An outstanding volume of non-Eurocentric historical-sociological essays that

advances an extremely powerful critique of the English School’s commitment

to what I call the ‘Eurocentric big bang theory of world politics’ – that the big
bang of modernity exploded autonomously within Europe and that thereafter
European ‘civilization’ expanded outwards in a non-problematic way to
remake the world in its own image – by deploying the antidote of bringing
Eastern agency back into the story of the long-term development of world
politics.
John M. Hobson, Professor of Politics and International Relations,
University of Sheffield, UK

Perhaps ‘1648 and all that’ fundamentally distorts our understanding of the
history of international relations. By rediscovering early modern and non-
western international orders, this expert team sets out a challenge to IR
scholarship. It is especially welcome and important in making sense of the
profound changes currently underway.
Ian Clark, E. H. Carr Professor of International Politics,
Aberystwyth University

Maps centered on the South Pole are amusing, but international relations
books centered on the non-Western world are essential. From its origins,
international relations theory has been a Western enterprise with other parts
of the world largely ignored or analyzed through parochial and often inap-
propriate conceptions. Suzuki, Zhang, Quirk and their collaborators turn the
tables and offer perspectives on Europe from East Asia, the Middle East, Africa
and Latin America, and generally at a time when European interlopers were
unable to impose their preferences on these cultures. They effectively demon-
strate the importance of non-Western cultures and their ideas in shaping
global history
Richard Ned Lebow, Professor of International Political Theory,
King’s College London, UK
This page intentionally left blank
International Orders in the
Early Modern World

This book examines the historical interactions of the West and the non-Western
world, and investigates whether or not the exclusive adoption of Western-
oriented ‘international norms’ is the prerequisite for the construction of stable
and enduring international orders.
This book sets out to challenge the Eurocentric foundations of modern
International Relations scholarship by examining international relations in
the early modern era, when European primacy had yet to develop in many
parts of the globe. Through a series of regional case studies on East Asia, the
Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Russia written by leading specialists
of their field, this book explores various historical patterns of cross-cultural
exchange and civilizational encounters. The chapters of this book document
and analyse a series of regional international orders that were primarily
defined by local interests, agendas and institutions, with European interlopers
often playing a secondary role. These perspectives emphasize the central role
of non-European agency in shaping global history, and stand in stark contrast
to conventional narratives revolving around the ‘Rise of the West’, which tend
to be based upon a stylized contrast between a dynamic ‘West’ and a passive
and static ‘East’.
Focusing on a crucial period of global history that has been neglected in
the field of International Relations, International Orders in the Early Modern
World will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations,
international relations theory, international history, early modern history and
sociology.

Shogo Suzuki is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the

University of Manchester, UK.

Yongjin Zhang is Professor of International Politics at the University of

Bristol, UK.

Joel Quirk is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the

University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
The New International Relations
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Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway and Jutta Weldes, University
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The Logic of Internationalism International Relations, Political

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States of Political Discourse Fear, migration and asylum
Words, regimes, seditions in the EU
Costas M. Constantinou Jef Huysmans

The Politics of Regional Identity State Sovereignty and Intervention

Meddling with the Mediterranean A discourse analysis of
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Reforging the link to foreign policy- Helle Malmvig
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Symbolic power and the politics of
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Between globalization and Michael Williams
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Edited by Ulf Engel and Hegemony & History
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Territorial Conflicts in World The Puzzle of Politics
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conflict studies Friedrich Kratochwil
Edited by Stephan Stetter
The Conduct of Inquiry in
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Global studies in an interconnected
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Social Power in International
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NATO’s Security Discourse after the European Integration and
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Representing the West The EU overseas countries and
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Edited by Rebecca Adler-Nissen and
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Bourdieu in International Relations Justice, Order and Anarchy

Rethinking key concepts in IR The international political theory of
Edited by Rebecca Adler-Nissen Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Alex Prichard
Making Sense, Making Worlds
Constructivism in social War in International Society
theory and international Lacy Pejcinovic
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Responsibility in International
World of Our Making Society
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Edited by Michael J. Struett, International Orders in the Early
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Edited by Shogo Suzuki, Yongjin
Zhang and Joel Quirk
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International Orders in the Early
Modern World
Before the rise of the West

Edited by Shogo Suzuki, Yongjin Zhang

and Joel Quirk
First published 2014
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Shogo Suzuki, Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk for selection and
editorial matter; individual contributors their contribution.
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Typeset in Times New Roman
by Taylor & Francis Books
‘Nobody forgets a good teacher.’
This book is dedicated to our teachers who inspired our interest in
social sciences:
Keith Hodgson (UK)
Ichikawa Shigeo (Japan)
Iijima Eiichi (Japan)
Benedict Kingsbury (New Zealand/US)
Alaistair Leonard (Australia)
Adam Roberts (UK)
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of contributors xv
Preface xvii
Acknowledgements xix

Introduction: the rest and the rise of the West 1

SHOGO SUZUKI, YONGJIN ZHANG AND JOEL QUIRK

1 Europeans and the steppe: Russian lands under the Mongol rule 12
IVER B. NEUMANN

2 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana, 1453–1774 34

AYLA GÖL

3 Curious and exotic encounters: Europeans as supplicants in the

Chinese Imperium, 1513–1793 55
YONGJIN ZHANG

4 Europe at the periphery of the Japanese world order 76

SHOGO SUZUKI

5 A corrupt international society: how Britain was duped into its first
Indian conquest 94
DARSHAN VIGNESWARAN

6 International relations in the Americas during the long eighteenth

century, 1663–1820 118
CHARLES JONES

7 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world, 1450–1850 138

JOEL QUIRK AND DAVID RICHARDSON
xiv Contents
8 Conclusion: Eurocentrism, world history, meta-narratives and the
meeting of international societies 159
RICHARD LITTLE

Bibliography 181
Index 206
Contributors

Ayla Göl is Senior Lecturer at the Department of International Politics,

Aberystwyth University. She was the inaugural John Vincent Visiting
Fellow at the Department of International Relations, Research School of
Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University in 2002, and a
visiting scholar at the Centre for Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge
in 2009. Dr Göl has published in leading journals such as Nations and
Nationalism, Third World Quarterly, and Critical Studies on Terrorism,
and is the author of Turkey Facing East: Islam, Modernity and Foreign
Policy, which is forthcoming with Manchester University Press.
Charles Jones is Emeritus Reader in International Relations and Director of
the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. His
leading research interests have been the modern history of Argentina,
international business history, the history of thought about war and trade,
and military ethics, especially as expressed in literature and film. Leading
publications include More Than Just War (2013), American Civilization
(2007), E.H. Carr and International Relations (1998), International Business
in the Nineteenth Century (1987), and The North-South Dialogue: A Brief
History (1983).
Richard Little is Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol. He is a
former editor of the Review of International Studies and former chair of the
British International Studies Association. He is the author of Intervention:
External Involvement in Civil Wars (1975), Global Problems and World
Order (with R.D. McKinlay, 1986), The Logic of Anarchy (with B. Buzan
and C.A. Jones, 1993), International Systems in World History (with B.
Buzan, 2000), and The Balance of Power in International Relations (2007).
He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Iver B. Neumann is Montague Burton Professor in International Relations at the
London School of Economics, but wrote this chapter when he was Director
of Research at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI).
He has written two books on Russian–European relations, and is presently
working on a duograph about the Eurasian Steppe with Einar Wigen.
xvi Contributors
Joel Quirk is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies, Uni-
versity of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is the author of Unfinished
Business: A Comparative Survey of Historical and Contemporary Slavery
(2009), and The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human
Trafficking (2011). His work has also recently been published in Human
Rights Quarterly, Review of International Studies and Social & Legal
Studies, amongst others. Dr Quirk also serves as a Rapporteur to the
International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project.
David Richardson is Professor of Economic History and former founder and
Director (2004–12) of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and
Emancipation, University of Hull. He was co-author with David Eltis of
the prize-winning Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010).
Shogo Suzuki is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics, University of
Manchester. He is the author of Civilization and Empire: China and
Japan’s Encounter with European International Society (2009), as well as
several articles on International Relations theory and East Asian foreign
policy that have appeared in European Journal of International Relations,
The Pacific Review, Pacific Affairs and Third World Quarterly.
Darshan Vigneswaran is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Urban Studies
and Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam. He is also
a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society,
University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has authored Territory,
Migration and the Evolution of the International System (2013), co-edited
Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage in Africa (2013), and published
articles in journals including Political Geography, Review of International
Studies and Policing & Society.
Yongjin Zhang is Professor of International Politics at the School of Sociol-
ogy, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. He has pub-
lished widely on topics ranging from International Relations theory to
Chinese history, politics, economic transformation and international rela-
tions. He is the author of several books, including China in International
Society since 1949 (1998), and China’s Emerging Global Businesses (2003),
and his articles have appeared in Review of International Studies, European
Journal of International Relations and Journal of Contemporary China.
Preface

