Limits of Empire European Imperial Formations in Early Modern World History Intro

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© Copyrighted Material


The Limits of empire: an introductionTonio andrade and William reger

The chapters here were all written by scholars whom parker has influenced—some as students, others as colleagues. all the authors have benefited from his warm and generous help at one time or another. They focus on a myriad different topics—marriage, war, diplomacy, drunken brawling. They treat many different parts of the world—Lithuania, Central america, indonesia. and they adopt different approaches—gender history, military history, religious history. But all share a parkerian focus on the limits of empire, which is to say that they all seek to understand the centrifugal forces—sacral, dynastic, military, diplomatic, geographical, informational—that plagued imperial formations in the early modern period. They also share parker’s curiosity about the workings of empire, the ways that states dealt with—or failed to deal with—the challenges that beset them.

What limits to empire do they examine? one of the most important is religion, and we see a remarkably nuanced view emerge in this book: religion not just as an imperial tool or, on the contrary, just a tool of resistance, but as one of many areas of interplay in the complex and often precarious balance of authority within empires. in his bold reinterpretation of the famous Catalan revolt of the 1640s, when communities in spain’s Catalan province rebelled against habsburg imperial control, andrew mitchell (one of parker’s former phd students) uses religious sermons—there is a rich corpus of them, and they have been largely unstudied, in contrast to protestant sermons in northern europe and the north american colonies—to show how the rebels used religious imagery and Catholic theology to legitimate their movement, even as the authorities they rebelled against used religious discourse to oppose them. each side made competing claims of religious legitimacy, and mitchell evokes parker’s discussion of philip ii’s messianic mindset, philip having been fond of referring to “God’s will, and mine, which are the same.”1 mitchell describes this

1 Geoffrey parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (new haven: yale university press, 2000), 75, cited in mitchell, “por dios, por patria”: The sacral Limits of empire as seen in Catalan political sermons, 1630–1641.”

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The Limits of Empire2

wrestling over religious legitimacy as the “sacral limits of empire,” and the limits were often challenging: no imperial formation could achieve a monopoly over the legitimate use of religion.2

Whereas mitchell’s analysis is discursive, historian andrea smidt adopts a more institutional approach but comes to similar conclusions. examining the spanish empire’s failed efforts towards absolutism in the eighteenth century, a sort of absolutist grand strategy, she shows that a key failure was the crown’s inability to exert control over religion. in the complex balance of countervailing forces—each with its own agenda—imperial pretensions to religious absolutism ultimately swirled into ineffectiveness. The spanish crown ended up deferring to rome and thus promoted, in the end, the traditional image of the spanish monarchy as defender of the faith rather than as a religious authority in its own right.3

mary sprunger approaches the theme of religion from a different angle, showing how the mennonites of the netherlands “could not offer their full support to the maritime empire,” but rather limited their participation in the “engines of empire.”4 mennonites in other areas, such as switzerland, responded to religious persecution by maintaining a strict separation between state and faith. But the dutch mennonites lived in a different sort of society. The dutch republic was commercialistic, capitalistic, and globalizing. referencing parker’s influential work on success and failure in the protestant reformation as well as his lesser-known but equally fascinating article about the scottish reformed Church (in which he argued that the scottish Kirk “became the handmaiden of nascent capitalism”), sprunger examines how dutch mennonites tried to navigate carefully between faith and participation in empire.5 despite their religious devotion to nonviolence, dutch mennonites invested in the dutch east and West india Companies, both of which organizations used violence in pursuit of trade. yet their faith also impelled them at times to condemn armed trade practices, particularly when they were in positions of responsibility within their faith community. Thus, even within one relatively tight-knit group there were countervailing claims of religious legitimacy, which affected the ways that that group viewed empire and participated in it.

2 mitchell, “por dios, por patria,” 31.3 andrea smidt, “enlightened absolutism and new frontiers for political authority:

Building towards a state religion in eighteenth-Century spain,” 34.4 mary sprunger, “The Limits of faith in a maritime empire: mennonites, Trade and

politics in the dutch Golden age,” 59. 5 Geoffrey parker, “success and failure during the first Century of the reformation”

and “The ‘Kirk by Law established’ and the ‘Taming of scotland’: st andrews, 1559–1600,” in Success is Never Final: Empire, War, and Faith in Early Modern Europe (new york: Basic Books, 2002), 282; quotation is from the latter, which is cited in sprunger, 60.

