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Atlantic Wars explores how warfare shaped human experience around the Atlantic from the late Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. Military concerns and initiatives drove the development of technologies like ships, port facilities, fortresses, and roads that made crossing the ocean possible and reshaped the landscape on widely separated coasts. Forced migrations made land available for colonization, and the transportation of war captives provided labor in the colonies. Some wars spread to engulf widely scattered places, and even small-scale, localized conflicts had effects beyond the combat zone. Wars in Africa had consequences in the colonies where captives were sold. Europeans and their descendants held the upper hand in combat on the ocean, but in the early modern period they never dominated warfare in Africa or the Americas. New ways of fighting developed as diverse groups fought alongside as well as against each other. In the Age of Revolution enslaved Africans, indigenous Americans, and colonists in various places rejected cross-cultural alliances and the prevailing pattern of Atlantic warfare. New military ethics were developed with important implications for the governance of the European empires, the security of the new American nation-states, the legal status of indigenous peoples, the future of slavery, and the development of Atlantic economy. The pervasive influence of warfare on life around the ocean becomes apparent only by examining the Atlantic world as a whole.

This book rethinks the nature of the early English East India Company as a form of polity and corporate sovereign well before its supposed transformation into a state and empire in the mid-eighteenth century. It explores the Company’s political and legal constitution as an overseas corporation and the political institutions and behaviors that followed from it, from tax collection and public health to war-making and colonial plantation. This book also traces the ideological foundations of those institutions and behaviors, revealing how Company leadership wrestled with typically early modern problems of governance, authority, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. the book thus reframes some of the most fundamental narratives in the history of the British Empire, questioning traditional distinctions between public and private bodies, “commercial” and “imperial” eras in British India, a colonial Atlantic and a “trading world” of Asia, European and Asian political cultures, and the English and their European rivals in the East Indies. At its core, the book offers a view of early modern Europe and Asia, and especially the colonial world that connected them, as resting in composite, diffuse, hybrid, and overlapping notions of sovereignty that only later gave way to more modern singular, centralized, and territorially- and nationally-bounded definitions of political community. Given growing questions about the fate of the nation-state and of national borders in an age of globalization, this study offers a perspective on the vitality of non-state and corporate political power perhaps as relevant today as it was in the seventeenth century.

(Dis)connected Empires takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kōtte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answers, this book explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. It argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the various parties involved, differences also emerged early on. This prepared the ground for a new kind of conquest politics, which changed the inter-imperial game at the end of the sixteenth century. The transition from suzerainty-driven to sovereignty-fixated empire building changed the face of Lankan and Iberian politics forever, and is of relevance to global historians at large. Through its scrutiny of diplomacy, political letter-writing, translation practices, warfare, and art, (Dis)connected Empires paints a troubling panorama of connections breeding divergence and leading to communicational collapse. It explores a key chapter in the pre-history of British imperialism in Asia, highlighting how diplomacy and mutual understandings can, under certain conditions, produce conquest. It also connects the histories of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This is a timely intervention in the current debate on the future of Global History.

This book is part of an intellectual project aimed at including indigenous voices in the debate over European appropriation of overseas territories. It is concerned with European efforts to negotiate with indigenous peoples the cession of their sovereignty through treaties. To grasp the extent of European legal engagement with indigenous peoples, the book examines the history of treaty making in European empires (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British) from the early 17th to the late 19th century, that is, during both stages of European imperialism. While scholars have often dismissed treaties, assuming that they would have been fraudulent or unequal, this book argues that there was more to the practice of treaty making than mere commercial and political opportunism. Indeed treaty making was also promoted by Europeans as a more legitimate means of appropriating indigenous sovereignties and acquiring land than were conquest or occupation, and therefore as a way to reconcile expansion with moral and juridical legitimacy. As for indigenous peoples, they engaged in treaty making as a way to further their interests even if, on the whole, they gained far less than the Europeans and often less than they bargained for. The vexed history of treaty making presents particular challenges for the great expectations placed in treaties for the resolution of conflicts over indigenous rights in postcolonial societies. These hopes are held by both indigenous peoples and representatives of the post-colonial state and yet, both must come to terms with the complex and troubled history of treaty-making over 400 years of empire.

In Search of the Way is a history of intellectual and religious developments in Japan during the Tokugawa period, 1582–1860. It begins with an explanation of the fate of Christianity, and goes on to cover the changing nature of the relationship between Buddhism and secular authority, new developments in Shintō, and the growth of a consciousness of ‘being Japanese’; but the main emphasis is on the process by which Neo-Confucianism from Song and Ming China captured the imagination of the intellectual class and informed debate throughout the period. The narrative is divided into three sections, breaking at 1680 and 1786, each section prefaced with an essay that provides the historical, political, social, and economic background to the intellectual and ideological discussions that follow. The narrative aims, as far as possible, to show how one set of concerns led to another with some interesting digressions on the way. This period is treated as being important in its own right, not merely as a backdrop to the events of the Meiji Restoration.

