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

5/21/2018 Limits of Empire European Imperial Formations in Early Modern World Histor...

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Te Limits o Empire: An Introduction

onio Andrade and William Reger

Te chapters here were all written by scholars whom Parker has influencedsome as students, others as colleagues. All the authors have benefited rom

his warm and generous help at one time or another. Tey ocus on a myriaddifferent topicsmarriage, war, diplomacy, drunken brawling. Tey treatmany different parts o the worldLithuania, Central America, Indonesia.And they adopt different approachesgender history, military history,religious history. But all share a Parkerian ocus on the limits o empire,which is to say that they all seek to understand the centriugal orcessacral,dynastic, military, diplomatic, geographical, inormationalthat plaguedimperial ormations in the early modern period. Tey also share Parkerscuriosity about the workings o empire, the ways that states dealt withorailed to deal withthe challenges that beset them.

What limits to empire do they examine? One o the most important isreligion, and we see a remarkably nuanced view emerge in this book: religionnot just as an imperial tool or, on the contrary, just a tool o resistance, but asone o many areas o interplay in the complex and ofen precarious balance oauthority within empires. In his bold reinterpretation o the amous CatalanRevolt o the 1640s, when communities in Spains Catalan province rebelledagainst Habsburg imperial control, Andrew Mitchell (one o Parkers ormer

PhD students) uses religious sermonsthere is a rich corpus o them, and theyhave been largely unstudied, in contrast to Protestant sermons in northernEurope and the North American coloniesto show how the rebels usedreligious imagery and Catholic theology to legitimate their movement, even asthe authorities they rebelled against used religious discourse to oppose them.Each side made competing claims o religious legitimacy, and Mitchell evokesParkers discussion o Philip IIs messianic mindset, Philip having been ond oreerring to Gods will, and mine, which are the same.1Mitchell describes this

1 Geoffrey Parker, Te Grand Strategy of Philip II(New Haven: Yale University Press,2000), 75, cited in Mitchell, Por Dios, Por Patria: Te Sacral Limits o Empire as Seen inCatalan Political Sermons, 16301641.



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Te Limits of Empire2

wrestling over religious legitimacy as the sacral limits o empire, and the limitswere ofen challenging: no imperial ormation could achieve a monopoly overthe legitimate use o religion.2

Whereas Mitchells analysis is discursive, historian Andrea Smidt adopts amore institutional approach but comes to similar conclusions. Examining theSpanish empires ailed efforts towards absolutism in the eighteenth century, a sorto absolutist grand strategy, she shows that a key ailure was the crowns inabilityto exert control over religion. In the complex balance o countervailing orceseach with its own agendaimperial pretensions to religious absolutism ultimatelyswirled into ineffectiveness. Te Spanish crown ended up deerring to Rome andthus promoted, in the end, the traditional image o the Spanish monarchy asdeender o the aith rather than as a religious authority in its own right.3

Mary Sprunger approaches the theme o religion rom a different angle,showing how the Mennonites o the Netherlands could not offer their ullsupport to the maritime empire, but rather limited their participation in theengines o empire.4Mennonites in other areas, such as Switzerland, respondedto religious persecution by maintaining a strict separation between state andaith. But the Dutch Mennonites lived in a different sort o society. Te DutchRepublic was commercialistic, capitalistic, and globalizing. Reerencing Parkersinfluential work on success and ailure in the Protestant Reormation as wellas his lesser-known but equally ascinating article about the Scottish ReormedChurch (in which he argued that the Scottish Kirk became the handmaideno nascent capitalism), Sprunger examines how Dutch Mennonites tried tonavigate careully between aith and participation in empire.5 Despite theirreligious devotion to nonviolence, Dutch Mennonites invested in the DutchEast and West India Companies, both o which organizations used violence inpursuit o trade. Yet their aith also impelled them at times to condemn armedtrade practices, particularly when they were in positions o responsibility within

their aith community. Tus, even within one relatively tight-knit group therewere countervailing claims o religious legitimacy, which affected the ways thatthat group viewed empire and participated in it.

2 Mitchell, Por Dios, Por Patria, 31.3 Andrea Smidt, Enlightened Absolutism and New Frontiers or Political Authority:

Building towards a State Religion in Eighteenth-Century Spain, 34.4 Mary Sprunger, Te Limits o Faith in a Maritime Empire: Mennonites, rade and

Politics in the Dutch Golden Age, 59.5 Geoffrey Parker, Success and Failure during the First Century o the Reormationand Te Kirk by Law Established and the aming o Scotland: St Andrews, 15591600,in Success is Never Final: Empire, War, and Faith in Early Modern Europe (New York: BasicBooks, 2002), 282; quotation is rom the latter, which is cited in Sprunger, 60.