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The Limits of Empire: An Introduction 3

another key limit to empire was geopolitics: the increasingly complex system of interstate interactions that began to set europe apart from other areas of eurasia in the early modern period. These new networks provided one of the greatest challenges to empires because they in a sense handed the advantage to smaller state actors, who were often able to move more nimbly. denice fett shows in her piece on early modern european diplomacy that the intelligence networks that empires built up so painstakingly, with their coded messages and multiple copies of dispatches (some of which were intended to fall into unfriendly hands and thus contained the sort of information—or misinformation—that one wanted the enemy to believe), had a tendency to go wrong, and although empires had more resources than smaller states, their intelligence networks were correspondingly larger and more unwieldy. fett’s comparative analysis of french, portuguese, and British diplomatic reports in the late sixteenth century draws on parker’s extensive work on philip ii to show how imperial intelligence networks could go bad and what factors lay behind robust and successful networks.6

aside from their tendency to not work, imperial intelligence networks had another problem: they generated huge amounts of information, a challenge that paul dover examines in his chapter about information overload. in Grand Strategy of Philip II, parker marveled at philip’s unprecedented intelligence network, which brought dispatches from all over the world to the king’s desks in madrid and Valladolid. But what puzzled parker—and what also puzzles dover—is a simple question: “Why did philip fail to translate so much knowledge into irresistible power?”7 parker offers a many-factored answer: philip’s controlling personality, his messianic ideology, and the sheer volume of the information. dover builds on this last point: “it is my contention,” he writes, “that among the defining features of the early modern age were the challenges of coping with greater quantities of data,”8 and he shows that although the rapid increase of information was an occasion for wonder, it also brought anxiety and “intellectual dislocation.”9 The quantity of information was disorienting; but it was the problem of assessing its quality that was most daunting, and dover draws convincing parallels between the early modern age, when rumor-ridden pamphlets and broadsheets flowed out of the presses in unprecedented numbers,

6 denice fett, “information, Gossip and rumor: The Limits of intelligence at the early modern Court, 1558–1585,” 81.

7 Cited in paul dover, “philip ii, information overload, and the early modern moment,” 99.

8 paul dover, “philip ii, information overload, and the early modern moment,” 100.9 ibid., 116.

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and our own, when the internet provides an anxiety-provoking surfeit of dubious information. early moderns even warned of the dangers of multitasking, that unhealthy wish “to dip first into one book and then into another,” which seneca, the classical hero of renaissance authors, denounced as the sign “of an overnice appetite to toy with many dishes; for when they are manifold and varied they cloy but do not nourish.”10

The complex systems of diplomacy that produced much of this surfeit of information were born in italy, and michael Levin’s chapter cleverly shows how spain’s imperial pretentions were challenged there. he, too, starts with parker’s Grand Strategy of Philip II. parker asserts that philip was relatively successful in italy, and that philip ii managed to create a sort of pax hispanica in the peninsula. Levin disagrees. drawing on an exploding literature on early modern italy, he shows convincingly that the italian states that spain tried to dominate were extremely effective at manipulating their nominal overlord, and that spanish dominance in italy, such as it was, was actually the result of a process of negotiation, a sort of interactive dominance, which he renames a pax hispano-italica.11 empire was always negotiated. imperial formations were contingent.

The dance of mutual accommodation was precarious, particularly since sovereignty in the early modern period could be ambiguous. parker has drawn attention in his work to the fact that in early modern europe divided sovereignty was more the rule than the exception. it is a theme running through his book Europe in Crisis, and it draws on J.h. elliot’s work on the “composite monarchy,” which has deeply influenced our understanding of early modern europe.12 The composite monarchy was a common political arrangement in which one ruler wore several crowns. each crown was supposed to bear with it different perspectives and agendas. Certainly that is what the subjects of the crown hoped for, and they made their feelings clear—sometimes in direct remonstrations with rulers and, if this failed, sometimes in outright rebellion. in this way, the political will of the sovereign was limited by the local laws and customs of his various domains whose citizens saw themselves as members of a political unit with its own history and institutions, whose interests were not identical to those of the imperium at large.

it may come as a surprise, then, that the composite monarchy could actually be a source of stability rather than centrifugism. This is the fascinating argument of historian robert i. frost, who first became interested in the composite

10 Cited ibid., 118.11 michael J. Levin, “italy and the Limits of the spanish empire,” 121.12 J.h. elliot, “a europe of Composite monarchies,” Past and Present, 137 (1992):

48–71.