This volume contributes to the burgeoning literature challenging the Euro-centric

and ahistorical character of contemporary International Relations (IR) as a
discipline. It explores international relations in the early modern era, before
the rise of Western dominance in many parts of the world, examining ‘patterns
of cross-cultural exchange and civilizational encounters’ among ‘the rest’ and
between Europe and ‘the rest’ (even this terminology highlights the extent of
the problem!). Through a series of case studies in East Asia, the Middle East,
Africa, Latin America and Russia, the empirical chapters demonstrate the
importance of non-European agency in the development of global history as
they decentre the Europe of the Wesphalian myth.
More specifically, the volume shows that, and how, in many cases the non-
European world set the terms of engagement between different regions,
including Europe, such that various regional international orders were con-
structed in significantly different ways. It also highlights how European elites
often found it difficult to impose their preferred forms of engagement on their
counterparts elsewhere. The book thus documents and analyses a variety of
regional international orders primarily defined by local interests, agendas and
institutions, with European ‘interlopers’ often playing a lesser role.
This corrective to contemporary IR is urgently needed, not the least
because in this Eurocentric and ahistorical form, IR is poorly equipped to
understand and to theorize both the (purported) decline of the West and the
rise of non-European parts of the world, such as China. As the editors argue,
theories such as the English School and constructivism, while challenging the
neo-neo theories in important ways, have continued to reproduce the Western
meta-narratives about the fundamentally European nature of international
relations and the fundamentally European nature of central IR concepts,
including sovereignty, modernity and development.
The central problematique of the volume is thus the dualism of ‘the West
and the rest’ in the current discourse on the emerging global order. As the
editors argue in their Introduction, the ‘belief that the rise of the non-West is
a novel event, thus an unknown quality in the history of the evolution of the
international system is … highly problematic for two main reasons.’ First, as
they note, it is historically inaccurate: for most of human history, peoples
xviii Preface
geographically in Europe have shared the global stage with powerful actors
from other continents. Second, the Westphalian myth constructs Europe as the
‘norm’, as if global history only begins when the West imposes its dominance
over ‘the rest’ and can dictate the forms of engagement between them. This,
as this volume convincingly shows, ‘is clearly false’.
Jutta Weldes
Series Co-editor
Acknowledgements

Like many collaborative projects, the idea for this book first emerged during
an international conference. It has taken some time (as is the case for many
projects that owe their origins to bar conversations!) to get the project moving
and steer it to completion, but this would not have been possible without the
help of many individuals and institutions, and it is our pleasure to be able to
thank them here. First and foremost, we thank all our contributors, who gave
much of their time to answer our editorial queries and respond to our
requests for revisions: your patience has been much appreciated. Earlier drafts
of these chapters were presented at the Annual Conventions of the Interna-
tional Studies Association and at a writers’ workshop at the University of
Bristol. We are grateful for all participants who gave valuable feedback and
suggestions. We would like to acknowledge the generous financial support
provided by the Vice-Chancellor’s Development Fund of the University of
Bristol with the workshop. We are also indebted to Routledge, particularly
Alexander Quayle, for his patience and good humour. As always, we thank
our friends and family, particularly Hirono Miwa, Jiang Yang, Kitamura Aki-
hiko, Arthur Mühlen-Schulte, Len Seabrooke, Stacey Sommerdyk, Jan Sturm,
Catherine and Toshiaki Suzuki, Eleni Tsingou, Wan Shanping, and Duncan
and Angela Wigan, who provided us with friendship, laughter and support.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to our teachers from all over
the world. Now that we have become teachers ourselves, their dedication to
education and ability to inspire their students has made them even more
important role models to us. It is in this spirit that we dedicate this book to
our teachers who first sparked off our interest in social science and helped us
– even though they may not have been aware of it at the time – become who
we are today.
Shogo Suzuki, Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk
Copenhagen, Bristol and Johannesburg
On Chinese New Year, 2013
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
The rest and the rise of the West
Shogo Suzuki, Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk

This book sets out to challenge the Eurocentric foundations of modern

International Relations (IR) scholarship by examining international relations
in the early modern era, when European primacy had yet to develop in many
parts of the globe. Through a series of regional case studies on East Asia, the
Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Russia, this book explores patterns
of cross-cultural exchange and civilizational encounters, placing particular
emphasis upon historical contexts when ‘the rest’ often set the terms of
engagement and encounter with the West and where European elites found it
difficult to impose their preferred modes of interaction upon their counter-
parts in other continents. The chapters of this book document and analyse a
series of regional international orders that were primarily defined by local
interests, agendas and institutions, with European interlopers often playing a
secondary role.
These perspectives emphasize the central role of non-European agency in
shaping global history, and stand in stark contrast to conventional narratives
revolving around the ‘Rise of the West’, which tend to be based upon a sty-
lized contrast between a dynamic West and a passive and static East (the
rest). By focusing on a crucial period of global history that has been neglected
in the field of International Relations, the book reveals profound differences
between the early modern era and the more familiar colonial conquests of the
second half of the nineteenth century. Its fresh focus on cross-cultural
exchanges and cross-civilizational interactions in contexts of relative European
weakness has important implications for understanding and exploring possi-
bilities for interactions between diverse civilizations today. The central pro-
blematique of this book is the dualism of the West vis-à-vis ‘the rest’ in the
current discourse on the emerging global order.

The West vis-à-vis the rest as a problematique

For too long, International Relations scholars have taken as unproblematic
1500 and 1648 as two ‘orthodox benchmark dates’ in the studies of the his-
tory of world politics (Buzan and Lawson 2012b). Columbus’s discovery of
the Americas in 1492 and Vasco da Gama’s landing on Culicut in 1498 have
2 Shogo Suzuki, Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk
been conventionally taken as the beginning of the European expansion to
conquer the non-European world. The peace of Westphalia, on the other
hand, has been frequently associated with the origin of the ‘international’, the
modern system of states, and the sovereign order in world politics. Taken
together, it is often claimed, these two watershed dates mark the beginning of
the era of European dominance of the world, political, military and eco-
nomic, which gave the material, institutional, normative shape and the con-
stitutional foundation to contemporary international society (Bull and
Watson 1984a; Watson 1992; Philpott 2001). In both teaching and research in
IR, the construction of an essentialized historical narrative of half a millen-
nium of Western dominance underlined by European power is for good
reason generally accepted and even celebrated, rather than critically reflected
upon and interrogated. As Buzan and Little (2000: 241) note, ‘Implicitly
nearly all [IR] theorizing is based on the world after AD 1500 and especially
after 1648’. Pervasive in the existing IR scholarship is unsurprisingly the
dualistic conception, either explicit or implicit, of the West vis-à-vis ‘the rest’
in the global power and normative hierarchy as a dominant dynamic in
international relations. Emblematic of such Eurocentric conceptions of global
politics in its contemporary manifestation is Samuel Huntington’s (1993,
1996) claim of the clash of civilizations.
The so-called Westphalian myth and the associated narratives have been
under sustained and relentless assault in the recent production of IR scholar-
ship (Spruyt 1994; Osiander 2001; Teschke 2003; Hobson 2010; Kayaoglu
2010; de Carvalho et al. 2011). It is the discourse of global power shift,
however, that has done much to begin to unravel, perhaps unwittingly, the
essentialized grand historical narrative of Western dominance since 1500. The
hubris of power exemplified by the unipolar moment is followed by its intel-
lectual nemesis: the claim of the terminal decline of the American power, and
more broadly of the West (Mahbubani 2008; Jacques 2009; Kennedy 2010;
Rachman 2011; Layne 2012). The anxieties of the present, i.e. the shift of
both power and wealth from the West to the non-West in the twenty-first
century, which claims to have spelt the end of much acclaimed Pax Amer-
icana and Western dominance, have returned history to the imagination of the
international. Niall Ferguson’s (2011) claim of the Great Reconvergence of
the West and the rest after hundreds of years of the Great Divergence, Ian
Morris’s (2010) penetrating question why the West rules for now, and Charles
Kupchan’s (2012) contention of a new global turn leading to no one’s world
all try to historicize the rise of the West on a global scale and in a very deep
historical perspective from 500 years to 1,500 years. The lens of the longue
durée in world history has been productively employed to shed new light on
the rise the West in order to understand its allegedly irrevocable fall. Such
historicization may not necessarily resonate with other critiques of Euro-
centrism in world history and IR. However, it helps to reinforce some earlier
but marginalized efforts at problematizing the Eurocentric reading of history
in articulating the regional and the global in the making of modern world
 Introduction 3
politics and global economy. In this instance, one could look meaningfully at
how China, through export trade, functioned as the ‘ultimate sink’ of the
world’s silver (Frank 1998: 127), which ‘sucked the Europeans into directly
joining the global economy’ (Hobson 2009: 681) in conjunction with Takeshi
Hamashita’s (2008) study of Asia’s domination of the global circulation of
silver in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. One could point to statistics
provided by Angus Maddison (2007a, 2007b) to interrogate the claim of
European dominance in the global economy before the nineteenth century
and to substantiate the contention that ‘East Asia remained in the forefront
of world development’ in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (Arrighi et
al. 2003: 3).
If history is indeed moving on, a subterranean Eurocentrism/European
exceptionalism still dies hard. The seemingly perpetual dualism of the West
vis-à-vis the rest is obdurately entrenched in both academic literature and
popular discourse from G. John Ikenberry’s (2008) speculation on the rise of
China and the future of the West, to Fareed Zakaria’s (2009) envisioning of a
post-American world with the rise of the rest, and from Niall Ferguson’s
(2011) claim of the Great Reconvergence of the West and the rest, to Charles
Kupchan’s (2012) conjecture of the coming global turn. The West continues to
be associated with progressive agency, rationality, order and sources of (uni-
versal) values and norms that constitute and sustain the global liberal order,
whereas the rest, the caricatured non-West, continues to be cast as the mirror
image of the West with regressive properties and at the receiving end of the
benefits of Western civilization. Robert Kagan (2008) reinvented this dualism
as the axis of democracy (the West) vis-à-vis the association of autocrats (the
non-West). History has returned in the aftermath of unipolarity, with, in his
words, ‘the old competition between liberalism and autocracy has also re-
emerged, with the world’s great powers increasingly lining up according to the
nature of their regimes’ (Kagan 2008: 4). The clash of civilizations, in various
incarnations, casts a long shadow.
In this way, the discourse of global power shift harks back to political and
intellectual debates over the last two decades on issues of culture, religion and
the ‘clash of civilizations’. These issues often have unsettling implications for
a privileged minority in the West, reflecting widespread unease surrounding
the increasing profile of radical Islam, unwelcome migrants, and the rapid
and potentially ‘destabilizing’ growth of Asian powers such as India and
China. One of the main points at issue here has been the extent to which
different cultural and religious groupings can sustain stable, respectful and
peaceful relationships. This contentious topic has both domestic and interna-
tional dimensions, with the former revolving around concerns about social
cohesion and cultural recognition, and the latter revolving around concerns
about the operation and organization of a global international order popu-
lated by many cultural communities. This frequently translates into a suspi-
cion of the political agency of non-Western peoples and anxieties and concern
about the possibility that a fragile yet longstanding and highly valuable
4 Shogo Suzuki, Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk
international order would be potentially imperilled by the increasing auton-
omy and influence of political actors who lack a solid grounding in the mores
of European civilization. In such light, the rise of the rest cannot be but
inherently frightening and potentially destabilizing.
The belief that the rise of the non-West is a novel event, thus an unknown quality
in the history of the evolution of the international system is, however, highly
problematic for two main reasons. First, it is historically inaccurate. The much-
touted emergence of a plural international order where non-European peoples
have acquired greater political power, influence and agency is simply a reversion
to a longstanding pattern. For the vast majority of human history, peoples in
Europe shared a global stage with powerful actors of various stripes. Until the
mid-nineteenth century, powerful empires in the Middle East, the Indian
subcontinent and East Asia were consistently at the forefront of human civi-
lization. While peoples in Europe regularly made important contributions, most
major centres of cultural, technological and political excellence were located
in other regions of the globe. Before the nineteenth century, ‘the European
system of states was a chaotic and peripheral component of a global economy
that had long been centred on Asia’ (Arrighi et al. 2003: 259). That is to say
that in deep world historical perspective, the dominance of the non-West was
in fact the norm. In this light, the global domination of the West in the last
two centuries, particularly since the age of high imperialism, is perhaps more
appropriate to be seen as an ‘aberration’ in world history (Mahbubani 2008).
Second, treating Western dominance as the historical ‘norm’ betrays a
profoundly Eurocentric interpretation of world history, as if international
history only began once the Western world was able to impose its dominance over
the non-European world and to dictate the terms of interaction with the
latter, a process that is frequently assumed to begin after the discovery of the
‘New World’ in 1492. This is clearly false. As will be examined in chapters in
this book, Europeans often had been in contact with non-European political
and economic actors much earlier, and their dealings with Asians or Africans after
1492 were often dictated and negotiated on the basis of European weaknesses
and limitations. By relegating this particular period of history to the periph-
ery, conventional narratives continue to deny ‘Eastern’ agency in the making
of world history by purposely consigning non-Western peoples to passive,
reactive and subordinate positions. The effectively seals off a significant part
of the world from the analysis of international history, and contributes to
dubious assumptions about how international relations can only be mean-
ingfully conceptualized and conducted within the framework of European
political institutions.