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Te Limits of Empire: An Introduction 3

Another key limit to empire was geopolitics: the increasingly complexsystem o interstate interactions that began to set Europe apart rom otherareas o Eurasia in the early modern period. Tese new networks provided

one o the greatest challenges to empires because they in a sense handed theadvantage to smaller state actors, who were ofen able to move more nimbly.Denice Fett shows in her piece on early modern European diplomacy that theintelligence networks that empires built up so painstakingly, with their codedmessages and multiple copies o dispatches (some o which were intended toall into unriendly hands and thus contained the sort o inormationormisinormationthat one wanted the enemy to believe), had a tendency togo wrong, and although empires had more resources than smaller states, theirintelligence networks were correspondingly larger and more unwieldy. Fettscomparative analysis o French, Portuguese, and British diplomatic reports inthe late sixteenth century draws on Parkers extensive work on Philip II to showhow imperial intelligence networks could go bad and what actors lay behindrobust and successul networks.6

Aside rom their tendency to not work, imperial intelligence networks hadanother problem: they generated huge amounts o inormation, a challengethat Paul Dover examines in his chapter about inormation overload. In GrandStrategy of Philip II, Parker marveled at Philips unprecedented intelligencenetwork, which brought dispatches rom all over the world to the kings desksin Madrid and Valladolid. But what puzzled Parkerand what also puzzlesDoveris a simple question: Why did Philip ail to translate so muchknowledge into irresistible power?7 Parker offers a many-actored answer:Philips controlling personality, his messianic ideology, and the sheer volume othe inormation. Dover builds on this last point: It is my contention, he writes,that among the defining eatures o the early modern age were the challengeso coping with greater quantities o data,8and he shows that although the rapid

increase o inormation was an occasion or wonder, it also brought anxiety andintellectual dislocation.9 Te quantity o inormation was disorienting; butit was the problem o assessing its quality that was most daunting, and Doverdraws convincing parallels between the early modern age, when rumor-riddenpamphlets and broadsheets flowed out o the presses in unprecedented numbers,

6 Denice Fett, Inormation, Gossip and Rumor: Te Limits o Intelligence at theEarly Modern Court, 15581585, 81.

7 Cited in Paul Dover, Philip II, Inormation Overload, and the Early ModernMoment, 99.

8 Paul Dover, Philip II, Inormation Overload, and the Early Modern Moment, 100.9 Ibid., 116.



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and our own, when the Internet provides an anxiety-provoking sureit o dubiousinormation. Early moderns even warned o the dangers o multitasking, thatunhealthy wish to dip first into one book and then into another, which Seneca,

the classical hero o Renaissance authors, denounced as the sign o an overniceappetite to toy with many dishes; or when they are maniold and varied theycloy but do not nourish.10

Te complex systems o diplomacy that produced much o this sureit oinormation were born in Italy, and Michael Levins chapter cleverly shows howSpains imperial pretentions were challenged there. He, too, starts with ParkersGrand Strategy of Philip II. Parker asserts that Philip was relatively successulin Italy, and that Philip II managed to create a sort o pax hispanica in thepeninsula. Levin disagrees. Drawing on an exploding literature on early modernItaly, he shows convincingly that the Italian states that Spain tried to dominatewere extremely effective at manipulating their nominal overlord, and thatSpanish dominance in Italy, such as it was, was actually the result o a process onegotiation, a sort o interactive dominance, which he renames apax hispano-italica.11Empire was always negotiated. Imperial ormations were contingent.

Te dance o mutual accommodation was precarious, particularly sincesovereignty in the early modern period could be ambiguous. Parker has drawnattention in his work to the act that in early modern Europe divided sovereigntywas more the rule than the exception. It is a theme running through his bookEurope in Crisis,and it draws on J.H. Elliots work on the composite monarchy,which has deeply influenced our understanding o early modern Europe.12Te composite monarchy was a common political arrangement in which oneruler wore several crowns. Each crown was supposed to bear with it differentperspectives and agendas. Certainly that is what the subjects o the crown hopedor, and they made their eelings clearsometimes in direct remonstrationswith rulers and, i this ailed, sometimes in outright rebellion. In this way, the

political will o the sovereign was limited by the local laws and customs o hisvarious domains whose citizens saw themselves as members o a political unitwith its own history and institutions, whose interests were not identical to thoseo the imperiumat large.