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monarchy when he was a student of parker’s at st andrews. frost’s subject is the composite monarchy of poland and Lithuania, and he argues that the two crowns benefited from their subjects’ awareness of the advantages of their being worn by the same sovereign. The composite monarchy was not, therefore, “simply a matter for monarchs.”13 rather, different “political communities were alive to the potential benefits of union.”14 frost calls on historians to pay more attention to the political communities participating in the enterprise of empire. once again we are thrown back on the idea of empires as complex interplays of rulers and ruled.

The complex interplays were hard to manage, of course. a tendency toward political entropy continually challenged imperial structures, and their rulers were always seeking strategies to build stability. not all of them had a “grand strategy,” but most sought to maintain and extend their empires, and the tactics they used to do so were as various as the forces they had to overcome.

one strategy was military force. Tonio andrade’s article builds on parker’s work on the military revolution, specifically on a seminal article parker published in 2000, whose argument is telegraphed in its title: “The artillery fortress as an engine of european overseas expansion.”15 parker’s article asserted that european expansion was greatly aided by the new italian fortresses, which were extremely difficult to dislodge and which thus undergirded european power throughout the world. The idea has come under attack, most notably by Jeremy Black, but andrade uses Chinese and european sources about the sino-dutch War of 1661–1668 to argue that the artillery fortress deserves its reputation as an engine of expansion. (andrade also draws on the award-winning work of another of parker’s mentees, military historian Jamel ostwald.16) although the Chinese won the war, they had great difficulty dislodging the dutch from two powerful artillery fortresses on Taiwan. The tactics the Chinese used—and their reaction to repeated failures—indicate that they did not at first understand the trace italienne’s peculiar capacity for defense in depth. They adapted, but the learning curve was slow and costly.

13 robert frost, “The Limits of dynastic power: poland-Lithuania, sweden and the problem of Composite monarchy in the age of the Vasas, 1562–1668, 153.

14 ibid., 152.15 Geoffrey parker, “The artillery fortress as an engine of european overseas

expansion, 1480–1750,” in James d. Tracy, ed., City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge university press, 2000), 386–416.

16 Jamel ostwald, Vauban Under Siege: Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

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of course, as parker has written, “success is never final.”17 military conquest was just the first step in expansion. a far more difficult step was consolidation, maintaining a hold on imperial subjects. rulers used various tactics.

one tactic was lying. matt romaniello looks at the way the russian empire deployed symbols of unity to portray its empire as stronger than it was. “Constructing an empire,” he writes, “was a process of maintaining a façade of success.”18 not only did this involve ceremonial celebration and the acquisition of the imperial title (tsar) for ivan the Terrible, it also meant constructing a tenuously closed border made up of small settlements and fortified points across routes of ingress and egress between territory conquered and what was beyond. This line through the steppes was more symbolic, however, than militarily efficacious: it was a material representation of the inclusion of the conquered territory into the russian empire, “a visible sign of the tsar’s claim over his new territory.”19 yet romaniello concludes that this strategy actually worked. Creating an appearance of success is a vital ingredient of effective statecraft.

playing with appearances was also a key pursuit for diplomats, as richard Lundell shows in his supple exploration of habsburg diplomacy. Lundell evokes parker’s discussion of strategic overstretch in the habsburg empire, but suggests that the habsburgs were able to use diplomacy to maintain stability in their variegated domains. Lundell’s theme is dissimulation, and he finds plenty of it in the career of eustache Chapuys, the famous habsburg ambassador to the english court. Lundell argues that we must pay close attention to the motivations of the diplomats themselves, and the multiple audiences they were trying to affect: “masks conceal,” he writes, “but they also present what one wishes to present.”20 Teasing out the complex web of motives and interests in diplomacy is a difficult task, and Lundell does it with aplomb, detailing how Chapuys and other ambassadors sought on the one hand to perceive facts and on the other to obstruct or influence their perception and transmission.21

dissimulation was also used by agents of empire in the habsburgs’ far-flung colonies, and Bethany aram’s article shows how spanish officials in Central america exploited the many “possibilities of misinformation” that naturally arose in an imperial system in which it took a year or more to receive a reply to

17 Geoffrey parker, Success is Never Final: Empire, War, and Faith in Early Modern Europe (new york: Basic Books, 2002).

18 matthew romaniello, “The façade of order: Claiming imperial space in early modern russia,” 197.