Silence and bias in the English School and constructivism

Theories of IR that emphasize the importance of historical context are cur-
iously silent on historical periods and settings defined by non-European
dominance. While constructivist and English School approaches have been
 Introduction 5
interested in the historical development of international norms, their focus has
been almost exclusively on the global diffusion of social rules and norms that ori-
ginated from Europe, such as sovereignty, international law or liberal inter-
nationalism (e.g. Ruggie 1993; Philpott 2001; Bull and Watson 1984a; Gong
1984a, 1984b; Clark 2005). The context in which this process took place is of
course European strength, particularly during the height of European imperi-
alism from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Armed with the
exceptionalist belief that the white races of Europe were uniquely qualified to
spread the tidings of ‘civilization’, European states were able to impose their
own political institutions on other ‘barbarous’ or ‘savage’ peoples and polities.
The fact that cross-cultural relations prior to European ascendancy hardly fea-
ture in these analyses reveals a number of implicit beliefs. First, the fact that ‘inter-
national relations’ governed by shared norms is seen as taking place outside the
European world only after Western norms are imposed again highlights a deeply
Eurocentric belief that the only truly ‘international’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ norms that
can be shared among humankind are those that originate from the West. Second,
the fact that non-Europeans hardly play a role in the production of ‘international’
norms also assumes that non-Europeans are nothing but ‘norm-takers’. They exist
only as objects with very little agency waiting to be ‘socialized’ into norms ema-
nating from the West. Non-Western ideas and norms are thus systematically
ignored, and only feature ‘to illustrate their incompatibility [with] the Western
Westphalian ones that embodies political and religious tolerance’ (Kayaoglu 2010:
210), thus reconstructing a narrative of Western moral superiority.
Such a narrow understanding of world history is intimately linked to the
normative agendas of both English School and constructivist scholars. The
English School approach to IR emerged in the context of the Cold War and
the dominance of realism, which posited the existence of a timeless ‘anarchi-
cal’ international realm characterized by insecurity. Keen on discovering
possibilities for a more ‘moral’ international life under anarchy, scholars of
the English School embarked on an enquiry that traced back the development
of various institutions that emerged in intra-European relations which were
held to have eventually evolved into an ‘international society’. The fact that
this endeavour was intended not only to suggest but also prove the possibility
of a moral international life meant that international society was seen as
something inherently desirable, and as such constituted a felicitous achievement
of Western civilization (Wight 1966).
As such, the expansion of (European) international society almost axio-
matically became the key historical period that was worthy of examination.
Naturally, the notion that non-European actors were able to construct social
rules that could promote some form of coexistence between states did not
enter the minds of English School scholars. Indeed, in the English School’s
narrative of the historical evolution of international society there is little
scope for non-European actors to exercise any agency, as they are usually
depicted as passive recipients of European norms (called the ‘standard of
civilization’ in the late nineteenth century) (cf. Suzuki 2009). English School
6 Shogo Suzuki, Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk
scholars’ ‘firm confidence in the virtues of western civilization’ meant that when
non-European thought or input featured in their analysis, it was ‘accom-
panied by their fear that [Western civilization] may be undermined by other
civilizations (or barbarisms) inimical to its fundamental values’ (Suganami
2003: 264), rather than something that could potentially contribute to enhanced
order and stability in international politics. Some scholars such as Wight –
while never questioning the moral superiority of ‘Western values’ – did voice
their doubts over the possibility that an international society could emerge in the
absence of a common culture (Wight 1977: 33), but these concerns were again
swept aside in the English School scholars’ attempts to ‘prove’ that a truly
‘global’ international society had emerged. Thus, one of the most famous works
of the English School, The Expansion of International Society, is largely con-
cerned with the (decidedly seamless) acceptance of the ‘institutions’ of Eur-
opean international society by non-European states – namely international
law and European diplomatic institutions. This theme was echoed in Gerrit
W. Gong’s (1984a) The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society.
Similar traits are visible in Ian Clark’s (2005) Legitimacy in International
Society or Edward Keene’s (2002) Beyond the Anarchical Society. Both
authors display strong awareness and sensitivity towards the Eurocentric
biases in works by earlier generations of scholars, yet their analyses remain
firmly rooted in the history of Europe and its ‘rise’ to global dominance.
Keene makes a valuable contribution to the field by highlighting the coercive,
‘civilizing’ face of European international society, but focuses exclusively on
European intellectual debates and history, and does not feature the voices of
those at the receiving end of Europe’s mission civilisatrice. Similarly, Clark’s
work, which traces the evolution of the norms surrounding the issue of legit-
imate membership and conduct, is based almost exclusively on European
history. Kayaoglu (2010: 207) has critiqued this focus for effectively robbing
non-European polities of their agency. ‘[T]he only time these societies are
included in the narrative’, he states:

is to show how these non-Western societies violated the principle of

legitimacy and thus are denied membership in international society and
sanctioned by Western states … their contribution to the development of
international legitimacy is minimal and passive, serving as foil for the
core Western states that are the authors of the ‘Westphalian’ legitimacy.

Constructivists similarly share this shortcoming of allowing their normative

agendas to cloud their purported sensitivity to context and historicity. While a
sizeable number of constructivists continue to adhere to a stricter positivist
notion of social science, it is important to note that there has been a sig-
nificant strand of contructivist scholarship that has been strongly influenced
by Critical Theories of IR (Price and Reus-Smit 1998). In a somewhat similar
fashion to the emergence of the English School approach, Critical Theories of
IR appeared in the intellectual backdrop of normative discomfort towards
 Introduction 7
dominant IR theories for perpetuating fear and instability in international
politics through their uncritical reification of an ‘anarchical’ international
system. Critical scholars charged that existing positivist IR theories’ adher-
ence to ‘objective analysis’ merely analysed and reproduced the status quo, and
failed to forward alternative policies and concepts that would lead to more
emancipatory outcomes in international political life (Cox 1996). Thus, many
constructivist scholars have not only sought to demonstrate that ‘norms
matter’ in international politics, but also prove that moral progress, epitomized
by the global diffusion of liberal values, is also possible.
The resulting constructivist analysis of ‘international history’ is decidedly
Eurocentric, as it depicts the evolution of the international system as

the emergence of norms in Europe and then their subsequent diffusion to

non-European entities through state socialization. Essentially, interna-
tional norms like sovereignty, secularism, and human rights emerge from the
norm-generating European core, and then diffuse into the norm-receiving
non-European periphery.
(Kayaoglu 2010: 209)

