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Jens Bartelson 2008Please do not quote or circulate
The Social Construction of Globality
The concept of globality is today commonly used to denote a condition characterized
by the presence of a single socio-political space on a planetary scale. Such a global
space is believed to have resulted from the dissolution of boundaries brought about by
intensified exchange and increased interdependence between territorially bounded and
distinct societies. But beyond such simple points of definition, this global realm has
proven difficult to make theoretical sense of within the social sciences. While there is a
broad agreement to the effect that it is necessary to posit a distinct global level of
analysis in order to be able to explain and understand a wide range of phenomena
which appear to transcend the boundaries of individual states, the social ontology of
this purportedly new domain remains largely unexplored, philosophically as well as
historically. What makes the global domain different from the international domain,
and how should we understand their relationship, ontologically as well as historically?
Unless such basic questions about the conditions of its existence can be answered in a
satisfactory way, the very notion of globality and all that goes with it will be of little
but metaphorical value to the social sciences.1
The inability to make sense of globality has been especially evident within academic
international relations. Most theories of international relations still habitually assume
that their field of inquiry is delimited to the interaction between bounded political
communities in a context defined by the absence of centralized authority. Given this
1 See for example Justin Rosenberg, Globalization Theory: A Post Mortem,
International Politics, vol. 42, 2005, pp. 2-74; Mathias Albert, Globalization Theory:
Yesterdays Fad or More Lively than Ever? International Political Sociology, vol. 1,
no. 2, 2007, pp 165-182.
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basic understanding of the topic of international relations, a distinct global realm
becomes hard to envisage other than perhaps as an epiphenomenon to interstate
interaction and interdependence. As Beck has remarked, the cosmopolitanization of
reality appears as the enemy of international theory, for it seems to undermine the
authority of the theory of the state, to abolish the political monopoly of the national
state and international relations.2 To the extent that globality has been taken seriously
within international relations theory, it has been conceptualized as an end state of a
process which originates in the international system, rather than as a sui generis
condition of sociopolitical life.
While much international relations theory view what goes on in the global realm as
epiphenomena to interstate intercourse, many sociologists assume that this global
realm lacks the essential characteristics of a society. In both instances, therefore,
globality becomes little but a conceptual umbrella under which all phenomena that
cannot be understood by means of the traditional categories of the social sciences
safely can be subsumed. This far, very few scholars are able to understand the global
realm as existing independently of those entities which it is supposed to transcend or
replace. Simply put, what we need in order to make coherent sense of the global is to
show that it has a distinct empirical content that cannot be reduced to what goes on
between states in the international system. But this is only possible to the extent we
succeed in conceptualizing the global realm as wholly ontologically distinct from the
international system of states.
2 Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitical realism: on the distinction between cosmopolitanism in
philosophy and the social sciences, Global Networks, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 131-156, at
148.
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As I shall argue in this paper, if we want to make coherent sense of the concept of
globality as a distinct analytical category, we must first account for how the social fact
of globality has been constructed historically. In order to build such an account, we
must inquire into the conditions that have made it possible to speak and act as if a
single universal socio-political space exists on a planetary scale in the past as well as in
the present. In this paper, I shall suggest that these antecedent conditions largely are to
be found in cosmological beliefs about the makeup of the terrestrial surface, as well as
in corollary beliefs about the inhabitability of the terrestrial surface and the conditions
of dispersion and intercourse by different peoples across this terrestrial surface.
Digging into these antecedent conditions, we are bound to discover that the social fact
of globality not only antedates but also conditions the differentiation of global political
space into territorially bounded political communities, and that it is intimately
connected to corresponding ideas of the cultural division of mankind into distinct and
unique peoples. This implies that the order of analytical priority between the
international system of states and the global realm ought to be reversed, and hence that
a sui generis account of globality must be built on the recognition that the world was
global well before it became international in any recognizably modern sense of this
latter term. In my view, globality constituted the default setting of political thought and
action before our core political concepts were nationalized and had their range of
meaningful reference confined to territorially demarcated communities. Thus, in
contrast to current attempts to understand the emergence of the global as the outcome
of processes taking place within the international system, our attempts to understand
the emergence of the international system of states must be able to explain how the
global domain was differentiated into bounded spaces populated by distinct peoples. In
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the next section, I shall dwell briefly on the reasons why contemporary international
relations theory and sociological theory have been unable to account for globality in
sui generis terms. I shall then go on to suggest a way to understand the historical
construction of globality in terms of the cosmological conditions of emergence. In the
final section, I shall offer a brief account of how the social fact of globality conditioned
the emergence of distinct and bounded political communities in Europe.
I
One obvious reason why contemporary international relations theory has been
unable to conceptualize the global is its ontological statism. Yet accusing the study of
international relations for being statist is a bit like accusing the devil for being evil.
That the identity of this discipline has been strongly conditioned by the concept of the
state is very true but also very trivial. But contrary to what is widely believed, this
focus on the state has never been unchallenged or left unqualified, not even within the
realist tradition frequently held responsible for its invention and uncritical
dissemination. While later theorists certainly took the presence of states for granted,
and had a quite simplistic understanding if any at all of what they contained, there
is an equally long tradition of dissecting the state concept within the discipline of
international relations.3
Arguably none of this dissecting has made it any easier to understand political
orders characterized by boundless forms of community and decentralized forms of
3 See for example Erik Ringmar, On the Ontological Status of the State European
Journal of International Relations, vol. 2, no. 4, 1996, pp. 439-66.
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authority. One corollary of this has been a denial of the existence of anything
genuinely global within mainstream international relations theory. Many of those who
deny the existence of anything distinctively global do so by insisting that allegedly
global phenomena can be explained with reference to what goes on between states in
the international system. They thereby assume that what looks global is reducible to
what is going on in the international sphere, and hence that there is no need to posit the
existence of a global domain for explanatory or other purposes. Sometimes this
assumption is explicitly stated, but more often it is simply implicit in the understanding
of disciplinary identity and its limits. But quite irrespective of whether the permanence
of sovereign state is explicitly defended or merely taken for granted, the possibility of a
sociopolitical space outside or beyond the domain constituted by the international
system and the sum total of relations within it is ruled out.4 On those relatively rare
occasions when this presupposition has been subjected to critical analysis, it has
largely been a matter of exposing its ideological implications for theory and practice of
international relations.5 Even later constructivist efforts to deal critically with the state
have ended up claiming that while essential attributes like identity and interest are
4 See for example Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty. Organized Hypocrisy, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999); Stephen D. Krasner, Problematic Sovereignty, in
Stephed D. Krasner ed. Problematic Sovereignty. Contested Rules and Political
Possibilities. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 1-23, Robert Jackson,
Sovereignty in World Politics: a Glance at the Conceptual and Historical Landscape,
in Robert Jackson ed., Sovereignty at the Millennium, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp.
9-34; Alan James, The Practice of Sovereign Statehood in Contemporary International
Society, in Robert Jackson ed., Sovereignty at the Millennium, (Oxford: Blackwell,
1999), pp. 35-51.
