europeans in general and of the Dutch in particular, arguing that the Marathas had an unusually positive opinion about the trade-oriented Dutch, especially when contrasted with the territorially ambitious English and the Portuguese.

Voir l'article en ligne Jérusalem ou Valence : la première colonie d'Occident (J. Torró). Au début des années 70, le médiéviste israélien Joshua Prawer indiquait que le royaume croisé de Jérusalem avait constitué la première action colonisatrice de l'Occident, premier pas d'une dynamique continue menant à la conquête des Amériques et aux colonisations plus récentes. Prawer posait ainsi une question d'une grande importance pour la connaissance de la généalogie de l'expansion européenne, au-delà même du saut océanique des xve-xvie siècles. Cependant, aussi bien l'acceptation que le refus de la notion de « colonie » appliquée aux conquêtes de la chrétienté latine médiévale ne se sont pas accompagnés d'une réflexion conceptuelle suffisante. C'est ce problème qui est discuté dans ce travail. La thèse défendue est que la nature spécifique de la colonisation occidentale réside dans la subversion et l'articulation des systèmes sociaux extérieurs. On considère par ailleurs que la première expérience de ce type n'eut pas lieu dans les États latins d'outre-mer, mais qu'elle se réalisa, de façon particulièrement claire, dans le royaume de Valence conquis par Jacques Ier d'Aragon au milieu du XIIIe siècle. Avertissement L'éditeur du site « PERSEE » -le Ministère de la jeunesse, de l'éducation nationale et de la recherche, Direction de l'enseignement supérieur, Sous-direction des bibliothèques et de la documentation -détient la propriété intellectuelle et les droits d'exploitation. A ce titre il est titulaire des droits d'auteur et du droit sui generis du producteur de bases de données sur ce site conformément à la loi n°98-536 du 1er juillet 1998 relative aux bases de données.

Rejecting the conventional presumption that violent indigenous resistance to colonization had become all but ineffectual by the late colonial period in Portuguese America, this article uncovers ample archival evidence of successful raiding and other military maneuvers by Brazil's eastern Indians, especially the Botocudo and the Puri. By carefully examining the comportment of both colonizers and colonized, it elucidates how each employed various forms of violence to achieve and communicate incompatible objectives. In particular, the peculiarities of the encroaching slave-holding Luso-Afro-Brazilian society presented Indians with diverse opportunities to impede expansion. They did so by understanding their adversary's culture and translating that understanding into acts orchestrated to achieve the greatest possible effect. As such, armed conflict did not represent the cessation of cultural interaction on this colonial frontier; rather, it was an essential means by which that interaction occurred. Over time, mutual bloodshed and brutality evolved to constitute a shared language and praxis, at once symbolic and concrete.

While the early Bristol expeditions to North America have always been thought of as a purely English phenomenon, this article demonstrates that they were partly funded by Italian capital. Following the slight leads left behind by a deceased historian, documents have been found which demonstrate that a payment of fifty nobles was made in 1496 to the Venetian explorer, John Cabot, from the London branch of a Florentine company: the Bardi. This article discusses the significance of the payment for Cabot and his expedition, the reasons why the funding might have been advanced, and the position of the Bardi within London's Italian community.

In contrast to the notion most historians have advanced of a “primitive” literary phenomenon, this article demonstrates that the first “descriptions of the Indies,” which at the turn of the fourteenth century were elaborated by Marco Polo, Odorico of Pordenone, and other mendicants traveling toward the Far East, deserve to be examined as an autonomous field of inquiry closely connected with the definitive loss of the Holy Land in 1291. The need for accurate knowledge about the Indian Ocean and the Mongols was a strategic necessity that Crusade theorists introduced in the highest political circles. Benefitting from a non-elitist language that complied with tradition and simultaneously marked a departure from it, Marco Polo and his peers contributed significantly to meeting this need. In spite of the superficial identification with the prestigious and ancient tradition of the allegorical East, the “descriptions of the Indies” challenged long-standing assumptions about medieval Orientalism and presented the lands beyond the Dar al Islam as a tangible geopolitical entity that would enable comparison with—and even the enlargement of—the political and spiritual horizons of the Latin West.