Consequently, these perspectives assume ‘self-generating Western agency’ and

‘unwittingly [naturalize] Western civilization and [at worst] Western imperialism’
(Hobson 2007a: 93). This viewpoint is visible in the works of Risse, Ropp and
Sikkink (1999), who effectively conceptualize the liberal democratic world (domi-
nated by the West) as the ‘producers’ and ‘teachers’ of norms that shape other, less
progressive actors, into the desired liberal mould. Constructivist scholars’
implicit confidence in the progressive qualities of liberal internationalism and
its universality means that the spread of this ideology is effectively the only
way to conceptualize ‘moral progress’ in the international realm.
It thus comes as no surprise that both constructivists and English School
Scholars ignore the possibility that the history of interactions between Eur-
opeans and non-Europeans prior to Western domination may have generated
norms that promoted some form of shared morality between the two. Indeed,
in Daniel Philpott’s (2001) account, even decolonization – one of the key
developments that punctured European dominance and cultural superiority in
the international system – is traced back to European ideas and influences,
‘such as the education the colonial elite received in the metropoles or the fact
that the metropoles established the institutions and the principles of equality
that the Church had embraced’, and by using this Eurocentric framework
‘non-Western ideas and events in the creation of international society are
explained away’ (Kayaoglu 2010: 212). There is consequently little room for
‘theorizing cross-civilizational and cross-regional interdependencies’, and this
‘thwarts the accommodation of pluralism’ (Kayaoglu 2010: 195). Western
liberalism is seen as the ‘only game in town’, and if emancipation in the
international realm is to be achieved, the ‘rest’ must be homogenized into the
norms of the ‘West’ (Jahn 1998: 637–41).
8 Shogo Suzuki, Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk
Such Eurocentric interpretations of history have left IR curiously ill equip-
ped to theorize and understand international relations in a (purported) age of
Western decline. While it is argued that non-Western polities’ acceptance of
the sovereign state system constitutes empirical evidence of the internalization
and global diffusion of European-originated norms in international politics, it
is important to acknowledge that many non-European states accepted these
‘rules of the game’ at gunpoint, and could not exercise much choice over this
matter. We should avoid overestimating the degree to which many supposedly
‘global’ norms have attained legitimacy. If the rise of states such as China,
India or Brazil will, as it is often claimed, bring about a greater degree of
plurality in concepts of international order, then existing theories of IR based
on an historical narrative of European ascendance provide us with very few
insights as to how we should understand and theorise this new dynamic.

Plan of the book

The working premise of this book is that international orders have never been
as cohesive or culturally homogenous as the literature of IR would have us
believe, and that there has been a systematic and deeply problematic ‘forget-
ting’ and ‘remembering’ of cross-cultural interactions before the rise of the
West in the existing literature. We are interested, therefore, in how cross-
regional international orders were contested, conceded, compromised, medi-
ated and negotiated in an historical period when the rise of the West was an
historically novel event, and what these historical encounters between the rest
and the rising West might tell us about the practice of global pluralism in
world history. Analytically, our main historical focus is the period before the
rise of the West. This period can be loosely defined in terms of two historical
bookends: 1492 and 1793. The former refers to the discovery of the ‘New
World’, which ultimately paved the way for the emergence of a nascent global
order. The latter refers to the first British embassy to China in 1792–3, when
Lord Macartney famously refused to kowtow to the Chinese emperor. This
incident can be framed as a symbol of a much larger structural transforma-
tion, as the Chinese had long been at the vanguard of human civilization, but
were now finally being eclipsed by long-term developments within Europe. In
this context, 1792 is held to be emblematic of a larger historical trend, as it
sits between the gradual decline of the Mughal and Ottoman Empires during
the eighteenth century, and the subsequent European conquest of most parts
of Asia and Africa during the nineteenth century.
This period can be distinguished from the more familiar ‘high imperialism’
of the late nineteenth century in other important respects. In the sixteenth
century, even after Westphalia, the Atlantic remained the main area of com-
petitive struggles for rival European powers. European intellectuals expended
considerable energy discussing the conquest of the Americas. The key point at
issue was not whether conquest was feasible, but the extent to which it was
moral. These debates have been discussed in considerable depth (Keal 1995,
 Introduction 9
2003), but in such a way that they are effectively insulated from parallel events
in other parts of the world. There were, for example, no equivalent discus-
sions about the morality of conquering the Middle East, since the Ottoman
Empire was far stronger than any European power, or plausible combination
of powers. A somewhat similar pattern applies in other parts of the globe.
Although Europeans established trading relationships in northern and western
Africa, conquest was mainly limited to a small number of often tenuous
enclaves. In Asia, European envoys were regularly forced to operate within (or
around) indigenous models of political authority, as the Mughal and Chinese
Empires incorporated traders into existing suzerain systems. The Japanese
excluded Europeans for centuries, save a designated port for Dutch traders. In
some of these cases, it was indigenous elites who were politically ascendant,
and it was Europeans who appeared as supplicants. In other cases, a number
of European powers acquired a degree of political and economic significance,
yet still fell well short of political dominance. Framed in these terms, the
European conquest of the Americas constitutes one end of a political spectrum,
rather than a representative example of international order and cross-cultural
exchange between the rest and the rising West. ‘The millennial balance of the
ecumene among the civilizations of the Middle East, India, China, and
Europe’, in the words of William McNeill (1963: 653), ‘did not decisively
collapse until about the middle of the nineteenth century’.
Each chapter of this book surveys these issues through case studies of different
geographical areas. While they can be read à la carte, as independent works in
their own right, several common themes emerge. First, throughout the period
under examination, trade has performed a powerful role in bringing various
polities of often different cultural backgrounds together and aiding the emer-
gence of shared rules and norms (cf. Buzan 2004; Schouenborg 2013: 22–23).
This again serves to highlight the empirical (and theoretical) difficulty of
sustaining conventional English School scholars’ strict differentiation of an
‘international system’ and ‘international society’, as well as establishing the
precise point at which a ‘system’ is transformed into a ‘society’. Darshan
Vigneswaran’s chapter, for instance, shows that British expansion into India
was an incremental process, often motivated by desires for personal gain by
both British and Indian actors, rather than being motivated by the desire to
spread the trappings of ‘civilization’ or judging non-European rulers and
polities by the yardstick of ‘the standard of civilization’. A similar picture
emerges from the Japanese–Dutch case examined by Shogo Suzuki. In their
analysis of cross-cultural exchanges in Atlantic Africa, Joel Quirk and David
Richardson emphasize that mutual desires for socio-economic gain played a
powerful part in facilitating the transatlantic slave trade even before the age
of European ascendance. They depart from postcolonial perspectives largely
blaming the West for exploitation of African peoples, and highlight how
African rulers acted as autonomous actors in their dealings with Europeans
(in the somewhat negative sense that they were also culpable for the flourish-
ing of the slave trade across the Atlantic).
10 Shogo Suzuki, Yongjin Zhang and Joel Quirk
Second, the chapters mount a strong challenge to the assumption of a
‘Eurocentric endogenous logic of immanence through which Europe’s rise is
self-generated before it subsequently projects its global will-to-power in order
to remake the world in its own image’ (Hobson 2007a: 94). For a start, the
empirical findings of the chapters show that the Europeans were historically
far from the ‘dominant actors’ that they are often presumed to be, and that
there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about the rise of the West. Suzuki, Zhang, Göl,
and Quirk and Richardson all emphasize how Western actors had to work
within the socio-political limits imposed on them by the local political and
economic actors. In so doing, the authors successfully bring back non-Western
agency, which has been subject to much neglect in the field of IR. Further-
more, the chapters historicize and relativize the view of a monolithic, ideolo-
gically ‘pure’ Europe as a ‘norm-generating core’ from which ‘international
norms’ emanate. Zhang’s empirical findings, for instance, challenge the
assumption (often visible in previous English School works) that the adoption
of norms originating from European international society would help bring
about progress and stability in international politics. Zhang suggests that by
following Chinese norms of interaction, the Chinese and Europeans seem to
have managed a sustained and prolonged period of peaceful co-existence,
with only isolated instances of violent conflict between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries. This stands in sharp contrast to violence, conflict and war
between China and the European international society in the mid-nineteenth
century, when the latter imposed Westphalian institutions on East Asia by
force and coercion.
While not explicitly examining a case of non-European historical ascen-
dancy, Charles Jones provides a critique of the English School’s tendency to
see the expansion of European international society as a seamless process of
European norm diffusion. His case study, which draws on the case of Latin
America, paints a complex picture where the native populace, creoles and
European colonial rulers coexisted uneasily side by side. The result, he argues,
was not the simplistic ‘expansion of international society’, but the emergence
of an American international society, where short-term and sometimes ad hoc
agreements between the European descendants and the indigenous peoples
were the norm. By pointing to these historical complexities, Jones highlights
the ahistoricity of the English School (which is contrary to their self-proclaimed
sensitivity to history), which results from their belief that (European) norma-
tive hegemony is the only pathway to stability and order. Iver Neumann’s
chapter, meanwhile, demonstrates how the rise of Moscow was accompanied
by considerable hybridization of Russian and Mongol practices and culture.
The Russians actually took pride in seeing themselves as the descendants of
the Mongol rulers. He thus provides historical insights that suggest that so-
called ‘international norms/culture’ are in fact not always influenced by Wes-
tern civilization alone. Such findings also generate interesting implications for
thinking about the possibility for genuinely cross-cultural norms to emerge in
contemporary international society. Vigneswaran’s chapter suggests that
 Introduction 11
European actors (in this case the British) displayed very little interest in pro-
pagating their own norms. By so doing, Vigneswaran is able to paint a fasci-
nating picture of the ‘expansion of Europe’ that challenges the English
School’s notion of an almost seamless diffusion of European customs and
norms whenever the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’ come into contact with one another.
Revisiting this particular historical epoch when diverse political cultures
and contending ideas of domestic and international orders, East and West,
competed for recognition and dominance will not only correct a very lop-
sided, unilinear and myopic view of world history. By giving due considera-
tion to a variety of historical contexts where Europeans were unable to impose
their preferred models, all the chapters of this book provide far greater scope and
precision to our understanding of non-European agency and non-European
institutions, and thereby offer invaluable insights into the contentious rela-
tionship between cultural pluralism and international order. We want to
demonstrate that the cross-cultural relationships occurring during this period
were often far more elaborate than a ‘natural law’ framework would suggest,
and also typically involved extensive input from non-European political elites
with little or no knowledge of the vagaries of European intellectual history,
thus restoring non-European voices to their rightful place in international
history. In this way, critical interrogations of cross-cultural history contribute to
theorizing what Kayaoglu (2010: 195) calls ‘cross-civilizational and cross-regional
interdependencies’ in global international society today.
1 Europeans and the steppe
Russian lands under the Mongol rule
Iver B. Neumann