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socially constructed all the way down, the existence and self-identity of the sovereign
state has remained an indispensable starting point for these arguments. So despite or
rather because these critical endeavors, the state appears to be very alive and well
within international relations theory, the outcome of the above kind of questioning
having been to underwrite the necessity of the state concept for the study of
international relations.6 When viewed from this perspective of mainstream international
relations theory, processes of globalization have brought little but intensified exchange
and increased interdependence between what in essence remain basically self-identical
units coexisting within basically stable international system. This granted, we are
obliged to supplement our understanding of this basic structure of world politics with
hypotheses that might help us explain those transnational phenomena and processes
which otherwise would remain enigmatic. So while these theories might differ widely
about the extent to which exchange and interdependence actually affect the interests
and identities of particular states, none of them have any clear conception of global
5 See for example Richard K. Ashley, The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Toward a
Critical Social Theory of International Politics, Alternatives, vol. 12, 1987, pp.
403-434.
6 See Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 193-245; Alexander Wendt, The state as
person in international theory, Review of International Studies, vol. 30, 2004, pp.
289-316. For discussions of this issue, see Jens Bartelson, Second Natures: Is the State
Identical with Itself, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 4, no. 3, 1998,
pp. 295-326; Hannes Lacher, Putting the State in its Place: the Critique of State-
Centrism and Its Limits, Review of International Studies, vol. 29, no. 4, 2003, pp.
521-41.
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level of analysis distinct from that of the international system. On this account,
concepts of a global society or community have little explanatory purchase, since they
become hard to make analytical sense of in the absence of boundaries.7
Other theorists believe that what goes on in the contemporary world cannot easily
be reduced to what goes on within an international system of states. Instead they have
struggled to conceptualize the global domain either in terms of transcendence of the
international system, or as epiphenomenal in relation to that system. In the former case,
the global is conceptualized as an end state in which the international system
eventually is replaced by a brand new sociopolitical global order the contours of which
remains to be known. In the latter case, the global is conceptualized as being fully
capable of coexisting with the international system out of which it has risen, and thus
also fully intelligible in terms of its relationship to the latter. To these authors,
transnational flows of people, goods, information and capital across borders have
brought about a massive transition from what once was a system of distinct and
bounded political communities into a new world characterized by more fluid forms of
political identity as well as de-territorialized forms of political authority.8But in order
7 For an interesting treatment of this problem, see Barry Buzan, From International to
World Society. English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalization,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
8 For some early versions of this argument, see for example Stephen Gill, Reflections
on Global Order and Sociohistorical Time, Alternatives, vol. 16, no. 3, 1991, pp.
275-314; John Gerard Ruggie, Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in
International Relations, International Organization, vol. 47, no. 1, 1993, pp. 139-174;
Timothy W. Luke, Discourses of Disintegration, Texts of Transformation: Re-Reading
Realism in the New World Order, Alternatives, vol. 18, no. 2, 1993, pp. 229-258;
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to make sense of what goes on in this brave new world, or so these authors argue,
conventional and state-centric accounts of international relations must be abandoned in
favor of a theoretical framework that takes transnational phenomena into consideration
without attempting to reduce them to what goes on within or between states. For this
purpose, the global level must be regarded as categorically distinct from the
international level. From this contention it follows that global politics only can be
properly understood from within of a global realm existing independently of the
international system of states. Such global society cannot be properly understood
unless we posit the existence of a larger social whole beyond that of a territorially
differentiated system of states. Responding to this theoretical challenge, several
authors have tried to conceptualize the global realm as ontologically independent of the
state and the states system.
But in order to make empirical sense of the global, most of these authors have
viewed its emergence as the outcome of processes which effectively have transcended
Philip Cerny, Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action,
International Organization, vol. 49, no. 4, 1995, pp. 595-625; Saskia Sassen, Losing
Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996), pp. 1-30; Yale H. Ferguson & Richard W. Mansbach, Polities. Authority,
Identities, and Change, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 3-31;
Michael Mann, Has Globalization Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nation-State?,
Review of International Political Economy, vol. 4, no. 3, 1997, pp. 472-96; Ian Clark,
Beyond the Great Divide: Globalization and the Theory of International Relations,
Review of International Studies, vol. 24, no. 4, 1998, pp. 479-498; John Agnew,
Mapping Political Power Beyond the State Boundaries: Territory, Identity, and
Movement in World Politics, Millenium, vol. 28, no. 3, 1999, pp. 499-521.
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the limitations of the international system, and its rigid separation between domestic
and international spheres. According to a widespread view, intensified interaction and
growing interdependence within the international system have brought about a
denationalization of authority and identity within domestic societies, thus profoundly
affecting the nature of both units and system.9 To some authors denationalization is
likely to lead to the transcendence and ultimate replacement of the international
system. As Scholte has argued, globality describes circumstances where territorial
space is substantially transcended.10 To him, the rise of supra-territorial relations has
made geographical concepts like territoriality, boundaries and distance increasingly
irrelevant if we want to understand the seamlessness nature of global sociopolitical
relations. To others, globalization is more likely to bring a a predicament in which
sovereign states and new constellations of authority and community coexist and
condition each other on a global scale. Thus, according to Ruggie, we have witnessed
the emergence of a new global public domain that is no longer co-terminus with the
system of states, but which exists in transnational non-territorial spatial formations,
and is anchored in norms and expectations as well as institutional networks and circuits
within, across, and beyond states.11 While the international system of states still exist
and account for a fair share of what goes on in the global political sector, this system
9 For a clear statement, see Saskia Sassen, Globalization or Denationalization? Review
of International Political Economy, vol. 10, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1-22.
10 Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction, (Houndmills: MacMillan,
2000), p. 48.
11 John Gerard Ruggie, Reconstituting the Global Public Domain Issues, Actors and
Practices, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 10, no. 4, 2004, pp.
499-531, at 519.
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must be understood as fundamentally embedded within a broader institutional arena
concerned with the production of global public goods. This analysis implies that the
global realm at least partly is constituted by the presence of some political authorities
of a global scope. As Agnew has argued, when assumptions about the fixed and
universal nature of territoriality no longer work to locate sovereignty in place, we
begin to see, for better and for worse, that there is political authority beyond the
sovereign construction of territorial space.12 As Sassen recently has argued, the
current phase of globalization consists at least partly of global systems evolving out of
the capabilities that constituted territorial sovereign states and the interstate system. 13
But as Justin Rosenberg has asked rhetorically, how could the very thing which
supposedly is to be contradicted by transnational relations actually be their
precondition? But maybe this transformation only looks dramatic when viewed from
the perspective of the international system. In his view, if one starts with a model of
the international system defined by the political interaction of territorially defined
entitiesthen the enormous volume of transnational flows and interconnections today
is bound to appear little short of revolutionary.14
But what when viewed from outside international relations theory? At first glance,
sociologists seem to be better equipped to conceptualize the global. Sociological
concepts seem to have been less burdened with nationalist baggage than that of the12 John Agnew, Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in
Contemporary World Politics, Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
vol. 95, no. 2, 2005, pp. 437-461, at 456.
13 Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006), p. 21
14Rosenberg, Globalization Theory: A Post Mortem, International Politics, p. 17 & 19.
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state, and hence easier to stretch to fit a condition in which social and political life is
believed to be increasingly unbounded.15 This is evident from many contemporary
efforts to apply basic categories of sociological analysis to the global realm, while
making traditional conceptions of society look increasingly incoherent and redundant
in the process.16 Yet simultaneously, sociologists have found it difficult to argue that
the global realm constitutes a society or a community in its own right, since the global
realm seems to lack precisely the traditional defining properties of societies and
communities, such as a firm division of labour, a common culture or a common
historical memory. To the extent that historical sociologists are able to speak of
anything resembling a society on a world scale, it is widely believed to be outcome of
intercourse between territorially bounded and distinct societies.17 Being ultimately
derivative of relocations of authority and community such intercourse has brought
within the international system, globality therefore essentially remains an unfinished
revolution, an end state whose existence depends on a fragile global consciousness. As
15 Peter Wagner, An Entirely New Object of Consciousness, of Volition, of Thought:
The Coming into Being and (Almost) Passing Away of Society as a Scientific Object,
in Lorraine Daston ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 145-157; David Inglis and Roland Robertson, The
Elementary Forms of Globality. Durkheim and the Emergence and Nature of Global
Life, Journal of Classical Sociology, vol. 8, no, 1, 2008, pp. 5-25.