19 ibid., 200.20 richard Lundell, “renaissance diplomacy and the Limits of empire: eustace

Chapuys, habsburg imperialisms, and dissimulation as method,” 206.21 ibid., 206.

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a report. aram draws on parker’s work on the “tyranny of distance,” an empire’s enemy number one, and details the precise times it took for dispatches to reach the colonies and for reports to make it back, pointing out that travel time was not the only problem: bureaucracy also slowed communication, as scribes and clerks struggled to cope with an avalanche of paperwork. What is most intriguing about aram’s piece, however, is her demonstration that spanish leaders in the colonies exploited “the productive and pernicious fictions facilitating … conquest.”22 strategic or “opportunistic” misinformation gave local authorities cover to disregard or delay the enforcement of royal decrees. They also span locally gathered intelligence into narratives that helped them achieve their ends, for example exaggerating rumors of gold and silver mines (the el dorado effect). in this way, local authorities legitimated the expansion of their own privileges and prerogatives.23

distance from the metropole was not a problem just for the habsburgs, of course. pam mcVay explores the problem in the dutch empire in her comparison of two colonies on opposite sides of the globe: one in indonesia and one in today’s new york state. her main focus is the practice of brawling, but she is interested in how the administrators of empire tried to control the brawlers. These ordinary (and often drunk) men were the main face of empire to the indigenous peoples in both colonies. administrators struggled to make them behave themselves according to proper “cultural standards.”24 yet on the edge of empire, the “small governing bodies and tiny legal bureaucracies had scarcely enough resources to manage diplomatic and trade relations.”25 They found it difficult to keep their employees and common citizens from drinking and fighting. dutch imperial authorities used legal mechanisms to try to control their employees’ penchant for interpersonal violence, but they were not very successful.

We have discussed lying as a tool of empire. another tool was sex. Cristina Beltrán argues that in the early modern world matrimonial politics were still “the most effective instruments of [monarchies’] political struggles.” in this she follows parker, who devotes considerable attention to the phenomenon in his work on philip ii, particularly in Grand Strategy. Beltrán points out that matrimonial dynasticism was a risky game to play because the contingencies of biology and diplomacy limited its effectiveness. for one thing, the very

22 Bethany aram, “distance and misinformation in the Conquest of america,” 224.23 ibid., 228.24 pamela mcVay, “Brawling Behaviors in the dutch Colonial empire: Changing

norms of fairness?” 237.25 ibid., 1.

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tools of this policy were the dynasts’ own “personages, along with those of their family members.”26 for another, the monarch seeking to make such connections had to navigate difficult diplomatic, religious, legal, and even geographic waters; and, as Beltrán argues, the success and even “the very power of the spanish monarchy made the work of marrying off the spanish princesses more difficult.”27

edward Tenace takes up the theme in his own exploration of philip ii’s matrimonial dynasticism, which examines the myriad ways philip tried to pair his daughter with various eligible mates. referencing parker’s work on philip ii, he notes philip’s “messianic imperialism,” which led him at times to expect divine aid when none was forthcoming. yet Tenace shows convincingly that this messianic outlook did not keep the king from making a sort of machiavellian dynasticism a priority in his relations with france. The messianic vision helped drive philip’s imperial ambitions, but it was combined with an at times hard realism: a divinely inspired realpolitik.28 nonetheless, philip ultimately failed to achieve his ends, thwarted by biology, politics, and death. These articles, disparate in topic and approach, share an underlying perspective: empire, being one of the most important and enduring types of political structure in human history, deserves to be studied on its own terms, with as few value judgments as possible.

for half a century it has been considered in rather bad taste, at least within the academy, to focus on the rulers of empires and the decisions they tried to make, on the grounds that such a perspective is a hallmark of traditional historiography’s focus on dead white men. This view started during the social historical turn of the 1960s and 1970s and continued through the rise of postmodern studies in the 1980s and 1990s. a history phd student could expect to build a better career by writing a dissertation on orientalism or “colonial discourse” than on the diplomacy of Charles V or philip ii. This is beginning to change. in the past decade, as american and British interventions overseas have thrust the discussion of empire onto editorial pages, scholars within the academy are becoming more willing to examine imperial structures on their own terms.

indeed, today the study of empire is in productive ferment, with a proliferation of new scholarship that adopts more supple understandings of

26 Cristina Borreguero Beltrán, “isabel Clara eugenia: daughter of the spanish empire,” 257.

27 ibid., 259.28 edward shannon Tenace, “messianic imperialism or Traditional dynasticism? The

Grand strategy of philip ii and the spanish failure in the Wars of the 1590s,” 282.