It was endemic on the medieval religious frontier not to admit consciously that
one had borrowed institutions from conquered or conquering peoples of a
different religion. This was true of Crusader Valencian 13th century Spain
about Islamic Moorish institutions, of the Arab Umayyad dynasty from the
7th century or the Ottoman Empire from the 14th century about Byzantine
institutions, and of the French Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem from the 12th
century about Islamic institutions.
(Halperin 2000: 238)

Introduction
The editors write in their introduction to this volume that it was only from
around 1750 onwards that European powers acquired sufficient capacities to
regularly dictate terms to political communities in many parts of the world. It took
that long to muster the capacity to project force across the distances in question.
In so far as relations with non-European political communities in Russia were
concerned, however, the turning point came 250 years before, in the final
decade of the fifteenth century. It was the decade when Russians threw off what
they in retrospect chose to name the ‘Tatar Yoke’. By 1750, Russia was only
decades away from annexing the Crimean Khanate, the last of the other suc-
cessor polities of what has anachronistically been called the Golden Horde, but
that was known at the time as the Khipchak Khanate (Halperin 2000; Morgan
1986: 141).1
The annexation followed a victorious Russian war against the Ottoman Empire.
At the end of the period covered by this book (1492–1792), then, Russia’s rela-
tions with non-European polities such as the Ottoman Empire and Persia, not
to mention relations with indigenous peoples throughout Siberia, mirrored the
hierarchical relations between European and non-European polities discussed
in the other chapters. At the beginning of the period, however, Russia was
emerging from a clearly subaltern relationship with a non-European polity,
namely the Khipchak Khanate, to which Russian cities were suzerain.
 Europeans and the steppe 13
Taking its cue from the editors pointing out that the past was not culturally
homogeneous, the first part of this chapter is a reminder of the importance of
the steppe not only to Russian history, but also to European history at large.
The Khipchak Khanate was the polity – the empire, really (Nexon and
Wright 2007) – to last the longest of those that came out of the great Mongol
empire that ruled most of the known world in the mid-thirteenth century. The
Mongol empire was one – it turns out to be the last one – of a succession of
polities that, beginning at the end of the third century BC, began its life cycle
in the Altai in the extreme north-east of the Eurasian continent, only to absorb a
number of other Mongol and Turkic nomadic elements. These were to be
found throughout the steppe, which stretched from the Pacific in the south to
the forested areas at the Dnepr in the west, and was delineated by the taiga in
the north and by sedentary cultures to the south (principally China, Persia
and various iterations of the Roman empire) (Barfield 1989).
The second part of the chapter focuses on how Russian cities experienced
being part of a Mongol polity, and the third part on how the consequent
hybridization fed into Russia’s entry into international society. The theme of this
chapter, then, is the experience by a specific sub-set of Christians (we cannot
in good faith call them Europeans, because this was a concept that was in use
briefly during Charlemagne’s reign and did not pop up again until the first half
of the fifteenth century) of being dominated by ‘non-Europeans’, and how
this experience was, in the period of key interest to this volume (1492–1792),
somehow seen as contaminating by other Europeans.
Note that, as seen from the Khipchak Khanate, the key point of interest was
not Russia or Europe, but first the Mongol imperial centre at Karakorum,
and when the centre lost its hold towards the end of the thirteenth century,
another of the Mongol empire’s successor states, namely the Il-khan empire to
their south-east, with which it quarrelled continuously about tribute taking in
and trade routes through the Caucasus (of which more below). Mongols were past
masters of many things, one of them being to provincialize the Russian lands.
Western historiography has, nonetheless, insisted on treating what happened
in these parts, at this time, from a Slav, sedentary point of view only. We may
see this already in the name given to the polity, which is ‘the Golden Horde’.
That was how Russian speakers, a subaltern part of the polity, referred to it.
The narratives about ‘the Golden Horde’ are predicated on ‘the notion that
the West properly deserves to occupy the centre stage of progressive world
history, both past and present’ (Hobson 2004: 2). The concept for such a
stance is Eurocentrism. The point has often been made that Russian histor-
iography has tried to bury the length and intensity of Mongol control over
Russian lands. European historiography has been little different.

The Mongols
The size of the Mongol population at the time of Chinggis Khan has been
estimated at 700,000 (Allsen 1987: 5). Although the Mongol made eminent
14 Iver B. Neumann
use of heavy wooden saddles and composite bows, their key advantage in warfare
was their strategy. The Mongols emphasized protracted training, advance
planning, multi-strand coordination and tight discipline. Alone at the time, they
concentrated their thinking not on the single combatant or on a small group
of soldiers, but on the tümen (Russian: t’ma), a unit ideally composed of ten thou-
sand men. It was officially recognized that actual tümen would be undermanned,
for an ‘upper tümen’ was stipulated as having a minimum of 7,000 troops, a
middle 5,000, and a lower only 3,000 (Allsen 1987: 193). The land needed to
man a tümen was also used by the Mongols as the basic administrative unit.
In Europe, Mongols are sometimes (and in Russia, always) referred to as
Tatars. We do not quite know why this is so. According to Matthew Paris, a
contemporary who wrote interestingly about how Europeans reacted to
Mongols, it was the French King Louis XI who punned that the Mongols,
who had almost exterminated a neighbouring tribe called the Tartars, emanated
from hell (Lat. Tartarus), hence Tatars (Morgan 1986: 57).
The key models on which Chinggis Khan organized his Mongol (or Tatar)
empire were those of the Uigurs and the Khitans. The Uigurs, a neighbouring
people who were first to be enrolled in the burgeoning empire, were a nomadic-
turned-sedentary people who had considerable experience in ruling sedentary
populations and cities. The Mongols borrowed their alphabet (and used it until
about a century ago), their way of setting up a chancery and the concept of scribes.
The Khitans were a semi-nomadic Turko-Mongolian people who had con-
quered the Chinese in the ninth century, established the Liao dynasty, been
displaced, and returned as a key steppe force of the twelfth century. The
Khitans, who were brought into the Mongol fold in 1218, had administered a
loose and non-confessional steppe empire based on tribute extracted by decimally
organized cavalry (Morgan 1986: 49).2 For this, they had used intermediaries,
and these are the direct predecessors of the darugha used by the Mongols, the
Turkish concept for which is basqaq (Morgan 1986: 109). The Mongol inter-
mediaries who ran the Khipchak Khanate in Russia in the early decades were
locally known as the basqaqi.
The Mongols themselves were almost uniformly illiterate, but they kept
written records, which were usually penned by personnel taken from con-
quered peoples. Except for their famous ‘Secret History’, though, there is very
little by way of Mongol historiography. For obvious reasons, the sedentary
peoples whom they conquered have tended to treat them as the Other and
give them bad press. Throughout the first half of the thirteenth century,
Mongols had a very clear and explicit sense of self. They also had a political
ideology, complete with scrupulous rules for how to deal with other political
entities.3 The key idea was that of a heavenly mandate. Knowing that all the
steppe empires from the Xiongnu (Huns) in the second century BC onwards
had adhered to the same principle of legitimacy, and given that the Xiongnu
evolved it concurrently with Chinese imperial ideology (Barfield 1989; de
Rachewiltz 1971: 104), we already have the outline of the principle’s geneal-
ogy. Nothing has only one origin, however, and in this case, too, there may
 Europeans and the steppe 15
have been a fair amount of hybridization when it came to the Mongols’ idea
that they were on a universalizing mission from God, seeing that the steppe,
Chinese, Islamic and Byzantine traditions all entertained similar ideas and all
proselytized in the areas where Mongols lived. It is a stock-in-trade of world
history that conquering polities experience themselves as being on a mission
from God, and that such a stance makes them rather less accommodating
interlocutors than polities that do not understand themselves in this way. As
Spuler (1965a: 5) puts it:

Some contribution was no doubt also made by Christian theories of an

oecumenical church under a single central leadership, since certain
Mongol tribes had for about two centuries been firm adherents of Nes-
torian Christianity and had thus had access to Christian thought. Insofar
as inferences can be drawn when direct evidence of contemporary poli-
tical ideas is lacking, it would seem that a peculiar metamorphosis of
Christian doctrinal theories into political notions had considerable
importance in the development of the Mongol concept of world empire.