16 John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies. Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century.
(London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1-20.
17 Justin Rosenberg, Why is There No International Historical Sociology?, European
Journal of International Relations, vol. 12, no. 3, 2006, pp. 307-340.
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Martin Shaw has put it, globality is constituted by a common consciousness of human
society on a world scale.18
The above efforts to make theoretical sense of the global realm assume that this is
necessary in order to make sense of phenomena that cannot be satisfactorily explained
with reference to what goes on within or between bounded political communities like
nation states. Most theoretical efforts in this direction assume that global relations are
qualitatively different from international relations, but find it very difficult to specify
exactly in what way and to what extent. Partly this is due to the semantic baggage
carried by the core categories of modern social and political thought, partly to the fact
that they regard the global as the outcome of a more or less dramatic historical
transition the ultimate causes of which are firmly located within the international
realm. So while the above accounts all emphasize the analytical distinctness of the
global realm from that of the international, that does not automatically entail that the
former is ontologically independent of the latter. Since most of these accounts
converge on the assumption that globality is a condition of fairly recent origin, they
imply that the rise of the global amounts to a partial transcendence of the territorial
state and the state system as the dominant loci of political authority and community in
the modern world. While what goes on in the global realm perhaps cannot be reduced
to what goes on in the international system of states, the global is nevertheless
epiphenomenal to that system in the sense that this condition could not have emerged
without those enabling preconditions being present in the international system of
states. Among those who have tried to come to terms within globality, there is a tacit
agreement that globality denotes an end state of a series of highly complex historical
18 Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State. Globality as an unfinished revolution,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 11-12, 67-97.
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processes which once originated and gained momentum from within the same set of
circumstances they are destined to transform or transcend. In the final analysis, while
the global realm has been conceptualized in increasingly sharp distinction to the
international realm, the existence of the former nevertheless turns out to be dependent
on the existence of the latter.
But if we want to make coherent sense of the concept of globality and its cognates,
we not only need to rid ourselves of the nationalist baggage carried over from modern
social and political theory and the resulting assumption that the global is but a recent
historical offspring of the international. To my kind, we need to understand how we
ended up with our nationalist baggage as well with the idea that the international realm
should enjoy explanatory and ontological primacy in relation to the global. Doing this
amounts to nothing less than a wholesale reversal of the perspective conveyed by
contemporary international relations theory. Rather than understanding the emergence
of the global realm as the outcome of a gradual denationalization of political authority
and community, we should start asking questions of how political authority and
community were nationalized in the first place, and how we ended up assuming that
the corresponding concepts only make clear theoretical sense in the context of bounded
and distinct societies. But in order for this to be possible, we must first account for how
political authority and community were configured before the process of
nationalization got off the ground in theory and practice like. As I shall argue in the
next section, we are then bound to realize that globality long constituted the default
setting of political thought and action, while being a precondition of the universalistic
aspirations of early-modern imperial projects, and that the international system owes
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its existence to the territorial differentiation of a global political space that resulted
from the clash of imperial claims to global sovereignty.
II
While some existing accounts of the emergence of the international system have
emphasized the importance of cosmological beliefs when explaining the emergence of
sovereign states, none of these accounts have bothered to systematically situate this
process a cosmological context.19 One possible reason for this neglect is the fact that
these stateless parts of our past are intrinsically hard to subject to historical analysis,
since most historiography takes the existence of bounded political communities for
granted. Thus, as Fasolt has noted, the mere existence of that past threatens historical
self-consciousness with dissolution.20 What makes these parts of the past so difficult to
understand is the fact that the meta-historical coordinates necessary to historical writing
themselves are contested during this period: if no clear and agreed senses of before and
after and up and down can be read off from the sources themselves, the historians task
becomes difficult if not impossible. Those parts of the past risk become
incomprehensible if we take the meaning of the concepts of space and time to be given
19 John Gerard Ruggie, Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in
International Relations, International Organization, vol. 47, no. 1, 1993, pp. 139-174;
Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and its Competitors. An analysis of systems change,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 59-77.
20 Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2003), pp. 27-28.
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and immutable.21 Hence, if we want to gain a more precise understanding of the
stateless parts of our past, we must attend to the history of these concepts as well, and
explore the connections between their historical trajectories and that of our main topic.
Corollary, if we want to gain knowledge of this world as it looked to its inhabitants
before they were divided into different peoples, we cannot take the facts of division and
dispersion for granted. For in order for these facts to make any sense at all, there has to
be another space where division and dispersion can be said to take place. And in order
for the human species to be divided and dispersed, there has to be something there to
divide and disperse in the first place.
Medieval cosmology was based on a variety of sources, most of which distinguished
between a celestial and a terrestrial region. While the former embraced everything from
the moon to the limits of the universe, the latter included everything below the moon to
the centre of the earth.22 Let us start with some of the main assumptions about the
terrestrial region. According to Genesis I, 9, there was a division between the zones
reserved for earth and water respectively. These zones were mutually exclusive, so
where there was water, there could be no earth, and conversely. So certainly, from a
biblical perspective, the ocean was since its beginning literally marked the end of the
known and inhabitable world. The Latin and Greek terms most frequently used to
describe this world was orbis terrarum or oikoumene. The former referred to the three21 See Reinhart Koselleck, Transformations of Experience and Methodological Change:
A Historical-Anthropological Essay, in Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual
History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002),
pp. 45-83.
22 See Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs. The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 11-45.
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interconnected continents Europe, Asia, and Africa which were surrounded by an
impenetrable ocean beyond which life was thought to be unlikely or even impossible.
At the centre of the orbis terrarum was Jerusalem to be found, The Holy City. Ideally,
the borders of the orbis terrarum ought to coincide with those of the oikoumene: even
though primarily a geographical concept, the oikoumene, in its most essential
meaning, can be defined as a region made coherent by the intercommunication of its
inhabitants, such thatno tribe or race is completely cut off from the people beyond
it.23 But beyond the oikoumene no human life was to be found. Both concepts thus
restricted the habitat of humanity to the northern hemisphere, since the southern
hemisphere consisted of a torrid zone, at the end of which the quasi-mythological
Antipodes were to be found.24 The question whether the latter really existed and were
inhabited, and if inhabited, whether by men or by monstrous races, was subject to
considerable debate during the Middle Ages.25 But as Cosgrove has noted, despite
23 James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought. Geography,
Exploration, and Fiction, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 37;
Cosgrove, Apollos Eye, pp. 41-53.
24 Thomas Goldstein, Geography in Fifteenth-Century Florence, in John Parker ed.,
Merchants and Scholars. Essays in the History of Exploration and Trade, (Minneapolis:
The University of Minnesota Press, 1965), pp. 11-32. See also E. H. Bunbury, A
History of Ancient Geography, vol. 2, (New York: Dover, 1959), pp. 546ff.
25 See for example Augustine, City of God, XVI: 8-9. For an account, see John Block
Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 37-58.
