Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of Oceanic Space

Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mapping of Mobility: A View from the Outside

“…In other words, even as the concept of boundable space (territory) was becoming essential for political organization, maritime spaces that resisted bounding were moving to the center of modern cosmology. Similarly, especially during the first half of this era, projections of power onto space focused on claiming rights of access to routes rather than direct control over swaths of overseas territory (Brotton 1998;Mancke 1999;Steinberg 1999aSteinberg , 2001Gillis 2007).…”

New Histories of British Imperial Communication and the ‘Networked World’ of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

“…It is an emphasis increasingly familiar across the discipline -in, for instance, legal history, which increasingly emphasises the chaotic, multilinear but still symbolic nature of power in the developing international system and the constantly-emergent corpus of international law. 35 The present-mindedness of other and less historically minded authors objectifies and utilises the past rather than exploring and delineating its contingent nature. Historians themselves cannot but be affected by the fact that they are living through another communications revolution carried through to the sound of very similar claims, but this essay will argue that the parallels with, and thus the 'lessons' from, this imagined past can be deeply misleading.…”

“A Politie of Civill & Military Power”: Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the East India Company-State

“…21 Moreover, while it is now clear that overseas expansion helped define early modern European state formation, spawning new institutions, stimulating greater revenues, and determining foreign policy, it also simultaneously opened spaces for a host of other rival political communities that also engaged in the business of empire: from informal merchant networks to transoceanic corporations, from privateers and mercenaries to the "many-headed hydra" of pirates, slaves, sailors, farmers, and other commoners. 22 As Elliott has recently observed, with his notion of composite monarchy very much in mind, histories of Britain's Atlantic world have revealed not a monolithic imperial system but a "patchwork of different styles of government and jurisdiction," not the least important of which was proprietary rule by companies. 23 Even if we were to ignore all of these warnings not to read the so-called Weberian model back into the history of early modern European states and empires, its central tenets would still remain a Eurocentric proposition about the proper organization of political power.…”