The locus classicus for this discussion is Voegelin (1941: 402), who analysed
the preambles to extant orders of submission from Mongol khans to Eur-
opean powers as ‘legal instruments … attached to the orders of submission in
order that the addressees might not plead ignorance of Mongol law when
they did not obey the orders received’. Voegelin (1941: 378) extracted from
this material ‘the principal ideas underlying Mongol constitutional law, as
well as the framework of Mongol political theory’. The key idea is the iso-
morphism between heaven and earth; the former is ruled by a deified Eternal
Heaven (Möngke Tenggeri), and the latter should be ruled by his servant, the
Mongol ‘emperor’ (khagan). There was, however, a temporal problem, for:

The true essence of world government is not yet in an actual but only in a
potential state, and it is bound to materialize itself in the course of his-
tory by turning the real world of political facts into a true picture of the
ideal and essential state as visualized by the Order of God … the Mon-
gols, therefore, cannot simply make war on foreign powers, since any
legal title is lacking for an enterprise of this sort. The proper mode of
procedure for the Imperial Government is to send embassies in due form
to the powers in question, giving them all the necessary information on
the principles of Mongol World-Empire law in order that they may know
that the moment of passing from potential to actual membership has
come, and to enable them to take this step in accordance with the legal
rules which govern it.
(Voegelin 1941: 403, 405; comp. Allsen 1987: 42)

In other words, the khagan (as well as his blood relatives, known as the
Golden Kin) was fully aware that there were rulers who did not yet know of
16 Iver B. Neumann
his existence, but these were nonetheless classified as being in rebellion against
the Mongol empire.
Chinggis Khan had four sons who all left descendents: Jochi, Chaghadai,
Ögödei and Tolui. Relations between these four lineages were at the centre of
Mongol politics. The key principle of organization was kinship, both biologi-
cal kinship and classificatory kinship. The language of the fights over succes-
sion was the one of the jasagh, the rules of the ancestors, which were
supposed to be upheld and to which respect should be paid, not least when
these used were used creatively. Although the custom was for the youngest
son to follow his father, when it came to being the khan of khans (khagan),
there was no automatic succession involved. The candidates built alliances,
which felt one another out until one candidate emerged as the stronger one
and called a kurultai where the leading Chinggisid successors were to con-
secrate him (Allsen 1987: 34). After Chinggis Khan died in 1227, his youngest
son Tolui took over as regent, but in 1229 it was Ögödei who was made
khagan. When he died in 1241, a protracted fight between the Toluids and the
Ögödeians ended when Tolui’s oldest son Möngke was made khagan in 1251.4
This protracted fight was of key importance to European history, and I will
return to it below.
Centralization of the empire peaked under Möngke. Within his central
administration, he established regional secretariats for China, Turkestan,
Persia and, although this is not altogether clear, Rus’ (Allsen 1987: 101). He
recalled all the imperial seals, insignia and orders from the court (jarligh) and
issued new ones. This gave him a chance to screen all the empire’s middlemen
and all his own residents. He then restricted the availability of the vital postal
system to these people only.

A third measure was intended to circumscribe the power of the imperial

princes within the confines of their own appanages (fen-ti). Thenceforth,
these princes could neither summon their subjects on their own authority
nor issue any orders concerning financial matters without first conferring
with officials of the imperial court.
(Allsen 1987: 80–81)

Möngke dispatched his own people to do the actual tax collection. The local
middleman was allowed to have his own representative on the spot, but he
was not allowed to receive the actual taxes. Allsen (1987: 46) notes that:

Of particular importance was the qaghan’s [khagan] right to appoint the

Mongol residents, called darughachi or basqaq, who were stationed in all
major population centers and at the courts of all local dynasts. These
officials, who commanded wide administrative, police, and military
powers, were key figures in the control and exploitation of the subject
populations.
(Allsen 1987: 46)
 Europeans and the steppe 17
A final point that needs underlining in our regard is that ‘The grand qan [i.e.
khagan] had exclusive right to conduct relations with others on behalf of the
empire’ (Allsen 1987: 45). I have dwelt on Mongol administration and its historical
precondition, first, in order to demonstrate that the Mongols stood in a long
political steppe tradition and, second, because this was the blueprint for the
Mongols who settled on the Volga to rule the Rus’ lands from the 1240s on.

The Mongols’ western campaign

When Chinggis Khan died in 1227, he had not only instructed his sons to conquer
the world, but he had allotted parts that were not yet conquered.5 The
extreme west of the Mongol empire was the preserve of Jochi, who was also
bequeathed 4,000 soldiers (Tolui inherited the lion’s share, 101,000 men).
Jochi had already reconnoitred the lands, and established a fledgling polity we
know as the White Horde somewhere north of the Caspian Sea. Indeed, in his work
on Mongol imperialism, Thomas Allsen maintains that the 1237–40 expedi-
tion that established the Mongols in the Rus’ lands ‘was designed primarily to
carve out a territory for the family of Jochi’ (Allsen 1987: 28, comp. 45).
Jochi’s reconnoitring in 1223 had also resulted in first contact between
Mongols and the Rus’. On their way westward, in 1222, the Mongol reconnoi-
tring party met opposition from an alliance of Alan and Khipchak troops.6
When the Mongols proclaimed themselves the blood brothers of the Khip-
chaks, this was enough to break the alliance. The Mongols proceeded to mas-
sacre the Alans while the Khipchaks stood idly by. Once the job was done,
the Mongols massacred the Khipchaks. The Khipchak Khan Kotyan passed
words of what had happened back to his son-in-law Prince Mstislav of Gali-
cia (note the marriage alliance), who called a council in Kiev. Three princes
decided to raise an army and engage them on foreign territory. The army
marched east, where they were met by Mongol envoys whose message was
that their real quarrel was with the Khipchaks. The Rus’ princes recognized
the tactic that they had heard about from the Khipchaks themselves, and
proceeded to kill the envoys. This move guaranteed that there would be war.
When it broke, the three Rus’ princes were neither willing nor able to coor-
dinate their efforts (which also meant that they could not coordinate very well
with their Khipchak allies).
The importance of Mongol superior strategy was in evidence already
during this first clash between the Rus’ and Mongols, which took place at the
Kalka river (now in southern Ukraine) in 1223, when two of Chinggis Khan’s
four key generals, Jebe and Subudai, outmanoeuvred a badly organized
assemblage of Rus’ and Khipchak forces which actually outnumbered the
Mongols (Allsen 1987: 6). Note that the western reconnoitring played out
according to standard Mongol operating procedures:

Prior to the commencement of hostilities with a foreign state (qari-irgen

[i.e. polity]) the Mongols always issued orders of submission that offered
18 Iver B. Neumann
its ruler physical and institutional survival in return for acknowledging
the suzerainty of the qaghan [i.e. khagan]. Even if the ruler did not in the
end surrender, such offers were still a valuable means of weakening an
enemy’s resolve and a diplomatic tool for detaching his clients and
allies … Another and perhaps more compelling reason for the toleration
of dependent states was the Mongols’ lack of experienced administrative
personnel. Inasmuch as very few of the Mongols’ estimated population of
seven hundred thousand were literate and still fewer were familiar with
the ‘customs and laws of cities,’ retention of a local dynasty and its
attendant administrative apparatus was frequently the most practical
method of controlling and exploiting the population and resources of a
newly surrendered territory.
(Allsen 1987: 64–65)

The Rus’ princes, seemingly reckoning that the Mongols were simply another
steppe nuisance, paid no more heed to steppe affairs than before. That was a
key mistake. In 1238, the Mongols returned with a vengeance. For the next
two years, they effectively overcame all military opposition from Bolgars,
Khipchaks, the Rus’, Poles and Hungarians. They established themselves in
the Rus’ and Hungarian lands, and had scouting parties as far west as Venice
and Vienna. Once again, the campaign went according to plan. Cities that did
not offer resistance were spared, cities that did were more or less destroyed.
The result, here as elsewhere in the empire, was patchy destruction of the
conquered areas (Morgan 1986: 82).
There is no reason whatsoever to assume that if they had forged ahead, the
Mongols would not have subdued all of what we may anachronistically refer
to as Europe and made it into part of the Mongol order in one way or
another. As it happened, however, news of Ögödei’s death reached the
extreme west of the empire in 1241. At this time, not only Batu, who was
Jochi’s oldest son, but also Ögödei’s oldest son Gülüg and Tolui’s oldest son
Möngke were there. The presence of three out of four Chinggisid lineages was
not by chance; the western front was at this time the key area of new con-
quest, which meant that representatives of the different lineages were there to
keep an eye on one another. Now, however, it became more important to
keep an eye on one another in the Mongol heartland around Karakorum,
where the succession would be decided. In the upshot, both Gülüg and
Möngke left the western frontier for the steppes. The focus of imperial politics
turned away from the fairly narrow strip of land that remained to be con-
quered, namely Europe. This left the Jochids, led by Batu, alone in the west
with his newly won Rus’ possessions.
Although he was no longer in the thick of imperial politics, as head of one
of the four Chinggisid lineages, Batu remained a key player in Mongol poli-
tics.7 When Khagan Ögödei’s widow Töregene, who was regent 1241–46,
called a kurultai to consecrate Gülüg as new khagan, Batu refused to attend,
and when she went on anyway, Batu refused to acknowledge the new khagan.
 Europeans and the steppe 19
This was instrumental in forcing the khaganate from Ögödeian hands and
usher in the Toluids, and this happened at a kurultai, which was actually
called by Batu. Furthermore, Batu had more leeway vis-à-vis the imperial
centre than had other regional middlemen (Allsen 1987: 61; comp Nexon and
Wright 2007). Actually, from Möngke’s accession in 1251, ‘Batu was con-
ceded virtual autonomy in his own ulus [patronage] of the Golden Horde’
(Morgan 1986: 117).
Note, however, that the first darughachi or governor to the Khipchak
Khanate or Golden Horde, a Mongol by the name of Kitai, was sent from
Karakorum in 1257 (Allsen 1987: 104). Furthermore, Batu and his immediate
successors sometimes sent Rus’ princes to the Mongol capital of Karakorum
to have their patents of rule confirmed there.8 Also, under Möngke:

Hostages were an additional measure designed to assure the fidelity of the

Mongols’ dependent rulers. Carpini reports that all tributaries were
required to send sons or brothers to the imperial court [at Karakorum].
As examples, he notes that Yaroslav of Vladimir, the chieftain of the
Alans, and the Korean king had sent relatives as a pledge of their good
behavior … it was not always the possibility of the hostage’s execution
that kept a dependent ruler in line, but rather the threat of being deposed
and replaced by the hostage at the first sign of disloyalty.
(Allsen 1987: 73–74)

When Batu died in 1256, he had built a tent capital in Saray on the Volga
(100 km north of today’s Astrakhan) for his khanate, which came to be
known locally as the Golden Horde. Batu was followed by his short-lived son
(Sartaq, a Christian) and grandson, before his brother Berke (1257–66) took
over. Berke lost Georgia to another Chinggisid line, the Il-khan of Persia and,
as we shall see, this sowed the seeds of discord for centuries to come. However,
the overall story of his reign was that he gained more room for manoeuvre
within the Mongol empire, the cohesion of which was now definitely loosening
(Allsen 1987: 62–63).