It may come as a surprise, then, that the composite monarchy could actuallybe a source o stability rather than centriugism. Tis is the ascinating argumento historian Robert I. Frost, who first became interested in the composite

10 Cited ibid., 118.11 Michael J. Levin, Italy and the Limits o the Spanish Empire, 121.12 J.H. Elliot, A Europe o Composite Monarchies, Past and Present, 137 (1992):

4871.



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monarchy when he was a student o Parkers at St Andrews. Frosts subject isthe composite monarchy o Poland and Lithuania, and he argues that the twocrowns benefited rom their subjects awareness o the advantages o their being

worn by the same sovereign. Te composite monarchy was not, thereore,simply a matter or monarchs.13Rather, different political communities werealive to the potential benefits o union.14Frost calls on historians to pay moreattention to the political communities participating in the enterprise o empire.Once again we are thrown back on the idea o empires as complex interplays orulers and ruled.

Te complex interplays were hard to manage, o course. A tendency towardpolitical entropy continually challenged imperial structures, and their rulerswere always seeking strategies to build stability. Not all o them had a grandstrategy, but most sought to maintain and extend their empires, and the tacticsthey used to do so were as various as the orces they had to overcome.

One strategy was military orce. onio Andrades article builds on Parkerswork on the military revolution, specifically on a seminal article Parker publishedin 2000, whose argument is telegraphed in its title: Te Artillery Fortress asan Engine o European Overseas Expansion.15 Parkers article asserted thatEuropean expansion was greatly aided by the new Italian ortresses, which wereextremely difficult to dislodge and which thus undergirded European powerthroughout the world. Te idea has come under attack, most notably by JeremyBlack, but Andrade uses Chinese and European sources about the Sino-DutchWar o 16611668 to argue that the artillery ortress deserves its reputation asan engine o expansion. (Andrade also draws on the award-winning work oanother o Parkers mentees, military historian Jamel Ostwald.16) Although theChinese won the war, they had great difficulty dislodging the Dutch rom twopowerul artillery ortresses on aiwan. Te tactics the Chinese usedand theirreaction to repeated ailuresindicate that they did not at first understand the

trace italiennes peculiar capacity or deense in depth. Tey adapted, but thelearning curve was slow and costly.

13 Robert Frost, Te Limits o Dynastic Power: Poland-Lithuania, Sweden and theProblem o Composite Monarchy in the Age o the Vasas, 15621668, 153.

14 Ibid., 152.15

Geoffrey Parker, Te Artillery Fortress as an Engine o European OverseasExpansion, 14801750, in James D. racy, ed., City Walls: Te Urban Enceinte in GlobalPerspective(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 386416.

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



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O course, as Parker has written, success is never final.17Military conquestwas just the first step in expansion. A ar 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 RussianEmpire deployed symbols o unity to portray its empire as stronger than it was.Constructing an empire, he writes, was a process o maintaining a aade osuccess.18Not only did this involve ceremonial celebration and the acquisitiono the imperial title (tsar) or Ivan the errible, it also meant constructing atenuously closed border made up o small settlements and ortified points acrossroutes o ingress and egress between territory conquered and what was beyond.Tis line through the steppes was more symbolic, however, than militarilyefficacious: it was a material representation o the inclusion o the conqueredterritory into the Russian empire, a visible sign o the tsars claim over hisnew territory.19 Yet Romaniello concludes that this strategy actually worked.Creating an appearance o success is a vital ingredient o effective statecraf.

Playing with appearances was also a key pursuit or diplomats, as RichardLundell shows in his supple exploration o Habsburg diplomacy. Lundell evokesParkers discussion o strategic overstretch in the Habsburg Empire, but suggeststhat the Habsburgs were able to use diplomacy to maintain stability in theirvariegated domains. Lundells theme is dissimulation, and he finds plenty oit in the career o Eustache Chapuys, the amous Habsburg ambassador to theEnglish court. Lundell argues that we must pay close attention to the motivationso the diplomats themselves, and the multiple audiences they were trying toaffect: Masks conceal, he writes, but they also present what one wishes topresent.20easing out the complex web o motives and interests in diplomacyis a difficult task, and Lundell does it with aplomb, detailing how Chapuys andother ambassadors sought on the one hand to perceive acts and on the other toobstruct or influence their perception and transmission.21

Dissimulation was also used by agents o empire in the Habsburgs ar-flungcolonies, and Bethany Arams article shows how Spanish officials in CentralAmerica exploited the many possibilities o misinormation that naturallyarose 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 ModernEurope(New York: Basic Books, 2002).