This book explains how a conspiracy trial featuring English, Japanese, and Indo-Portuguese co-conspirators who allegedly plotted against the Dutch East India Company in the Indian Ocean in 1623 produced a diplomatic crisis in Europe and became known for four centuries in British culture as the Amboyna Massacre. The story of the transformation of this conspiracy into a massacre is a story of Anglo-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century and of a new word in the English language, massacre. The English East India Company drew on this new word to craft an enduring story of cruelty, violence, and ingratitude. Printed works—both pamphlets and images—were central to the East India Company’s creation of the massacre and to the story’s tenacity over four centuries as the texts and images were reproduced during conflicts with the Dutch and internal political disputes in England. By the eighteenth century, the story emerged as a familiar and shared cultural touchstone. By the nineteenth century, the Amboyna Massacre became the linchpin of the British Empire, an event that historians argued well into the twentieth century had changed the course of history and explained why the British had a stronghold in India. The broad familiarity with the incident and the Amboyna Massacre’s position as an early and formative violent event turned the episode into the first English massacre. It shaped the meaning of subsequent acts of violence, and placed intimacy, treachery, and cruelty at the center of massacres in ways that endure to the present day.

An unprecedented exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire’s capital, The King and The People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah’s devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime which saw them only as the ruled.

This book brings together medieval Iberia, colonial Mexico, and colonial New Mexico through the largely unexplored history of the Virgin Mary as a figure of warfare and cross-cultural encounter. Beginning around 1000, Mary was drawn into warfare between Muslims and Christians in Iberia, emerging as an icon of the so-called Christian reconquest, which ended in 1492. In the process, rulers of Castile and Aragon developed a Marian sense of monarchy and Mary helped define the manliness of Christian men of war. In the religiously–mixed polities of high medieval Castile and Aragon, Mary became a key figure through which Muslims, Christians, and Jews negotiated their relationships with each other, and articulated identities. Mary also became central to the Christian view of the conversion of Muslims and Jews. The Spaniards who established colonies in the Caribbean and Mexico brought with them these medieval understandings of Mary. In the New World, the conquistadors both used her in the conquest of indigenous peoples and held her out to these people in evangelical efforts, influencing how some indigenous eventually appropriated her as their own military icon. Legends about her role in the conquest of Mexico became repositories of colonial identities, Spanish and indigenous. These legends inspired men involved in the founding of seventeenth-century New Mexico. There, Mary figured prominently in how colonists, friars, and Pueblos viewed the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the re-establishment of the Spanish colony in the 1690s. Her role in colonial New Mexico reverberates in the state’s contemporary ethnic politics.

This book explores the hidden history of a family in slavery and freedom in the Indian Ocean empires of France and Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A tale of legal intrigue, this biography uncovers the family lives of slaves and free people in two islands, Réunion (Isle Bourbon) and Mauritius (Isle de France). Madeleine, a girl from Bengal, entered the service of a French mistress in Chandernagor in the 1750s and accompanied her to France, where she became the slave of a planter couple who brought her to Isle Bourbon. Madeleine’s three children — Maurice, Constance, and Furcy — survived monsoons, famine, and the French Revolution. At the heart of the story is Furcy’s legal struggle to free himself from his putative master, Joseph Lory, a case that was ultimately decided by the Royale Court (Cour royale) of Paris in 1843. A meticulous work of archival detective work, Madeleine’s Children investigates the cunning, clandestine, and brutal strategies that masters devised to keep slaves under their control while painting a vivid picture of the unique and evolving meanings of slavery and freedom in the Indian Ocean world.

From schoolbooks to scholarly monographs, mercantilism has come to be synonymous with early modern political economy, though it is just as often criticized as inadequate, incomplete, or incoherent as both a theory and a set of policies. This book takes a new approach to this problematic subject by rethinking its broad foundations. From a variety of perspectives, its authors situate mercantilism against the backdrop of wider transformations in seventeenth-century Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic, from the scientific revolution to the expansion of empire. Not seeking to offer yet another definition or critique of mercantilism, this book instead reappraises its value in light of new approaches and understanding of the core characteristics and objects with which it has been traditionally associated: population, money, commodities, markets, merchants, institutions, warfare, and, of course, the state. In so doing, it offers a new narrative of early modern political economy that neither abandons nor assumes the use and validity of mercantilism but rather situates it in its various political, scientific, intellectual, social, and cultural contexts.