En este artículo se pone de manifiesto cómo la institucionalización de la cosmografía y la navegación puso fin al lema Non Terrae Plus Ultra y propició el surgimiento de la rúbrica imperial Plus Ultra ayudada por la navegación de un Mare Tenebrosum (el Océano Atlántico) y el trazado de los contornos de un mundo nuevo que empezaba más allá de las Columnas de Hércules. Este proceso fue posible gracias a la instauración en Sevilla de la Casa de la Contratación en 1503 y a la creación de oficios científicos como el de Piloto Mayor, maestro de hacer cartas de marear o cosmógrafo. La nave que aparece en la portada del Regimiento de navegación (1606) de Andrés García de Céspedes cruzando los pilares del héroe de la mitología griega pone de relieve la premisa baconiana del dominio del hombre sobre la naturaleza, el conocimiento obtenido a través de la conquista de las Indias Occidentales y, también, los deseos de la monarquía española por aprovecharse de la utilidad del conocimiento científico mediante la unión de la experiencia náutica y la teoría cosmográfica.

Modern European culture and politics have been largely shaped by the century-long material and cognitive relationships with several (domestic and exotic) forms of ethno-anthropological, sociological and cultural diversity according to both a spatial and a temporal dimension. The need to confront and handle ‘diversity’ did not just result from the European expansion process in the world, but coincides with the most classic problem of politics, consisting in the effort to harmonize different interests, groups, religious faiths, customs, languages, ethnic identities and merge them into some form of viable and durable co-existence. Approach to cultural diversity has produced two ideal extremes: suppression through assimilation or its perpetuation through radical ‘othering’. Historical experience has offered, however, a large variety of policies and of intellectual or ideological constructs of a ‘transcultural’ kind, with the transfer, adaptation and dialogue of political, religious, economic patterns of relationships. This international collection of essays sweeps over a multiplicity of such cultural experiences according to a global, transcultural outlook, ranging from European encounters with exotic, savage peoples of newly discovered lands of conquest and colonization, to the European nation-State building process. The book is the outcome of the European research project, “EUO-European Culture and the Understanding of Otherness: Historiography, Politics and the Sciences of Man in the Birth of the Modern World (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries)” conceived and directed by Guido Abbattista with researchers from eleven European universities and sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Education University and Research (Interlink program for 2006-2008).

Harold Marcuse describes reception history as ‘the history of the meanings that have been imputed to historical events. It traces the different ways in which participants, observers, historians and other retrospective interpreters have attempted to make sense of events both as they unfolded and over time since then, to make those events meaningful for the present in which they lived and live.’ In recent years, there has been increased academic interest in the reception of the languages and cultures of classical antiquity in East Asia. For example, in 2019 an edited volume on the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity in East Asia was published, which includes essays on the reception of antiquity in Ming and Qing China and Tokugawa Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As for another area of East Asia, Taiwan, one chapter in the book examines classical architectural elements in buildings on the island, but this mainly concerns the period of Japanese occupation (1895–1945).There is, however, little on the reception of the classical tradition in Taiwan prior to this time, including the age of European expansion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the present article I attempt to address this situation by exploring how meaning was imputed to texts from classical antiquity in seventeenth-century Taiwan, where Dutch and Spanish merchants and missionaries were active and had regular contact with indigenous Formosan peoples. In some sense this complements a recent article of mine on the reception of ancient Latin and Greek authors in Tokugawa Japan.Footnote4 One important difference, however, is that whereas Japan was already a highly literate society when Europeans first arrived there in the mid-sixteenth century, the indigenous Formosan people were not literate. Furthermore, we have no texts written by them during the period of contact with Europeans, and so we must view their reception of classical authors through the prism of Dutch and Spanish records, which raises methodological questions.

nowledge is power: the versatile expeditions of botanist Pieter Willem Korthals (1807–1892)

The National Herbarium in Leiden houses a fascinating archive about one of the few botanists of the Committee for Natural History of the Netherlands Indies, Pieter Willem Korthals (1807–1892). The notebooks and reports of his travels in Java, Sumatra and Borneo reveal the hybrid position of Korthals in the colonial world of the Dutch East Indies. Korthals was an experienced botanist who employed methods such as measuring, taking notes and sensual observation at various locales in the Malay Archipelago. His multi-faceted fieldwork tied into the colonial administration’s desire to acquire valuable information about the islands’ human and natural resources. In particular, after the introduction in 1830 of the Cultivation System in Java, the colonial authorities in Batavia were eager to learn more about the system’s efficiency in more remote areas. By drawing upon rich archival sources, this brief essay uses Korthals’ case to shed fresh light on the production of botanical and other knowledge in the for- mer Dutch colony in the East Indies.