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constituting different nations some yet to be redeemed the population of the
oikoumene constituted humanitas.26
In this context it has been argued that the affirmation of a common human descent
simply required that the existence of the Antipodes should be denied, or that the
existence of monsters was required in order to distinguish humanity from its others.27
This problem was further complicated by the fact that it was formulated with reference
to pre-Newtonian notions of up and down. Given these notions, belief in life at
Antipodes was refutable with recourse to a simple reductio, since whether inhabited by
men or monsters, this life must be hard indeed, and for physical reasons alone. Is there
anyone silly enough, asked Lactantius, to believe that there are men whose feet are
higher than their heads? Or that things which lie on earth with us hang downwards with
them, and trees and fruits grow the wrong way up, and rain and snow and hail fall
upwards onto the ground?28
But this worldview was soon to be replaced. As Headley has argued, [t]the
awareness of the accumulated new lands and peoples on a transformed and enlarged
terraqueous globe reinforces the cognitive impact of the accomplishment whereby he
formerly preconceived yet formidable barriers preventing access to other continents and
peoples have been dissolved by a rare combination of reason and experience. The
machine of discovery. had not only produced an immense perceptual challenge and26 Cosgrove, Apollos Eye, pp. 24, 63
27 Valerie I. J. Flint, Monsters and the Antipodes in the Early Middle Ages and
Enlightenment, Viator, vol. 15, 1984, pp. 65-80.
28 Lactantius, Divine Institutiones, 3.24, ed. S. Brandt, L. Caeli Firmiani Lactanti Opera
Omnia 1, (Prague, 1890), pp. 254-55, quoted in Flint, Monsters and the Antipodes, p.
68.
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epistemological problem but also the realization of an almost totally accessible and
inhabitable global arena in which to contend with this problem.29 But as I intend to
show in this section, the cosmological changes that effectively turned the world into
one place conditioned the emergence of the new conceptions of mankind that emerged
largely simultaneously. Gradually, the notion of a relatively uniform mankind is
replaced by assumptions about human diversity, and is accompanied by attempts to
understand this diversity as a consequence of the prior dispersion of the human species
into different corners of the earth.30
The translation of Aristotles De Coelo stimulated new cosmological speculations
among scholars. By the late thirteenth century, Aristotelian cosmology and its
geographical implications had become integrated within Christian doctrine.31According
this theory, the earth was fixed at the centre of the sublunary sphere, and was composed
of the four elements that made up all matter in this region of the universe. Reflecting
their different densities, the four elements were thus neatly arranged in distinct and
concentric spheres. In the absence of external disturbances, these elements could be
29 John M. Headley, The Sixteenth-Century Venetian Celebration of the Earths Total
Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe, p. 24,
Journal of World History, vol. 8, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1-27.
30 For a different version of this argument, see Denis Cosgrove, Apollos Eye. A
Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 1-28.
31 Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 50-56; Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican
Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought,
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 108; Cosgrove, Apollos Eye,
pp. 36-38.
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expected to settle into four stable concentric spheres, with the element earth naturally at
the geometric centre of the globe.32 But this theory could not explain why not all land
was covered with water, and thus turned any observation to the contrary into an
anomaly. Provided that the Aristotelian laws of motion were correct, and the
movements of the heavenly bodies sufficiently regular, the world should rather be
completely submerged in water. Even more puzzling was the question why dry land
was found where it was found, and what the existence of a continuous landmass in turn
implied for the problems of habitability and navigation.33 Curiously, Dante was among
those who tried to solve this problem. In his Comedia, he had described the earth and
its lower regions in terms largely consonant with the Aristotelian worldview. But later,
in his Questio de Aqua et Terra (1320), he proposed that the cause of the protrusion of
land above water is the influence of the stars, which attract land upwards, and by
vapours being generated in the bowels of the earth.34
But this problem could not be satisfactorily resolved within an Aristotelian
framework, since the assumption that earth and water were divided into two distinct
spheres was intimately connected to the idea that the centre of the terrestrial globe
coincided with the centre of the universe. This implied that any revision of
32 Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 630-635; Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, pp. 81-2;
Cosgrove, Apollos Eye, pp. 72-78.
33 Thomas Goldstein, The Renaissance Concept of the Earth in Its Influence upon
Copernicus, Terr Incognit, vol. 4, 1972, pp. 19-51.
34 Dante Alighieri, A Question of the Water and of the Land, trans. by C. H. Bromby,
(London: David Nutt, 1897), p. 54. The authenticity of this manuscript has been
inconclusively disputed. See Bruno Nardi, La Caduta di Lucifero e LAutenticit della
Quaestio de Aqua et Terra, (Torino, 1958).
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astronomical beliefs about the place of the earth within the universe would necessitate a
revision of geographical assumptions about the composition of the planetary surface, as
well as conversely.35
And since the latter were intimately connected with assumptions
about the essential unity of mankind and the Biblical causes of its geographical
dispersion, any revision of this framework of cosmological beliefs would also call for a
corresponding redefinition of human community and its place within this cosmological
framework.36
Perhaps the most important step towards constructing the global was taken when the
assumption of two distinct spheres of earth and water was abandoned in favour of the
idea that these elements together form a single sphere with one common centre of
gravity. Once this was done, there was no longer any reason to believe that the human
race was confined to one single landmass, or that the ocean constituted an impenetrable
limit beyond which no human life was to be found. Thus chapter three of Copernicus
De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543) is entitled How Earth Together With
Water Forms One Globe. Here Copernicus sets forth some of the prerequisites for
conceiving of the earth as one planet among others, being a solid sphere capable of both
rotation and revolution. The assumption of an orbis terrarum, a single and continuous
protrusion of land is incorrect, writes Copernicus:
35 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, pp. 99-132.
36 See Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Clarence J. Glacken, Traces
on the Rhodian Shore. Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to
the End of the Eighteenth Century, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp.
176-253.
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[t]his can be established by the fact that from the ocean inward the
curvature of the land does not mount steadily in a continuous rise. If it
did, it would keep the sea water out completely and in no way permit
the inland seas and such vast gulfs to intrude. Furthermore, the depth
of the abyss would never stop increasing from the shore of the ocean
outward, so that no island or reef or any form of land would be
encountered by sailors on the longer voyages.37
This argument led to the establishment of three related points. First, rather than being
united into one landmass, there is a manifold of different land formations distributed
relatively evenly across the spherical surface of the globe. Second, rather than existing
in separate spheres and having different centres of gravity, the elements of earth and
water share the same centre of gravity. Third, the planet as a whole is best represented
as a solid geological mass whose chasms are filled with water, the totality being one
perfectly shaped sphere, a rotunditate absoluta. Copernicus had thereby managed to
refute view of the earth as consisting of two spheres, being located in a fixed position at
the centre of the universe.38 According to the view set forth in De Revolutionibus, the
ocean is no longer a limit, but rather a transcontinental waterway, connecting different
and discontinuous land formations to each other.
The cosmological changes effected by Copernicus brought a shift of vantage point
from which questions of political community could be formulated and answered. When
the earth no longer constituted the given centre of the universe, these could now be
formulated with reference to an imagined point of view situated above the terraqueous
37 Nikolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, trans. by Edward
Rosen, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), ch. 3.