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empires as they actually functioned. rigid conceptions of colonizer–colonized are being increasingly replaced by conceptions of complex interplays between coalitions of rulers and ruled because it has become clear that empires simply could not exist without the at least partial consent of their imperial subjects, or at least significant groups of those subjects. This was as true of the British raj as it was of imperial China or imperial russia.

a mark of these changing attitudes is that the term “empire” itself is being more widely used. it used to be reserved primarily for western powers or states that looked like western states, such as ottoman, Chinese, and mughal structures. But now historians apply the term in contexts one might never have guessed it could be used.29 in 2009, the Bancroft prize in american history went to pekka hämäläinen’s book The Comanche Empire, which treats the Comanche indians of north america as a powerful empire that eclipsed european rivals.30 as david Cannadine has recently quipped, historians are starting to realize that empire might not necessarily be “wholly and intrinsically and irredeemably bad.”31

Geoffrey parker, of course, knew this before it was fashionable. he is a fan of social history, deeply influenced by the Braudelian revolution, but he has never been comfortable with the Braudelian view of human actions as immaterial to history, as froth on the surface of the sea. so although his work has always acknowledged the deep forces—environmental, cultural, economic, and technological—that underlie human history, he has also always kept in mind that history is composed of humans whose actions are often crucial to the outcome of events. We should focus on the poor, the disadvantaged, the marginalized, of course; but we cannot ignore the powerful, particularly kings and queens and generals. he has passed on that perspective to his students and mentees.

Thus the essays in this book keep a firm focus on human beings, great and lowly: the king reading memorials late into the night; the diplomat forging a letter; the royal father conniving to marry his daughter; the clerk struggling to keep up with an avalanche of paperwork. and, on the other side of the imperial equation, those who resisted empire or insisted on accommodating it on their own terms: mennonites who struggled to remain true to ideals of nonviolence even as they invested in overseas imperialism; settlers who drank and fought and

29 some scholars prefer alternate terms. see, for example, ann stoler, Imperial Formations (santa fe: school for advanced research press, 2007).

30 pekka hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (new haven: yale university press, 2009).

31 david Cannadine, “‘Big Tent’ historiography: Transatlantic obstacles and opportunities in writing the history of empire,” Common Knowledge 11, no 2 (2005): 375–92, quote at 388.

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settled their differences in their own way in the colonies; nomads who sought to evade imperial restrictions on travel; priests who wrote incendiary sermons; and bishops who disobeyed royal orders. The result of all this focus on human action is a picture of empires as contingent, evolving, constantly changing structures, perpetually running up against limits and trying out new strategies.

The human factor is a central fact of empires, and focusing on it helps keep us aware of how dynamic empires were, even as it makes us aware of how misleading appearances can be. powerful, dynamic, and growing empires—like those of spain, Britain, or russia—could conceal great weaknesses and were more precarious than they appeared on surface. similarly, empires that seemed weak or cobbled together—such as the spanish empire in the eighteenth century or the combined crowns of poland-Lithuania—often displayed remarkable flexibility, persistence, and adaptability. The case of early modern Japan, which parker focuses on in his upcoming book about the global crisis, is a key example. What once looked like economic weakness—anemic growth, a lower rate of population increase, etc.—turns out in retrospect to have been a system that presciently managed a complex society with an awareness of ecological limits. perhaps the future will look more like early modern Japan than like the precipitously growing societies and economies of modernity.

But perhaps the deepest lesson of this book and, indeed, of parker’s work in general, is that things can shift quickly. The best-laid plans of the most powerful rulers have a tendency to go wrong. success is never final. The world can change in the blink of an eye.

That’s something we should keep in mind.

Documents

Limits of Empire European Imperial Formations in Early Modern World History Intro