This book shows that from the moment European expansion commenced through to the 19th century, indigenous peoples from America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand drafted legal strategies to contest dispossession. Colonisation was countered not only by force but also by ideas. Indigenous peoples made claims to territory using legal arguments drawn from their own understanding of a law which applies between peoples: that is, a kind of law of nations which was comparable to that being developed by Europeans. Confronted by indigenous claims, Europeans were forced to make rival claims. The story of indigenous resistance to European colonisation is, of course, well known. But legal resistance has been wrongly understood to be a relatively recent phenomenon. In the face of indigenous legal arguments, European justifications of colonisation should be understood not as an original and originating legal discourse but, at least in part, as a form of counter-claim. Indigenous claims show that a dialogue was being held between colonisers and colonised which can only be restored by staging all the participants and showing how they dealt with and reacted to each other. By enlightening the history of indigenous legal opposition to dispossession from the beginning of colonisation, this book will provide the general community with a means of engaging with the political challenges and responses posed by legal conflicts with indigenous peoples over the question of land.

Volume III of this series contains chapters on the writing of history globally during the early modern era, from 1400 to 1800. The volumes proceed in geographic order from east to west, beginning in Asia and ending in the Americas. It aims at once to provide a selective but authoritative survey of the field and, where opportunity allows, to provoke cross-cultural comparisons. This is the third of five volumes in a series that explores representations of the past from the beginning of writing to the present day, and from all over the world.

This book applies a patron-client model to case studies of imperial over-rule to examine the political relationships between administrative and indigenous hierarchies derived from existing social structures and surviving into the period of decolonization. It goes beyond classification of administration as ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’, and rejects the notion that imperial rule was simply maintained by threat of force. From the range of cases presented it is argued that there was a continuity between pre-colonial regimes and succeeding European hierarchies that incorporated indigenous leaders. There are common themes in the initial dependency of European agencies (evangelical, commercial, official) on the patronage of indigenous rulers in states and reversal of this status at the onset of colonial rule. Remarkably few indigenous governments disappeared; and most subordinated leaders accommodated willingly or unwillingly within a new hierarchy deficient in resources and administrative personnel. In short, Europeans became imperial patrons and brokers between a distant metropolis and local systems of government in ways that were symbiotic, rather than hegemonic, subject to compromise beneath the rhetoric of colonial policies.

This study provides a new interpretation of how political authority was conceived and transmitted in the Early Mongol Empire (1227–59) and its successor state in Iran, the Īlkhānate (1258–1335). Authority within the Mongol Empire was intimately tied to the character of its founder, Chinggis Khan, whose reign served as an idealized model for the exercise of legitimate authority amongst his political successors. After Chinggis Khan’s death in 1227 two distinct political traditions emerged in the Mongol Empire, the collegial and the patrimonial, each representing the political and economic interests of different social groups within the Mongol polity. These two groups formed competing ideas on how legitimate authority should be exercised in the Mongol Empire based upon Chinggis Khan’s legacy. The present study documents the emergence of these two streams of political authority and assesses their impact upon the constitution and character of the Early Mongol Empire and the Īlkhānate. In doing so, this book provides a more comprehensive account of how power was conceived and exercised in the Mongol Empire, particularly amongst the noyat (military aristocracy), whose contribution to the Mongol polity has traditionally received little attention.

This book traces the evolution of religious attitudes in this important transitional period in Russian history. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Russia saw the gradual decline of monastic spirituality, the rise of miracle cults, and ultimately the birth of a more personal and private faith that stressed morality instead of public rituals. The book not only skillfully reconstructs these rapid and fundamental changes in the Russian religious experience, but also shows how they were influenced by Western European religious ideas and how they foreshadowed the secularization of Russian society usually credited to Peter the Great.

This book focuses on trade across religious boundaries around the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans during the second millennium, when transportation technology was fragile and religion often a primary marker of identity. It examines a wide range of commercial exchanges from first encounters between strangers who worshipped different gods and originated in different continents to everyday transactions between merchants who lived in the same city yet belonged to diverse confessional groups. Risk and uncertainty often characterized cross-cultural ventures. The threat of violence frequently accompanied such exchanges, too, particularly in places where states lacked institutions to enforce contracts. Still, through gift-giving ceremonies, with the assistance of merchants’ networks, or as a consequence of piracy or pilgrimage, cross-cultural trade took place. The volume’s chapters, written by an international team of historians, shed light on the very mechanisms that facilitated these extraordinary exchanges between members of different religions. They point, for example, to methods for calculating the degree of risk associated with different kinds of economic transactions, the minting of local coins to conform to foreign currency standards, and a pragmatic legalistic approach to religious constraints. They reveal the political, economic, and juridical underpinnings of cross-cultural trade as it emerged or developed at various times and places. They also reflect on the cultural and religious significance of the passage of strange persons and exotic objects—from “infidel” captives to ivory salt cellars—across the many frontiers that separated humankind in the early phase of globalization.