This paper discusses how colonialism and global modernity are connected. In response to the debate on the topic in this journal, we criticize the simplistic understanding of both terms and their interrelation and raise three objections to the “genuinely colonial character of modernity” claim made by Meinhof: (1) the terms “modernity” and “colonialism” are too compact and polemical to be adopted unaltered, without necessary adjustments, into the sociological analysis; (2) the narrative of the colonial origins of modernity is, in a historiographical regard, questionable; and (3) Meinhof’s postcolonial critique of the epistemic structures of sociology operates with essentializing notions, insofar as it short-circuits the social aspects of science with its contents. In the final analysis, however, we do recognize the urgent need for further sociological investigation of the interconnection between colonial rule and global modernity. However, for this to be successful, it will be necessary to overcome the too-simple, if not plainly false, claim of the “colonial foundation of modernity.”

geoPolítIca amerIcana a escala global. el estrecho de magallanes y su condIcIón de "PasaJe-mundo" en el sIglo xVI 1 resumen El artículo analiza las tipificaciones que se le dieron al estrecho de Magallanes dentro del proceso de configuración político-territorial de América durante el siglo XVI, y de las dinámicas globales que fueron a la par de este proceso. El texto se divide en tres partes. En la primera se hace una lectura teórica sobre las problemáticas historiográficas y las temporalidades en las que se inscribe el descubrimiento del Estrecho, que permiten que sea definido en el estudio como un pasaje-mundo. En la segunda se examinan los hechos, actores y las territorialidades que lo consolidaron como una referencia geopolítica entre 1520-1560. Y, por último, en la tercera se estudian las variaciones que tuvo su importancia estratégica durante 1560-1580, variaciones que develan las formas sobre cómo fue concebido para delinear, sincronizar y especular sobre una serie de problemáticas continentales que afectaban al mismo tiempo espacios locales y globales.

What was the cultural impact of early meetings between Chinese and Europeans? This book explores visual, literary, and scholarly representations of the Celestial Empire and Western countries against the backdrop of actual encounters. Based on rare Chinese and, correspondingly, European (especially Dutch) sources and archival documents, the volume covers a range of cultural expressions from the applied arts to philosophy. Special attention goes to the ideals and realities of trade and diplomacy of the Dutch East India Company in China. Foreign Devils and Philosophers approaches global history from a cultural perspective and illuminates the reciprocal dynamic of aversion and admiration: Chinese and Westerners could appear as sages or savages in each other’s eyes.

In 1558 Nicolò Zeno published an account of a voyage which two of his ancestors had made to the subarctic parts of the North Atlantic Ocean around 1390. It claimed the discovery of the island of Frislanda and others, until then unknown, including the coastal areas of North America. Although its reliability was definitively discredited in the course of the nineteenth century, the account still attracts believers. In this essay I first argue how the report is one of many that rely on the attraction of the fantasy island. Next, I explore narrative features that link it to medieval travel literature. Finally, I show how the account, which was initially embraced by Western European geographers and cartographers, was first disproved in a disputation, in the 1640s, between two prominent Dutch scholars, Hugo Grotius and Johannes de Laet.

The theory and practice of liberalism has historically justified the dispossession of non-European peoples through the ideological deployment of individual rights—private property being the most prominent. Rather than discarding rights language altogether due to its colonialist background, the theological option for the poor in the postconciliar Church of Latin America establishes a criterion of authenticity that contributes to its prophetic renewal. The methodological turn toward the poor evident in the liberation theology of Ignacio Ellacuría can wrest rights from its crippling association with political, economic, and cultural forms of liberal domination as seen in the Americas. Latin American theologians provide historical and constructive resources for demythologizing the sacred right to private property in liberalism’s neocolonial present and historical past, as typified by John Locke. Specifically, the theme of integral liberation outlines the material, social, and transcendent dimensions of justice for the dispossessed as an ecclesial alternative to liberal individualism.

Hieronymus Köler (1507-1573) lebte in einer Zeit, die gemeinhin als Epochenschwelle gilt. Entdeckung und Eroberung der Neuen Welt, Humanismus, Renaissance und Reformation sind pathosgetragene Eingangsakkorde dieses Zeitalters. Diese Akkorde brechen sich in dem bewegten Leben Kölers auf die eine oder andere, mitunter überraschende Weise. Der Beitrag richtet sein Augenmerk auf die Reise des Nürnbergers nach Sevilla. Köler ist gewillt, sich der Welser-Expedition nach Venezuela anzuschließen, wird jedoch durch widrige Winde davon abgehalten. In seinen biografischen Aufzeichnungen beschreibt er die Sitten und Gebräuche der dort lebenden Indianer und schöpft dabei aus Informationen der Zeitzeugen. Kölers Schilderungen können somit als frühe Quelle imaginärer America-Ethnographie gelesen werden.