18 Matthew Romaniello, Te Faade o Order: Claiming Imperial Space in EarlyModern Russia, 197.

19 Ibid., 200.20 Richard Lundell, Renaissance Diplomacy and the Limits o Empire: Eustace

Chapuys, Habsburg Imperialisms, and Dissimulation as Method, 206.21 Ibid., 206.



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a report. Aram draws on Parkers work on the tyranny o distance, an empiresEnemy Number One, and details the precise times it took or dispatches to reachthe colonies and or reports to make it back, pointing out that travel time was not

the only problem: bureaucracy also slowed communication, as scribes and clerksstruggled to cope with an avalanche o paperwork. What is most intriguingabout Arams piece, however, is her demonstration that Spanish leaders inthe colonies exploited the productive and pernicious fictions acilitating conquest.22Strategic or opportunistic misinormation gave local authoritiescover to disregard or delay the enorcement o royal decrees. Tey also spanlocally gathered intelligence into narratives that helped them achieve their ends,or example exaggerating rumors o gold and silver mines (the El Dorado effect).

In this way, local authorities legitimated the expansion o their own privilegesand prerogatives.23

Distance rom the metropole was not a problem just or the Habsburgs,o course. Pam McVay explores the problem in the Dutch Empire in hercomparison o two colonies on opposite sides o the globe: one in Indonesiaand one in todays New York State. Her main ocus is the practice o brawling,but she is interested in how the administrators o empire tried to control thebrawlers. Tese ordinary (and ofen drunk) men were the main ace o empireto the indigenous peoples in both colonies. Administrators struggled to makethem behave themselves according to proper cultural standards.24Yet on theedge o empire, the small governing bodies and tiny legal bureaucracies hadscarcely enough resources to manage diplomatic and trade relations.25 Teyound it difficult to keep their employees and common citizens rom drinkingand fighting. Dutch imperial authorities used legal mechanisms to try to controltheir employees penchant or interpersonal violence, but they were not verysuccessul.

We have discussed lying as a tool o empire. Another tool was sex. Cristina

Beltrn argues that in the early modern world matrimonial politics were stillthe most effective instruments o [monarchies] political struggles. In thisshe ollows Parker, who devotes considerable attention to the phenomenon inhis work on Philip II, particularly in Grand Strategy. Beltrn points out thatmatrimonial dynasticism was a risky game to play because the contingencieso biology and diplomacy limited its effectiveness. For one thing, the very

22

Bethany Aram, Distance and Misinormation in the Conquest o America, 224.

23 Ibid., 228.24 Pamela McVay, Brawling Behaviors in the Dutch Colonial Empire: Changing

Norms o Fairness? 237.25 Ibid., 1.



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tools o this policy were the dynasts own personages, along with those otheir amily members.26 For another, the monarch seeking to make suchconnections had to navigate difficult diplomatic, religious, legal, and even

geographic waters; and, as Beltrn argues, the success and even the verypower o the Spanish monarchy made the work o marrying off the Spanishprincesses more difficult.27

Edward enace takes up the theme in his own exploration o Philip IIsmatrimonial dynasticism, which examines the myriad ways Philip tried topair his daughter with various eligible mates. Reerencing Parkers workon Philip II, he notes Philips messianic imperialism, which led him attimes to expect divine aid when none was orthcoming. Yet enace showsconvincingly that this messianic outlook did not keep the king rom making asort o Machiavellian dynasticism a priority in his relations with France. Temessianic vision helped drive Philips imperial ambitions, but it was combinedwith an at times hard realism: a divinely inspired realpolitik.28 Nonetheless,Philip ultimately ailed to achieve his ends, thwarted by biology, politics, anddeath. Tese articles, disparate in topic and approach, share an underlyingperspective: empire, being one o the most important and enduring types opolitical structure in human history, deserves to be studied on its own terms,with as ew value judgments as possible.

For hal a century it has been considered in rather bad taste, at least withinthe academy, to ocus on the rulers o empires and the decisions they triedto make, on the grounds that such a perspective is a hallmark o traditionalhistoriographys ocus on dead white men. Tis view started during the socialhistorical turn o the 1960s and 1970s and continued through the rise opostmodern studies in the 1980s and 1990s. A history PhD student couldexpect to build a better career by writing a dissertation on orientalism orcolonial discourse than on the diplomacy o Charles V or Philip II. Tis is

beginning to change. In the past decade, as American and British interventionsoverseas have thrust the discussion o empire onto editorial pages, scholarswithin the academy are becoming more willing to examine imperial structureson their own terms.