This book gives a sweeping account of the evolution of empire from its origins in ancient Rome to its most recent twentieth-century embodiment. It explains what constitutes an empire and offers suggestions about what empires of the past can tell us about our own historical moment. The book uses imperial examples that stretch from ancient Rome, to Britain's “new” imperialism in Kenya, to the Third Reich to parse the features common to all empires, their evolutions and self-justifying myths, and the reasons for their inevitable decline. The book argues that far from confirming some sort of Darwinian hierarchy of advanced and primitive societies, conquests were simply the products of a temporary advantage in military technology, wealth, and political will. Beneath the self-justifying rhetoric of benevolent paternalism and cultural superiority lay economic exploitation and the desire for power. Yet imperial ambitions still appear viable in the twenty-first century, the book shows, because their defenders and detractors alike employ abstract and romanticized perspectives that fail to grasp the historical reality of subjugation. The book offers a cautionary tale rich with accounts of subjugated peoples throwing off the yoke of empire time and time again.

The book tells the story of Rufino, or Abuncare, a Yoruba Muslim from the kingdom of Oyo, who came to Brazil as a slave in c. 1823 and lived in the Atlantic cities of Salvador, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Recife (all in Brazil), and Freetown in Sierra Leone. In Salvador, he lived his first eight years as a slave; then he was taken to Porto Alegre by his young master and sold there. He bought his freedom in 1835 with money he made as a hire-out slave and then moved to Rio de Janeiro. Here Rufino started to work as a cook on a slave ship bound to Luanda. In late 1841, after a few slave trading voyages between Africa and Recife, his ship was captured by the British and sent to Freetown, where he took Qur’ānic and Arabic classes in the local Yoruba community. Still an employee of the slave trade, he would later return to Sierra Leone complete his studies. Back to Recife, he made a living as a diviner, serving all sorts of clients, whites and blacks, free and slaves. He also became a leader in the local Afro-Muslim community. In 1853, Rufino was arrested in Recife due to rumors of an imminent African slave revolt. Rufino left several traces of his personal experience as a slave and a freeman in Africa, Brazil, and aboard a slave ship. The book revolves around his life, which is used as a lead to discuss the slave trade, slavery, and the resilience of ethnic and religious identities as seen through the experience of an individual.

The woman known as “Tree of Pearls” ruled Egypt in the summer of 1250. A rare case of a woman sultan, her reign marked the shift from the Ayyubid to the Mamluk dynasty, and her architectural patronage of two building complexes had a lasting impact on Cairo and on Islamic architecture. Rising to power from slave origins, Tree of Pearls—her name in Arabic is Shajar al-Durr—used her wealth and power to add a tomb to the urban madrasa (college) that had been built by her husband, Sultan Salih, and with this innovation, madrasas and many other charitably endowed architectural complexes became commemorative monuments, a practice that remains widespread today. This was the first occasion in Cairo in which a secular patron’s relationship to his architectural foundation was reified through the actual presence of his body. The tomb thus profoundly transformed the relationship between architecture and its patron, emphasizing and emblematizing his historical presence. Indeed, the characteristic domed skyline of Cairo that we see today is shaped by such domes that have kept the memory of their named patrons visible to the public eye. This dramatic transformation, in which architecture came to embody human identity, was made possible by the sultan-queen Shajar al-Durr, a woman who began her career as a mere slave-concubine. Her path-breaking patronage contradicts the prevailing assumption among historians of Islam that there was no distinctive female voice in art and architecture.

This book examines the rise of men of letters and military officers as new and competing political actors in two central areas of the Spanish world: the viceroyalty of Peru and Spain. This was a disruptive, dynamic, and long process of common imperial origins. In 1700, two dynastic lines, the Spanish Habsburgs and the French Bourbons, disputed the succession to the Spanish throne. After more than a decade of war, the latter prevailed. Suspicious of the old Spanish court circles, the new Bourbon Crown sought meritorious subjects for its ministries: men of letters and well-trained military officers among the provincial elites. Writers and lawyers were to produce new legislation to radically transform the Spanish world. They would reform the educational system and propagate useful knowledge. Military officers would defend the monarchy in this new era of imperial competition. Additionally, they would govern. From the start, the rise of these political actors in the Spanish world was an uneven process. Military officers came to being as a new and somewhat solid corps. In contrast, the rise of men of letters confronted constant opposition. Rooted elites in both Spain and Peru resisted any attempts at curtailing their power and prerogatives and undermined the reform of education and traditions. As a consequence, men of letters found limited spaces in which to exercise their new authority, but they aimed for more. A succession of wars and insurgencies in America fueled the struggles for power between these two groups, thus paving the way for decades of unrest.