Resumen: A partir de una laguna en la amplia bibliografía sobre historia urbana, la contribución insiste en las diferencias de la extensión geográfica del llamado " alfoz " , los distritos jurisdiccionales en los cuales las autoridades municipales ejercen autoridad, en-tre las zonas de frontera en la Andalucía bajomedieval y las áreas de expansión atlántica. Aludiendo a distintas explicaciones posibles, se destaca la necesidad de investigaciones futuras que analicen el alcance de las implicaciones jurídicas. Palabras clave: historia urbana, jurisdicción urbana en distintas épocas, espacio y control urbano, expansión, métodos de colonización, vecindad. Abstract: The contribution points to a neglected problem of the history of Spanish urbanization either in late-medieval reconquest areas as well in regions of overseas coloni-zation in early modern times, i. e. the different extensions of urban municipal jurisdiction, the so-called alfoz, in frontier areas in Andalucía, the Atlantic Islands and early continental America. The contribution calls for deeper study of the phenomenon.

Until quite recently, the field of early modern history largely focused on Europe. The overarching narrative of the early modern world began with the European " discoveries, " proceeded to European expansion overseas, and ended with an exploration of the factors that led to the " triumph of Europe. " When the Journal of Early Modern History was established in 1997, the centrality of Europe in the emergence of early modern forms of capitalism continued to be a widely held assumption. Much has changed in the last twenty years, including the recognition of the significance of consumption in different parts of the early modern world, the spatial turn, the emergence of global history, and the shift from the study of trade to the commodities themselves. Keywords Long-distance trade – material culture – the spatial turn – gift-giving – food history

Lorsqu'ils découvrirent les immensités asiatiques après avoir subi l'assaut des armées mongoles en 1241, les Occidentaux furent pris d'un immense vertige, dont une des formes les plus spectaculaires fut le départ de missionnaires, pour la plus grande part franciscains, jusqu'à l'autre bout du monde. Toutefois, cet élan ne fut pas une simple réaction évangélique. Il est aussi le signe d'une société en pleine transformation, marquée par l'apparition de nouvelles manières de vivre le christianisme, dont un des marqueurs fut justement cette mobilisation autour du thème de l'évangélisation, qui prolongeait plus qu'elle ne contredisait une croisade entendue d'abord comme rêve d'unité du monde tout entier au-tour d'un ordre chrétien. Ce rêve fut recueilli par une Église-monde, et organisé par l'administration centralisée d'une papauté impériale. C'est de ce vaste mou-vement que naquit la mission telle que nous la connaissons, c'est-à-dire une évangélisation portée par un corps spécialisé et par une administration en mesure de penser des stratégies globales. Mais plus profondément, c'est ce mouvement qui permit de mobiliser l'Occident latin autour d'une culture de l'expansion nourrie par un discours prophétique sur les succès futurs de la chré-tienté – et ce jusqu'en Amérique. Après tout, Marco Polo, comme Christophe Colomb, furent peut-être davantage des missionnaires que des marchands.