38 Goldstein, Renaissance Concept of the Earth, p. 40.
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globe, and answered with reference to the intercourse between different people from
what now were interconnected continents. As Juan Vives noted in 1531, [t]he whole
globe is opened up to the human race, so that no one is so ignorant of events as to think
that the wanderings of the ancientsare to be compared with the journeys of these
travellers.39
But the concept of an orbis terrarum had been abandoned in practice before it was
formally refuted by Copernicus, the impetus coming from the cartographical research
being conducted during the fifteenth century. While being greatly facilitated by the new
conceptions of space that emerged at this point in time, cartographical research was to a
large extent motivated by the search for safer and cheaper trade routes to the East
Indies.40 Almost at the same moment as the Lopo Gonalves first crossed the equator in
1473, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli had written a letter to Ferno Martins, canon of the
Lisbon cathedral, on the subject of possible circumnavigation: You must not be
surprisedif I call the parts where the spices are west, when they usually call them
east, because to those sailing west, those parts are found by navigation on the underside
39 Juan Vives, On Education, (Cambridge, 1913), p. 3, quoted in Walter S. Gibson,
Mirror of the Earth. The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 49-50.
40 See Denis Cosgrove, Mapping New Worlds: Culture and Cartography in Sixteenth-
Century Venice, Imago Mundi, vol. 44, 1992, pp. 65-89; Samuel Y. Edgerton, The
Renaissance Discovery of Linear Perspective, (New York: Basic Books, 1975);
Thomas Goldstein, The Role of the Italian Merchant Class in Renaissance and
Discoveries, Terrae Incognitae, vol. 8, 1976, pp. 19-27; Erwin Panofsky, Perspective
as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1995).
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of the earth. But if by land on the upper side, they will always be found to the east. 41
Written in order to be comprehensible to the layman, the childish simplicity of these
instructions contrasts nicely with the complexity of the task at hand. This task consisted
of convincing the Portuguese elite of the validity of a new worldview which was clearly
at odds with the educated lore of the day, and prompting them to act urgently upon this
new knowledge. But when both Martins and Alfonso V failed to respond, a copy of the
same letter was sent to a more entrepreneurial spirit in Genoa who soon was to take
action.42
There was a short step from claiming that the ocean was navigable and foreign lands
inhabitable in principle, to demonstrating that the whole world was inhabited in fact.
Such demonstrations could take place in many ways, not infrequently by invoking
observations which earlier had been dismissed as false or absurd when interpreted
within the framework of the orbis terrarum. But as Copernicus scornfully remarked,
there was now little reason to marvel at the existence of antipodes.43 Old but
previously discounted geographical observations were supplemented by the enormous
amount of new observations generated by the discoveries, and gradually assimilated
into one and the same pool of geographical knowledge. Thus, in the very same year as
De Revolutionibus was published, the Venetian humanist Giovanni Battista Ramusio
had taken upon himself the no less heroic task of bringing together all existing
41 Letter, June 24, 1474. Quoted in Goldstein, Geography, pp. 13-14.
42 A copy of this letter was sent by Toscanelli to the young Cristobal Clon. See Norbert
Sumien, La Correspondence du Savant Florentin Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli avec
Christophe Colomb, (Paris, 1927), pp. 9ff.
43 Copernicus, Revolutions, ch. 3.
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geographical knowledge into one organized body.44 This resulted in what was to
become a landmark achievement of Renaissance geography, the Navigazioni e Viaggi
(1550-9). In this work, Ramusio presented a series of arguments to the effect that the
entire world indeed was inhabited by human beings:
[t]he sun makes its course with such order that the inhabitants [at the
north pole] live not as moles buried under the earth but as other
creatures who are upon this terrestrial globe, illuminated so that they
are able most profitably to maintain and provide for their livelihood
Now, by the matter stated above I think there can be no longer any
doubt that beneath the equator and below both poles there is the same
multitude of inhabitants that there are in all the other parts of the
world.45
When later prefacing the first volume, the printer Giunti summarized the upshot of this
argument: it is clearly able to be understood that this entire earthly globe is
marvellously inhabited, nor is there any part of it empty, neither by heat nor by cold
deprived of inhabitants.46 In 1570, this new knowledge was synthesized and presented
by Abraham Ortelius in the shape of an atlas which offered the synoptic vision that
44 See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood. The Elizabethan Writing of England,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 152.
45 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e Viaggi, (Turin, 1978-88), Vol. 5, pp. 6-9,
quoted in Headley, Venetian Celebration, p. 3.
46 Ramusio, Navigazioni e Viaggi, Vol. 1, p. 8, quoted in Headley, Venetian
Celebration, p. 3.
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disengages one from local prejudice and promotes a cosmopolitanism based on the
moral wisdom that comes from self-knowledge.47
That parts of the world previously thought to be inhabitable indeed were inhabited led
to an expansion of the oikoumene. In the orbis terrarum, the world known by men had
coincided nicely with the world inhabited by the same men. But the construction of a
rotunditate absoluta and its corroboration by empirical cartography brought an
expansion of the oikoumene far beyond its former and ancient limits. In this new world
the discipline of cosmography could reign as an absolute sovereign over the
terraqueous globe. It manipulated at will the natural frontiers of rivers and mountains;
determined the future of peoples by fixing their migrations and boundaries.48
The unfamiliarity of newly discovered places had a destabilizing impact upon the
foundations of medieval knowledge, as the things and living beings found there were
hard to fit into existing categories and classificatory schemes. As Harrison has
remarked, what had once been a coherent universal language was inundated by an
influx of new and potentially unintelligible symbols.49 Most crucially, however, the
idea of a common human descent made it difficult to account for the geographical
47 Denis Cosgrove, Globalism and Tolerance in Early Modern Geography, p. 866,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 93, no. 4, 2003, pp. 852-870.
48 Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World. The Geographical Imagination
in the Age of Discovery, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 3.
49 Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, p. 91; Anthony
Pagden, European Encounters with the New World. From Renaissance to Romanticism,
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 17-49; Joan-Pau Rubis, Futility in the
New World: Narratives of Travel in Sixteenth-Century America, in Elsner and Rubis
eds., Voyages & Visions, pp. 74-100.
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dispersion of peoples across the dry surfaces of the globe. If this dispersion were to be
consistent with the idea of a common origin, it was necessary to explain how different
people had ended up in different places, as well as why the existence of these places
had been forgotten.50 As Headley has noted, [t]he growing recognition of the earths
universal habitability could only make more acute the problem of squaring the Adamic
origin of all mankind with the swelling contours and complexity of its membership. 51
And since the newly discovered peoples hardly could be described as faithful
Christians, this excluded them from the community of believers as well. Thus, to the
extent that mankind had been rendered coextensive with the class of believers, such
exclusion was bound to be problematic.52
One common response to this new predicament was to twist visions medieval of
universal community into justifications of empire. As we shall be able to notice in the
next section, this reversal was largely accomplished by grafting the inherited symbols
and values of universal community onto a new and territorially defined context. The
problem confronted by those efforts was how to reconcile the geographical diversity of
peoples with their received notions of a unified mankind. Hence the encounter with
new peoples on new continents led to efforts to broaden the definition of political
community in terms increasingly independent of scriptural authority.53
50 See Joan-Pau Rubis, Hugo Grotiuss Dissertation on the Origin of the American
Peoples and the Use of Comparative Methods, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 52,
no. 2, 1991, pp. 221-24.