Mongols and Rus’ polities

The Mongols destroyed Kiev and established a new layer of Mongol over-
lordship to what was now becoming a suzerain system of Rus’ cities within an
imperial structure – that of the Golden Horde. The Khipchak Khanate, which
was itself still part of an imperial structure, continued to follow the standard
operational procedures of Mongol rule. As summed up by Allsen, the basic
demands that the Mongols imposed on all of their sedentary subjects were:
‘(1) the ruler must come personally to court, (2) sons and younger brothers
are to be offered as hostages, (3) the population must be registered, (4) militia
units are to be raised, (5) taxes are to be sent in, and (6) a darughachi is to
take charge of all affairs’ (Allsen 1987: 114). To the Mongols:
20 Iver B. Neumann
the surrender of a foreign state [i.e. polity] was not just an admission of military
defeat and of political subordination, but a pledge that the surrendering
state would actively support the Mongols in their plans for further conquest.
To fulfill this pledge, the surrendered state had to place its entire resour-
ces at the disposal of the empire, and because a census was needed to
identify and utilize these resources effectively, the Mongols came to consider
submission and the acceptance of the census as synonymous acts.
(Allsen 1987: 124)

A census was made of Kiev in 1245 and of Novgorod in 1259.

Following Mongol standard procedures, the khan initially dispatched basqaqi,
personal representatives, to live in key Rus’ cities. After some decades (how
many exactly is not known), the Mongols changed their policy and dispatched
representatives who were based in the capital Saray on shorter inspections
(darugi). The Rus’ called these posoli (posol is still the term for ambassador in
Russian). When the posoli were not on missions, they worked in the admin-
istration in Saray (Halperin 1987: 33). In the degree that there remained a
primus inter pares amongst the Rus’ princes, it was the grand prince of Vla-
dimir. His rule, like that of all princes, was dependent on a Mongol patent (yarlik).
The principle of personal presence was replayed on the regional level, which meant
that Rus’ princes journeyed to Saray in person to deliver their pledges of
loyalty. The Rus’ probably paid their taxes partly in coin, partly in furs. As
will be seen, this is a standard way of establishing order that closely fits ideal
types of what imperial relations look like (see Nexon and Wright 2007). It is
also a reminder that European forms of imperial control as we know them
from the more recent past are not unique to Europe, and so cannot be called
particularly European. If nothing else, this should be a reminder that the
European moment in world history (c. 1800–1950) was special in that it was
global, but not so special when it came to form. By the same token, one
might expect coming imperial orders emanating from rising powers to be
fairly similar to the sundry orders we have already known historically.
In Rus’ lands, as elsewhere under the Mongols, there was one group that
did not pay taxes. That was religious leaders, which in Christian areas meant
the clergy. A precondition of this special treatment was Mongol eclectic reli-
gious tastes and general tolerance. Exemption from taxes was also a useful
political tool, which facilitated breaking in local religious elites to imperial
rule. In Russia, as elsewhere, this came in handy.9 The clergy was, it will be
remembered, a force in the squabbling between lineages in Russia, and this
squabbling went on unabated after the Mongol invasion. As Fennell (1983:
97) puts it, ‘the princes were able to squabble amongst themselves, to manage
their own business, to defend themselves against enemies in the west, and even
occasionally to interfere in the affairs of their old neighbours in the south’.
The ‘Vsevolodskiys’, whose struggles converged on the city of Vladimir and
its hinterland (Suzdalia), were the main lineage in Russia after the Mongol
invasion. After Kiev’s fall, it was Vladimir that was the key Rus’ city. The
 Europeans and the steppe 21
Vsevolodskiys were named after Yuriy Dolgorukiy’s son Vsevolod III, whose
son Yaroslav’s sons included Aleksander Nevskiy and Andrey. They were, not
surprisingly, split on the key question of whether to cooperate with the
Mongol invader or to cooperate with their neighbours to the west. This was a
struggle for keeps, in the sense that the winner would maintain the throne for
his direct descendants (primogeniture having become the key principle of
succession in the years immediately preceding the Mongol invasion). Fur-
thermore, since Galicia was already attempting to head westwards and the
southern cities were increasingly passive politically, it was also a struggle
about the entire orientation of what remained the key areas of the Rus’ lands
and was increasingly becoming the only centre of political gravity between the
Khipchak Khanate in the East and Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, the Ger-
mans and the Scandinavians in the West. It was a centre that was very aware
of its dependence on their new Mongol overlords. Between 1242 and 1252,
Suzdalian princes made 19 visits to Saray. Four of these visits ended with the
princes being sent on to the Mongol capital Karakorum (Fennell 1983: 99).10
Once again, the imperial order on display here, with suzerain supplicating
polities quarrelling to get in line, is an example of a pattern that we know
from both non-European and European orders.
Given Mongolian superior military force, the temptation to embrace the inevi-
table and to collaborate must have been very strong indeed. The key band-
wagoner was Aleksander Nevskiy. Already in the early years of the Mongol
invasion, Aleksander had spent the time successfully fighting Swedish detach-
ments (1240, earning his moniker) and German knights (1242). These fights
were part of a protracted struggle for mastery over the lands lying between them.
When Yaroslav died in 1248, Aleksander was next in line of succession, but it
was his younger brother Andrey who seized the throne. Andrey was one of the
few Rus’ princes to advocate resistance to the Mongols. Nonetheless, in order to
hang onto the throne, he needed the patent from the khan, so both he, and even-
tually his brother Aleksander, made their way first to Saray, and then onwards
to Karakorum, where Andrey was confirmed in Vladimir and Aleksander in
Kiev. Since Vladimir had been the main prize since the Tatar invasion, Alek-
sander did not rest content with this decision, and in 1252 he went to the Horde
and obtained their help to oust Andrey. Andrey fled to Sweden. Aleksander
had managed to put paid not only to his brother Andrey, but also to organized
opposition to the Mongols as such. As Fennell (1983: 108) puts it:

… this was the end of any form of organized opposition to the Tatars by
the rulers of Russia for a long time to come. It was the beginning of
Russia’s real subservience to the Golden Horde … the so-called ‘Tatar
Yoke’ began not so much with Baty’s [i.e. Batu’s] invasion of Russia as
with Aleksander’s betrayal of his brothers.

From this time on, the enrolment of Mongol backing became a routine part
of internecine struggles. There was nothing new about this: first the nomadic
22 Iver B. Neumann
Pechenegs and then the Khipchaks had been drawn on in similar fashion by
the Rus’ princes before. Now, once more, the appeal to steppe forces became
a key factor in the intensification of direct Mongol control with Rus’ political
life. There is a causal link between this development and the period of inten-
sified Mongol raids and invasions towards the end of the thirteenth century.
At this point, not only were Mongols from the Khipchak Khanate brought
in, but Rus’ princes who were up against other Rus’ princes with Horde
backing actually ventured further afield to bring in the backing of Mongol
insurgents from the Nogay further south.11 Rus’ princes stood against Rus’
princes, each backed by a Mongol ally. We see here a typical example of how
an imperial power overlays a balance of power between suzerains.
In 1304, the grand prince of Vladimir died. Three developments brought
about a change in politics. First, the princes of Moscow and Tver’ emerged as
the key players in Rus’ politics, among other things as a result of their
population increase in the wake of the Mongol invasion, which was again to
do with a nice strategic location (with Moscow, in particular, being something
of a hub of the river system).12 Second, among other things because of the
now firmly established principle of primogeniture, these princes headed more
clearly organized families, which served as a firm power base. Third, the firm
wedding between families and cities meant that the territoriality of this power
base was now assured in a much higher degree than before.13 Following dec-
ades of struggle between Moscow and Tver’, Moscow emerged victorious and
Ivan I was granted the title of grand prince of Vladimir by the Mongols in
1328. From Ivan I onwards, Moscow was the emergent centre of gravity of
Rus’ politics, and the home both of the great prince (who underlined his
success by adding ‘and of all Russia’ to his princely title) and of the Metro-
politan. Moscow remained completely dependent on the Mongols, however,
to the point that brothers appealed to Saray and even travelled there in order
to settle their succession struggles (Halperin 1987: 58). Moscow took its time
fighting down Tver’ competition. In 1353, Novgorod supported the Tver’ bid
for the grand principality of Vladimir over the Moscow one by sending
envoys to Saray to plead for Tver’s case (Halperin 1987: 51). The suzerain
balance of power system was still in operation, and that very operation also
served to confirm and strengthen the importance of the Mongol overlay.
The grand princes of Moscow kept up their brilliance in playing this game.
Whereas Tver’ looked West, to the rising power of Lithuania, Moscow stuck to
the Mongols of the Khipchak Khanate. This served them well, for they were
able to stave off three attacks by Lithuania and Tver’ between 1368 and 1372.
As summed up by Halperin (1987: 54; for details, see Vernadsky 1953: 207):

the special relationship between the Golden Horde and Moscow was
strengthened in the middle of the fourteenth century, when the Mongols
faced a new challenge to their hegemony. Grand prince Olgerd of
Lithuania struck deep into the Tatar orbit by bringing both Tver’ and
Riazan’ into his sphere of influence and applying pressure to Novgorod.14
 Europeans and the steppe 23
Olgerd’s opposition to Moscow was not rooted in principle, and he played
politics by the same rules as everyone else. Thus, with the eye on Moscow, he
sent a delegation to the Golden Horde to negotiate a rapprochement. The
Mongols, however, had decided, logically, to use Moscow as a counter-
weight to the growing power of Lithuania. The Muscovites were therefore
successful in their attempts to undermine the Lithuanian embassy, and
the Mongols, in a fine display of political delicacy, arrested the Lithuanian
envoys and handed them over to Moscow. Olgerd was compelled to
ransom his emissaries from his enemies.