Indeed, today the study o empire is in productive erment, with aprolieration o new scholarship that adopts more supple understandings o

26

Cristina Borreguero Beltrn, Isabel Clara Eugenia: Daughter o the SpanishEmpire, 257.27 Ibid., 259.28 Edward Shannon enace, Messianic Imperialism or raditional Dynasticism? Te

Grand Strategy o Philip II and the Spanish Failure in the Wars o the 1590s, 282.



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empires as they actually unctioned. Rigid conceptions o colonizercolonizedare being increasingly replaced by conceptions o complex interplays betweencoalitions o rulers and ruled because it has become clear that empires simply

could not exist without the at least partial consent o their imperial subjects, orat least significant groups o those subjects. Tis was as true o the British Raj asit was o Imperial China or Imperial Russia.

A mark o these changing attitudes is that the term empire itsel isbeing more widely used. It used to be reserved primarily or western powersor states that looked like western states, such as Ottoman, Chinese, andMughal structures. But now historians apply the term in contexts onemight never have guessed it could be used.29 In 2009, the Bancrof Prize in

American History went to Pekka Hmlinens bookTe Comanche Empire

,which treats the Comanche Indians o North America as a powerul empirethat eclipsed European rivals.30 As David Cannadine has recently quipped,historians are starting to realize that empire might not necessarily be whollyand intrinsically and irredeemably bad.31

Geoffrey Parker, o course, knew this beore it was ashionable. He is a an osocial history, deeply influenced by the Braudelian Revolution, but he has never beencomortable with the Braudelian view o human actions as immaterial to history,as roth on the surace o the sea. So although his work has always acknowledgedthe deep orcesenvironmental, cultural, economic, and technologicalthatunderlie human history, he has also always kept in mind that history is composedo humans whose actions are ofen crucial to the outcome o events. We shouldocus on the poor, the disadvantaged, the marginalized, o course; but we cannotignore the powerul, particularly kings and queens and generals. He has passed onthat perspective to his students and mentees.

Tus the essays in this book keep a firm ocus on human beings, great andlowly: the king reading memorials late into the night; the diplomat orging a

letter; the royal ather conniving to marry his daughter; the clerk struggling tokeep up with an avalanche o paperwork. And, on the other side o the imperialequation, those who resisted empire or insisted on accommodating it on theirown terms: Mennonites who struggled to remain true to ideals o nonviolenceeven as they invested in overseas imperialism; settlers who drank and ought and

29 Some scholars preer alternate terms. See, or example, Ann Stoler, ImperialFormations (Santa Fe: School or Advanced Research Press, 2007).

30

Pekka Hmlinen, Te Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press,2009).31 David Cannadine, Big ent historiography: ransatlantic obstacles and

opportunities in writing the history o empire, Common Knowledge 11, no 2 (2005): 37592, quote at 388.


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settled their differences in their own way in the colonies; nomads who sought toevade imperial restrictions on travel; priests who wrote incendiary sermons; andbishops who disobeyed royal orders. Te result o all this ocus on human action

is a picture o empires as contingent, evolving, constantly changing structures,perpetually running up against limits and trying out new strategies.Te human actor is a central act o empires, and ocusing on it helps keep us

aware o how dynamic empires were, even as it makes us aware o how misleadingappearances can be. Powerul, dynamic, and growing empireslike thoseo Spain, Britain, or Russiacould conceal great weaknesses and were moreprecarious than they appeared on surace. Similarly, empires that seemed weakor cobbled togethersuch as the Spanish Empire in the eighteenth centuryor the combined crowns o Poland-Lithuaniaofen displayed remarkableflexibility, persistence, and adaptability. Te case o early modern Japan,which Parker ocuses on in his upcoming book about the global crisis, is a keyexample. What once looked like economic weaknessanemic growth, a lowerrate o population increase, etc.turns out in retrospect to have been a systemthat presciently managed a complex society with an awareness o ecologicallimits. Perhaps the uture will look more like early modern Japan than like theprecipitously growing societies and economies o modernity.

But perhaps the deepest lesson o this book and, indeed, o Parkers work ingeneral, is that things can shif quickly. Te best-laid plans o the most powerulrulers have a tendency to go wrong. Success is never final. Te world can changein the blink o an eye.

Tats something we should keep in mind.

Documents

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