Após trabalhar em Sevilha e Lisboa por alguns anos, o holandês Jan Huygen van Linschoten (c. 1563-1611) foi nomeado guarda-livros e secretário do recém-indicado arcebispo de Goa, o dominicano Vicente da Fonseca, em 1583. Ao retornar à Europa quase uma década depois, tendo vivido em Goa por mais de cinco anos, Linschoten começou a publicar relatos de viagem e instruções náuticas que encontraram extraordinário sucesso. Sua principal publicação, o Itinerario, foi editada em holandês por Cornelis Claesz em 1596 (com uma cópia avançada tendo sido entregue um ano antes à primeira frota holandesa que navegou para as Índias Orien-tais), e quase imediatamente traduzida para o inglês (1598) por sugestão de Richard Hakluyt, que recomendou o livro à Companhia das Índias Orientais da Inglaterra. Edições em latim, alemão e francês logo se seguiram. Sua extensa circulação e as valiosas instruções de navegação que continha fizeram dele um dos livros que mais propagaram o conhecimento sobre o Estado português da Índia pela Europa, tendo tido impacto direto sobre as empresas holandesas, britânicas, francesas e dinamarquesas rumo à Ásia. Além de um relato de viagem e compêndio da história natural indiana, o Itinerario também é uma longa meditação moral sobre os modos e atitudes dos portugueses em relação aos habitantes de Goa – sua " etnografia implícita " – e sobre sua falência em manter uma distância segura em relação a eles, o que representa uma avaliação negativa do próprio sistema de " conhecimento colonial " dos portugueses. Palavras-chave Império português – conhecimento colonial – etnografia implícita – Jan Huygen van Linschoten ABSTRACT After working as a merchant in Seville and in Lisbon for a few years, the Dutchman, Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1563-1611), was named book-keeper and secretary to the newly appointed archbishop of Goa, the Dominican Vicente da Fonseca, in 1583. Upon his return to Europe almost a decade later, having lived in Goa for more than five years, Linschoten started publishing travel accounts and sailing instructions that met with extraordinary success. His foremost publication, the Itinerario, published in Dutch in 1596 by Cornelis Claesz (an advance copy being given one year earlier to the first Dutch fleet sailing to the East Indies), was promptly translated into English (1598) upon the counsel of Richard Hakluyt, who recommended the book to the British East India Company. Latin, German and French editions followed suit. Its wide circulation and invaluable navigational instruction turned it into one of the books that did the most to spread knowledge about the situation of the Portuguese State of India throughout Europe, having had direct impact on Dutch, British, French and Danish ventures into Asia. Being somewhere between a travel account and a compendium of Indian natural history, the Itinerario is also, however, a long meditation with moral overtones on Portuguese manners and attitudes toward Goans – the formers' " implicit ethnography " – and about their failure in keeping a safe distance from the latter, what represents a negative evaluation of the very " colonial knowledge " system of the Portuguese.

(focussing on the Upper German merchants and the Hanseatic League)

Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, National Library of Portugal
20.11.2014
Lisbon, Portugal

in:

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP "Renaissance Craftsmen and Humanistic Scholars: European Circulation of Knowledge between Portugal and Germany"

Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, National Library of Portugal
20.11.-21.11.2014
Lisbon, Portugal

Business history can be a valuable, even critical element in teaching international management – not only at elite institutions and at postgraduate level, but at universities of applied sciences and in undergraduate education, too. It is specifically relevant for programs with a focus on Europe. Students should be given a chance to discover common and connected pasts of European enterprise. The article offers a rationale for curriculum integration and discusses case selections and teaching methods for non-historians. Five exemplary themes are presented: East India companies, financial market bubbles, telegraphy, the Suez Canal, and the emergence of airlines.
Zusammenfassung
Unternehmensgeschichte kann ein wertvoller, sogar kritischer Beitrag in der Vermittlung des internationalen Managements sein – nicht nur an elitären Einrichtungen und im Master, sondern auch an Fachhochschulen und in Bachelor-Studiengängen. Besonders relevant ist sie für Studiengänge mit Fokus Europa. Studenten sollten eine Chance erhalten, die gemeinsame und zusammenhängende Vergangenheit europäischer Unternehmenstätigkeit zu entdecken. Der Artikel begründet die Integration ins Curriculum und diskutiert Fallauswahl und Lehrmethodik für Nichthistoriker. Eine exemplarische Auswahl von fünf Themen wird gezeigt: Ostindienkompanien, Finanzmarkt-Blasen, Telegrafie, der Suezkanal und die Entstehung von Fluggesellschaften.

With the loss in 1291 of the Holy Land at the hands of the overwhelming Sultan of Cairo, numerous and complex treatises on military strategy were submitted to the Pope and the king of France that reinforced tremendously the scope and significance of the Recovery ideology. Their authors’ nominal adscription to the eschatological discourse of the Crusade ideal paved the way for new horizons in the European political agenda that, paradoxically, worked against the very foundations of the pilgrim soldier legitimate tradition as well as the realization of their ultimate goal; the possession of the Holy Sepulcher. This discursive strategy – initially intended to allow parties to synchronize activities without truly achieving complete agreement – would assure an essential form of continuity at the cost of putting the legacy of tradition on a same level with other categories of thought, equally ductile and surrendered to the urgencies of now. This radical turn outward of the ontological quest stand as a conspicuous observatory for exploring not only the extraordinary European expansion overseas but also the no less traumatic process that gave shape to the Modern conscience, oscillating as it were between acquiescence to power and resistance to it because of the contingency and faultiness of its very foundations.