51 Headley, Venetian Celebration, p. 10.
52 Cosgrove, Apollos Eye, pp. 135-138.
53 See for example John M. Headley, The Universalizing Principle and Process: On the
Wests Intrinsic Commitment to a Global Context, Journal of World History, vol. 13,
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III
When modern states were created, they were created by means of resources already
available within the global context in which they emerged. In this world, visions of a
community of all mankind blended together with visions of monarchy or empire, both
being based on similar foundations and sharing the same symbols. Both visions were
universalistic in aspiration and inherently boundless in scope. But while this world was
populated by peoples who knew little or nothing of territorial differentiation, it
supposedly had a centre, one embodied in the legal and political institutions of early
Rome. This world constituted the symbolic backdrop of subsequent European state
formation, and provided the ideological impetus behind further imperial expansion by
European powers.54 As Yates has argued, [t]he symbolism of the empire of Charles V,
which seemed able to include the whole world as then known and to hold out the
promise of a return to spiritual unity through a revival of the cementing power of the
Christianized imperial virtues, was a comforting phantom in the chaotic world of the
sixteenth century.55 Campanella provides us with an interesting example of the ease
no. 2, 2002, pp. 291-321.
54 See Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: ideologies of empire in Spain, Britain
and France, c.1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 29-102; David
Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), pp. 1-23; David Armitage, The Elizabethan Idea of Empire,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 14, 2004, pp. 269-277.
55 Frances A. Yates, Astraea. The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, (London:
Routledge, 1975), p. 27.
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with which such phantoms were created in the fluid context of Renaissance political
thought. Written within a cosmological framework similar to that of Copernicus, his
Monarchia di Spagna (c. 1600) contains a plan for the creation of a world community,
if only in order to sustain the successful global expansion of Spanish imperial power.
Thus, the best way to secure lasting domination over foreign lands is through the
gradual hispanization of all peoples, by forcing everyone within the empire to adopt
Spanish laws, language, and customs.56 Another influential attempt to articulate a
universalistic framework for understanding geopolitical relations on a global scale
during this period was made by Giovanni Botero, whose Relationi Universali (1591-6)
sought to account for the geographical distribution of political authorities and different
peoples across the planetary surface.57
Those who tried to justify state building faced the formidable task of reinterpreting
and re-contextualizing the rich world of signs, symbols and metaphors that had been
handed down to them from the ancients and medieval Christianity, and which had been
filtered through Renaissance attempts to appropriate the same sources in support of
56 See Frances A. Yates, Giordani Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, (London:
Routledge, 1964), pp. 360-397; John M. Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the
Transformation of the World, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp.
197-245; Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination. Studies
in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990), pp. 37-64.
57 John M. Headley, Geography and Empire in the Late Renaissance: Boteros
Assignment, Western Universalism, and the Civilizing Process, Renaissance Quarterly,
vol. 53, 2000, pp. 1119-1155.
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city-states. Since these symbols and metaphors had been tailored to fit boundless forms
of political community, the task at hand was how to restrict their range of applicability
in such a way that they could be used to reinforce those particularistic forms of political
identity needed to sustain emergent territorial states. In order to achieve this, certain
things had to be remembered in order to bestow the emergent territorial order with
intelligibility and legitimacy. Other things had to be forgotten, and for much the same
reasons. This was commonly done by making crucial symbols and metaphors appear to
be new and exclusive inventions of particular peoples, while concealing the fact they
constituted parts of a cultural heritage common to the entire West, and sometimes even
to a wider world than that.
As I have argued earlier, similar moves had been undertaken during the Italian
Renaissance, and then notably in the political context of city-states and their quest for
survival in an increasingly hostile environment. Thanks to the peculiarities of
Renaissance modes of knowing and writing, ancient sources could be re-appropriated
and important political insights distilled from them by means of the use of the esoteric
doctrines of resemblance and exempla. Provided that the underlying conception of time
was cyclical, history was bound to repeat itself infinitely. Against the backdrop of such
a cosmology, it was fully possible to argue by means of examples derived from ancient
sources when legitimating different forms of rule or different lines of action against
ones opponents. What once applied in Athens or Sparta now apparently applied in
quattrocento Milan or Firenze, without the slightest degree of anachronism being felt as
long as certain rules had been obeyed in the selection of and sampling from classical
texts. In other words, there was no firm divide separating past and present, simply
because the concept of secular and linear time (tempus) could not claim to be the sole
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legitimate foundation of historiography.58 Perhaps the best example of the resulting
propensity for time traveling is found in Petrarchs letters in support of Cola di
Rienzos effort to reestablish the Roman Republic in 1344, in which Petrarch seems to
assume that the past millennium merely had been a blip on the screen, having done
nothing to change the identity of the Roman people, and its capacity to endow the
emperor with legitimacy.59 And while the Roman concept of patria was used to describe
such secular communities during the Middle Ages, and while the term natio had been
used to denote common birth and ancestry among their members, these secular
communities were intrinsically hard to make sense of outside the universalistic
framework of medieval legal theory.60
But by the sixteenth century, similar rhetorical strategies were redeployed in order
to make sense of a kind of entity that had not yet been conceptualized in fully
independent terms before. This new entity was premised on the actual or desired
coincidence between a sufficiently homogeneous people and a continuous territory, and
58 Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995); Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories, pp. 541-62.
59 Francesco Petrarca, Letter to Cola di Rienzo and the Roman People (Variae 48,
Horatorio) in Petrarch, The Revolution of Cola di Rienzo (New York: Italica Press,
1996), pp. 10-36; Yates, Astraea, pp. 13-16; Coleman, Ancient and Medieval
Memories, p. 558. See also sa Boholm, Reinvented Histories: Medieval Rome as a
Memorial Landscape, Ecumene, vol. 4, no. 3, 1997, pp. 247-272.
60 See Ernst Kantorowicz, Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought, American
Historical Review, vol. 56, no. 3, 1951, pp. 472-92; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five
Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
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was most frequently created through the assimilation of ancient myth. This is not to say
that any fully modern conceptions of nations or national identity originated at this point
in time, since no such fully particularized conceptions of community were yet
available. Rather, these efforts to justify the congruence between peoples and territories
in mythical terms represent the first steps towards the nationalization of political
community. Not surprisingly, the first authors to tell stories that purported to explain
the spatiotemporal trajectory and gradual triumph of distinct peoples were from that
corner of Europe that had the strongest reasons to do so, given their political
experiences of conquest and discovery. For this purpose, they vernacularized
predominantly Latin sources, and used those sources in order to create poetic defenses
of their achievements.
Thus, when Lus Vaz de Cames wrote his poem Os Lusadas (1572), it was not
only to celebrate the discoveries of Vasco da Gama, but also to instill a sense of
peoplehood to the ancient races of Lusitania. Thus, in Os Lusadas , the triumph of the
Portuguese discoveries is intimately connected not only to the glory and bravery of
those who achieved it, but also, and more importantly, to the formation of the
Portuguese people, their independence from the Castilian Crown, their expulsion of the
Moors, and the dynastic legitimacy of their Crown.61 Connecting all of the above in one
single epic, Cames assimilates and compares the Portuguese experience to that of
other glorious empires in the past. Skillfully redrawing the line between fact and
fiction, the gods of those empires are now on the side of Portugal, the legitimate heir to
their imperial greatness. Thus no one less than Jupiter sets the stage in Canto One:
61 For an analysis of the rhetorical structure of Os Lusadas, see Richard Helgerson,
Forms of Nationhood. The Elizabethan Writing of England, (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 149-163.
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Eternal dwellers in the starry heavens, you will not have forgotten the
great valour of that brave people of the Portuguese. You cannot
therefore be unaware of that it is the fixed resolve of destiny that
before their achievements those of Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and
Romans shall fade into oblivion. Already with negligible forcesthey
have expelled the Moslemwhile against the redoubtable Castilians
the have invariably had heaven on their side.62
This task also required a shift in vantage point from the global perspective conveyed
by Copernicus and the Venetian cartographers. Instead of viewing the whole world
from a hypothetical point above it, Cames views this new world from a point within it:
Proud Europe lies between the tropic of Cancer and the Arctic zone,
where cold is as intense as the heat is here on the equator. To the north
and west it is bounded by the ocean, to the south by the Mediterranean
Sea. And if Spain is the Head of Europe, Portugal, set at its western
extremity, where land ends and sea begins, is as it were the crown on
the head.
63
Cames succeeds in mobilizing a wide range of mythological sources in his
celebration of the Portuguese discoveries. Yet this might strike a more inquisitive
reader as strange, since these glorious battles also include Viriatos guerilla-like war
62 Lus Vaz de Cames, The Lusiads (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1952), p. 42.
63 Cames, Lusiads, p. 78-80.
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against the Romans. But why so daringly count on the support of Roman deities while
taking a fair amount of pride in their victory against the Romans? Would not that most
likely upset the same deities, and tempt them to withdraw their support with reference
to the obvious hubris of the Portuguese? But Os Lusadas is built on a strategy of
textual assimilation. Everything that is foreign to the Portuguese in time and space is
gradually swallowed up in the course of their providential march to unity and grandeur.
Memory traces of earlier empires and their gods are rendered visible and intelligible
only to the extent that they condition the formation of the Portuguese people, and can
be used to justify its achievements. Portugal and the Portuguese become real only to the
extent that the Romans are forgotten other than as a distant yardstick of military valor
and aristocratic virtue. But in order to institute this forgetfulness in a persuasive way,
the Romans must be confronted and beaten on their mythological home ground, as it
were. This is done by the fearsome creature of Adamastor, who introduces himself in
the following way in Canto Five:
I am that mighty hidden cape, called by you Portuguese the Cape of
Storms, that neither Ptolemy, Pomponius, Strabo, Pliny nor any other
of past times ever had knowledge of. This promontory of mine, jutting
out towards the South Pole, marks the southern extremity of Africa.
Until know it has remained unknown: your daring offends it deeply.
Adamastor is my name. I was one of the giant sons of earth, brother of
Enceladus, Briareus, and the others. With them I took part in the war
against Jupiter, not indeed piling mountain upon mountain but as a
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sea-captain, disputing with Neptunes squadrons the command of the
deep.64
It seems like Vasco da Gama finally has met somebody in the same trade from
whom he has things to learn. The discovery of Adamastor by Vasco marks the final
poetic victory over the Romans, since this bizarre innovation by Cames is a potent
newcomer in the Western gallery of mythological creatures. His claim to fame is to
have fought none but Jupiter himself, if only in order to be turned into a rock as a
punishment. Yet as we might recall from Matthew, being turned into a rock is not
necessarily a bad thing, since both empires and churches can be built on them. 65 And
through this double move, Vasco da Gama is now admitted to the same aristocratic hall
of fame, closely followed by his men, since no trial, however great, has caused them to
falter in that unshakable loyalty and obedience which is the crowning quality of the
Portuguese.66
Thus, Cames succeeded in creating a veritable poetic vortex that soaked up what
was of value in both Roman and Christian symbolic heritage, and twisted all those
memory fragments into a poetic defense of Portuguese peoplehood and imperial
ambition.67 In a gesture that later would find its full justification in Vicos attempt to
shed light on the deplorable obscurity of the origin of nations, Cames established a
mnemonic practice that could make sense of a desired future of a people in terms of a
64 Cames, Lusiads, p. 131.
65 XVI, 18-19.
66 Cames, Lusiads, p. 134.
67 For an analysis, see David Quint, Epic and Empire. Politics and Generic form from
Virgil to Milton, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 113-125.
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past which then could be made to look increasingly alien and easily forgotten.68 Doing
this, he could draw on an established tradition of rhetorical prophecy that stretched
back into which had earlier been used to boost dynastic claims against the Castilians.69
This was the final victory of the Portuguese over the Romans, a victory which made it
possible for Cames to find his place side by side with the other heroes of the
discoveries.
As a result of their collaboration with Italian cartographers, the Portuguese were
now using sophisticated maps and instruments to assist navigation, and hence to further
imperial ambitions. In 1478, Abraham Zacuto had circulated his Almanach perpetuum,
which made it possible to calculate latitude on the basis of the position of the sun. Other
solar tables were published by Valentim Fernandes in his Reportrio dos Tempos
(1518) in order to further facilitate maritime explorations.70 The gradual accumulation
of knowledge in these areas led to the establishment of a hydrographical repository
within the Armazem da Guine e Indias in order to keep this knowledge from falling into
the hands of competitors.71 Maps and globes also became prized possessions, not only
68 Giambattista Vico, The New Science [1746] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976),
pp. 102-103.
69 See Helder Macedo, The Rhetoric of Prophecy in Portuguese Renaissance
Literature, Portuguese Studies, vol. 19, 2003, pp. 9-18.
70 Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories. Mapping the Early Modern World, (London:
Reaktion Books, 1997), p. 54.
71 J. B. Harley, Silences and Secrecy. The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early
Modern Europe, in Paul Laxton ed., The New Nature of Maps. Essays in the History of
Cartography, p. 93, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 84-107. See
also A. Texeira da Mota, Some Notes on the Organization of Hydrographical Services
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keeping their owners informed of the latest discoveries and commercial ventures, but
also providing them with a sense of security as to their own identity within such an
ever-changing world.72
In the larger context of maritime exploration, this meant that
the ocean, previously seen as an impassable barrier, by the last third of the fifteenth
century hadbecome an intercontinental highway for those impious ships. 73 Thus, in
Portugal and elsewhere, dreams of unlimited territorial power found the beginnings of
its realization in the map or sphere that was dedicated to the monarch, framed by his
arms and traversed by his ships, and that opened up to his dreams of empire a space of
intervention stretching to the limits of the terraqueous globe.74 In the process of
expansion, the Portuguese empire had to digest all new knowledge it encountered, since
it was indispensable to its success and consolidation. Hence the appropriation of space
in Portugal before the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Imago Mundi, vol. 28,
1976, pp. 51-60.
72 Brotton, Trading Territories, p. 75.
73 John M. Headley, The sixteenth-century Venetian celebration of the earths total
habitability: the issue of the fully habitable world for renaissance Europe, p. 9, Journal
of World History, vol. 8, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1-27.
74 Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaisasance World. The geographical imagination
in the age of discovery, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 23. See also Denis
Cosgrove, Apollos Eye. A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western
Imagination, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 79-101; David
Turnbull, Cartography and science in early modern Europe: Mapping the construction
of knowledge spaces, Imago Mundi, Vol. 48, 1996, pp. 5-24; Mark Neocleous, Off
the Map. On violence and cartography, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 6, no.
4, 2003, pp. 409-25.
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on a global scale was as much a source of knowledge as it was a source of
sovereignty.75
But the Portuguese were not to be left alone in their quest for mastery over this global
space. Similar efforts to create a nation on the basis of ancient myths produced similar
results in England during the same period. While this quest for identity in part was
motivated by the need for domestic legitimacy, it also fuelled overseas expansion and
dreams of global mastery. Again the geographical and cartographical revolutions
provided these ambitions with critical momentum. As Hakluyt claims in his Principal
Navigations (1589), he was the first that produced and shewed both the olde
imperfectly composed, and the new lately reformed Mappes, Globes, Spheares, and
other instruments of this Art for demonstration in the common schooles, to the singular
pleasure, and generall contentment of my auditoryI meddle in this worke with the
Nauigations onely of our owne nation.76 The conceptual resources with which this
nation was built were drawn from a variety of ancient and medieval sources, making
Tudor imperialism a blend of nascent nationalism and surviving medieval
universalism.77 In order to achieve this precious blend, authors like Davenant and
75 Brotton, Trading Territories, p. 83; Vitorino Magalhes Godinho, Entre Myth et
Utopie: Les Grandes Dcouvertes. La construction de lespace et linvention de
lhumanite aux XVe et XVIe sicles, Archives Europenes de Sociologie, vol. 32, pp.
3-52.
76 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the
English Nation, (London, 1589), dedicatory epistle and preface. See Armitage,
Ideological Origins of the British Empire, pp. 61-99.
77 Yates, Astraea, p. 87; Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, pp. 107-47; Armitage,
Elizabethan Idea of Empire.
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Drayton transferred symbols and images from the Roman Empire and Christianity to
the new context of the territorial state.78 True to this ambition, Drayton warns against
staying local in the quest for nationhood in his Poly-Olbion (1613). Those who remain
content to do this are, [p]ossest with such stupidity and dulnesse, that rather then thou
wilt take pains to search into ancient and noble things, choosest to remaine in the thicke
fogges and mistes of ignorance, as neere the common Lay-stall of a Citie; refusing to
walker forth into the Tempe and Feelds of the Muses.79
In order to actually manifest the kind of identity that this poem so eloquently
celebrates, nascent nationalism had to be disseminated to the populace in order to stir
the right sentiments in them. Thus Davenant speculated about how to turn his own
proto-nationalist poetry into popular entertainment. In his Proposition for the
Advancement of Moralities (1651), this was to be done through a spectacle, [i]n which
shall be presented severall ingenious Arts, as Motion and transposition of Lights; to
make a more naturall resemblance of the great and virtuous actions of such as are
eminent in Story; and chiefly of those whose famous Battails and Land and Sea by
which this Nation is renownd.80That the theatre was chosen as the preferred channel
of dissemination is perhaps no coincidence, since the way in which theatres were
78 Patricia Springborg, Global Identity: Cosmopolitan Localism, paper presented at
IPSA, Seoul, 17-21 August, 1997. Cited with kind permission by the author.
79 Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, or a chorographicall description of the tracts, riuers,
mountaines, forests, and other parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britaine, in The
Works of Michael Drayton, ed. by William Hebel (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933), vol.
4. Quoted in Springborg, Global Identity, p. 29.
80 William Davenant, Proposition for the Advancement of Moralities (London, 1651), p.
249. Quoted in Springborg, Global Identity, p. 30.
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constructed closely reflected simultaneous developments in the art of memory during
Renaissance.81Ultimately, the purpose of this re-appropriation and assimilation of the
Roman and Christian heritage was not only to create a sense of common identity, but
also to reinforce the legitimacy of their monarchy by wrapping the English Crown in
mythical splendor.82 As Selden commented on Draytons efforts, [i]f in Prose and
Religion it were justifiable, as in Poetry and Fiction, to invoke a Locall Power (for
anciently both Jewes , Gentiles & Christians have supposed to every Countrey a singular
Genius) I would therein joyne with the Author.83
In the this section, we have seen how early modern political communities were
bounded by means of rhetorical strategies that assimilated everything useful in the past,
while simultaneously erasing the traces of this act of assimilation. These strategies of
remembrance transferred symbols from boundless visions of community to the world of
territorially bounded states. What was deemed of value in the imperial past was dug up
from ancient sources, reinterpreted and then attributed to the vanguards of early-
modern order, the Crown, the nobility and the church. It was then a truly monumental
task to disseminate this collective memory to the populace and make it stick in an age
when literacy still was a privilege of the few. Poetry presupposed a degree of literacy
that made it impractical for this purpose if not staged into spectacles, a fact which
confined much of the knowledge of national traditions to the elites which had
invented them. But the early-modern strategy par excellencehad been to create spatial
symbols of identity that could be deciphered in terms of those virtues that had been
81 Yates, The Art of Memory, pp. 310-54.
82 Yates, Astraea, pp. 59-87.
83 John Selden, Illustrations, in The Works of Michael Drayton, vol. 4, p. 15.
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appropriated from the ancients.84 Cathedrals, royal palaces, public buildings were
erected with remarkable stylistic uniformity throughout Europe during this period,
drawing on similar principles of construction and decoration.
When we reach end of the seventeenth century, the territorialized substratum of the
international system had thus been created, with or without the aid of singular geniuses.
This had little to do with what happened in Westphalia, but more to do with the shift in
cosmological perspective that had occurred in the beginning of this century when
geographical and cartographical knowledge was being harnessed for the purposes of
imperial expansion. The vantage point from which human affairs could be
contemplated was then literally brought down to earth. This vantage point was no
longer located over and above the terrestrial globe, but was located at a series of
discrete points on the planetary surface, each of these points corresponding to a claim to
territorial sovereignty. It was then but a short step to particularize existing historical
memories, by assimilating the whole array of symbols, metaphors, and tropes within
emergent vernacular literary traditions. This process was greatly facilitated by the
philosophical contention that historical memory is constitutive of identity, implying that
those parts of the past that could not be tailored to fit present requirements of political
identity simply ought to be forgotten. Not only were parts of a more universalistic and
boundless past now recycled to boost claims to territorial authority and the
particularistic identities of hopefully congruent nations, but they were also providing
84 See for example Anne-Marie Lecoq, The Symbolism of the State. The Images of the
Monarchy from the Early Valois Kings to Louis XIV, in Pierre Nora, Rethinking
France: les Lieux de Mmoire, Vol. 1, The State, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2001), pp. 217-267; Franoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic
Monument, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 40-62.
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fresh justifications of imperial expansion. In this process, medieval and Renaissance
visions of world community were translated into ideologies of empire, their constituent
concepts having their range of applicability firmly delimited by territorial boundaries. It
was then left to others to provide the theoretical justification of that which now largely
had been accomplished in practice, and, by consistent omission, help readers forget the
fact that the early-modern state had been crafted out of prior and boundless conceptions
of human community.
But none of this is visible from within the international system, since the trajectory
outlined above constitutes the very precondition of its emergence insofar as it provided
the conceptual resources necessary for territorial differentiation of political space and
the concomitant division of mankind into distinct and bounded political communities,
each carrying a corresponding claim to territorial sovereignty. The upshot of this
narrative has been to demonstrate not only that the social construction of a boundless
global socio-political space antedated the emergence of both individual states as well as
the larger system of which they came to form part, but that globality indeed conditioned
the possibility of the international system of states insofar as the construction of this
system not only took place within a pre-constituted global realm, but by means of
conceptual resources that were distilled from universalistic and boundless conceptions
of political community. As I have tried to show in the two previous sections, globality
is not a timeless condition existing by virtue of the shape of the earth or on actual the
interconnectedness between individual societies, but rather a social fact whose genesis
and dissemination is as open to historical and sociological inquiry as any other social
fact. On the basis of my analysis of the genesis of this particular social fact, I would
like to conclude that if we want to make sense of the concept of globality as a distinct
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analytical category, we must begin by realizing that the global realm not only is
historically prior to the international system of states, but also accord it ontological
primacy in relation to the international system for the simple reason that this system as