The decisive Moscow victory over Tver’ occurred in 1375.15 In 1478, Ivan III sub-
dued Novgorod. Moscow owed its victory to the superior way in which they
had played the alliance game vis-à-vis the Mongols compared to other Rus’
polities. From this time on, in order to underline how Moscow was changing
the suzerain system of Rus’ lineages into a polity centred on Moscow, it is
customary to refer to this polity as Muscovy. Muscovy was still subservient to
the Khipchak Khanate, and would remain so for another 100 years.
In terms of systems logic, the arrival of Lithuania was a major event, since
it challenged the suzerain system by adding another possible centre of gravity
for Rus’ princes. It is true that Lithuania was at first sucked into the suzerain
system centring on the Khipchak Khanate’s ambit, to the degree that the
Khipchak Khanate certainly saw Lithuania as a vassal, and Lithuania itself at
some point probably did (comp. Vernadsky 1953: 264). It is also true that the
Khipchak Khanate backed Moscow in its war with Lithuania in 1406, and
also on subsequent occasions. As the Khipchak Khanate weakened and
Moscow as well as Lithuania emerged ever stronger, however, diplomatic
relations between the Khipchak Khanate and Lithuania became closer and also
less lopsided. Despite certain temporary setbacks such as the Moscow-
Lithuanian treaty of friendship of 1449 (a short-lived affair anyway), the
Khipchak Khanate and Lithuania were more often than not as one on
opposing the rise of Moscow.16 It was an alliance that did not fulfil the goal
for which it was formed, however, for Moscow (which could in turn draw on
its good relations with the emergent Crimean Khanate)17 emerged trium-
phant, whereas the Khipchak Khanate fell apart. Note, and this is crucial in our
context, that the patterns of alliance do not follow religious or cultural lines.
The same may be said about the alliance that Muscovy and what was left of
the Khipchak Khanate formed in 1502, against the Great Horde, i.e. the
polity of nomadic Mongol-led forces on the steppe. Cultural similarity eases
contact between polities and may result in alliances, but as is demonstrated
here, it may also take a back seat to other concerns.
To sum up, the key political fact in the Rus’ lands from 1240 to the end of
the fifteenth century was the suzerainty of the Mongols, based in Saray. Rus’
princes fought one another, and used Mongol backing as the key power
resource in their internecine struggles. The Mongols lent their support to
various princes with a view to upholding tribute. They also followed the same
24 Iver B. Neumann
policy towards the Rus’ princes that they themselves and other steppe peoples
had experienced from the Chinese side: they played the Rus’ princes off
against one another so that no one of them should emerge as a uniting force
that could challenge Mongol rule. As the Khipchak Khanate started to fall
apart from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, however, Moscow was none-
theless able to emerge as the key political centre, which proceeded to relativize
Mongol suzerainty and, using techniques borrowed from the Mongols, unite
first the Rus’ lands and then the old lands of the Khipchak Khanate (Kap-
peler 2001). Muscovy seems to have stopped paying tribute to the Khipchak
Khanate sometime around 1470, and made an alliance with the eastern part
of what was left of it in 1502. Muscovy effectively swallowed its partner, and
in 1507, Sigismund of Poland-Lithuania was ‘granted’ the western part from
its last khan. The Khipchak Khanate was no more.
Although the fact that the Khipchak Khanate turned to Islam in the first
half of the fourteenth century could not fail to delineate them clearly from a
population who was consistently referred to by its writing layer as ‘the
Christians’, a number of hybridizing practices were in evidence. There was
intermarriage, but it was to a high degree an elite phenomenon. Spuler
(1965a: 86) sums it up as follows in the fashion of high modernity: ‘A fair
measure of Finnish blood was absorbed into the veins of the Tatar nation,
and Russian and Polish captives of both sexes added a certain Slavic element,
though the Russian contribution was in all probability still very small in the
mid 15th century’. More importantly, after more than 250 years of Mongol
influence, there was widespread hybridization on the institutional and prac-
tical levels. We have here a key example of the kind of situation that this book
was supposed to excavate: non-European domination of Europeans invariably
led to cultural hybridization. Equally invariably, it seems, and as pointed out
in the epigraph to this chapter, such hybridization is quickly and wilfully
downplayed once the power configuration that gave rise to the hybridization
in the first place, changes.
How widespread hybridization between Mongols, Russians and others had
become in this period is a matter of debate, most recently around the pub-
lication of a book by Donald Ostrowski (1998). Halperin (2000: 238) outlines
the broad consensus as follows:

Despite the objections of hypersensitive Russian historians, there is a

compelling case that Muscovy did indeed borrow a variety of Mongol
political and administrative institutions, including the tamga, the seal for
the customs tax as well as the tax itself; the kazna, the treasury; the iam,
the postal system; tarkhan, grants of fiscal or juridical immunity; and
den’ga for money. Muscovite bureaucratic practices, including the use of
stolbtsy, scrolls to preserve documents, and perhaps some feature of
Muscovite bureaucratic jargon, may also derive from the Qipchaq Kha-
nate, as well as selective legal practices such as pravezh, beating on the
shins. Certainly Muscovite diplomatic norms for dealing with steppe
 Europeans and the steppe 25
states and peoples were modeled on Tatar ways. Finally, the Muscovites
had no choice but to study Tatar military tactics and strategies, if only to
survive by countering them in battle, but the Muscovites also copied
Mongol weapons, armaments, horse equipage, and formations.

The consensus does not extend to the administrative system as such.

Ostrowski (1998, 2000) sees the major aristocratic organ, the Boyar Duma, as
being formatted on the major aristocratic organ of the Khipchak Khanate,
and also sees a number of detailed similarities between the lower ranks, but
has not been able to garnish much support for this view (Halperin 2000;
Goldfrank 2000). Be that as it may, the pride that Russians took in being the
key successor of the Khipchak Khanate was evident in the sixteenth-century
aristocratic fashion for tracing one’s ancestry back to Mongols (Halperin
1987: 113). As we shall see, this Russian identification with its former sovereigns
proved to be detrimental to its relations with its European neighbours.

Significance for Russian–European relations

Throughout the Mongol period in Russian history, relations with Western
Christendom continued. The Khipchak Khanate cherished trade, and gave
privileges to a number of traders. Most of the trade went through the Black Sea,
and was handled by non-Mongol servants of the khan. The Mongols were
generally very good at acknowledging their limited knowledge of city ways,
seafaring and other pursuits foreign to the steppe. Seeing the advantages of trade
with the known world, they therefore employed foreign subjects as customs
officers, and allowed colonies of Genoese and also Venetian traders along the
northern coast of the Black Sea (seeing to it that some ports remained in Tatar
hands). From 1365 to 1475, when the Crimean Turks put an end to their pre-
sence, the Genoese dominated heavily (Meyerdorff 1981). In the early years, the
Khipchak Khanate demanded tribute of the Venetians, but, presumably find-
ing this to be counter-productive, soon rescinded the practice (Spuler 1965a:
399). Trading included a whole gamut of goods, and also slaves.
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion (by the Mongols, of the Russian
lands), and despite Aleksander Nevskiy’s scepticism of Western powers and
Catholicism, Pope Innocent IV nonetheless forwarded a bull to him in 1248
(Fennell 1983: 122, n.15). Rome followed what was going on in the Rus’ lands.
Note also that Aleksander’s ally Metropolitan Kirill established a bishopric in
Saray in 1261. The church’s presence in Saray secured, among other things, a
channel from the Rus’ clergy and princes to the Byzantine Empire, which had
diplomatic relations with the Khipchak Khanate (the Byzantine emperor
married off his daughter to Khan Uzbeg of the Golden Kin in around 1330;
Vernadsky 1953: 196). The Khipchak Khanate also received diplomatic
envoys from Rome. Even in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, ‘trade
with the West, either from or via Novgorod and Smolensk, both of which
suffered no damage from the Tatars, seems to have been relatively unaffected’
26 Iver B. Neumann
(Fennell 1983: 89). Furthermore, the Khipchak Khanate granted tax exemp-
tions to the Hanseatic League, which continued its brisk trade with Rus’ lands
via Novgorod (Halperin 1987: 81).
In 1270, the Khipchak Khanate also made a trade agreement with Riga
Germans and other Germans, and saw to it that Russian princes did not
interfere with it. The main route for this trade followed the ‘Tatar road’ from
Kiev to Lemberg. Kiev, the main Russian town, was ‘teeming with Tatar,
German, Armenian and Moscow merchants’ (Spuler 1965a: 403). In the
context of this book, the main point here is that the boot was firmly on the
Tatar foot when it came to settle the conditions for and terms of trade here,
much as they were where the other European-non-European relations dis-
cussed in this book are concerned (see, particularly, the chapters by Göl,
Jones, Suzuki and Zhang). Note here that Genoese and also particularly
Venetian merchants were able to draw on these experiences when it came to
evolving trade with the Ottoman Empire. We have here a reminder of how, in
the years before the sixteenth century, the polities of Christendom were
simply not particularly powerful agents relations with polities from elsewhere.
If the existence of Russian-speakers and their human status were known to
most Europeans, the same could not be said about the steppe-dwelling peoples
to their east. Ever since Pope Alexander III’s personal physician Master
Philip had set sail eastward from Venice in 1177 on his mission to find the
alleged Christian kingdom of Prester John, attempts to establish contact had
rested on ‘a strange combination of Christian and pagan elements … [built
on] the legends and myths inherited from the classical world’ (de Rachewiltz
1971: 29). When the pope had word of the Mongol invasion some 60-odd
years later, his reaction was to send friars with letters asking the Khans to
mend his ways and convert to Christendom. The Mongol answers mirrored
these messages by insisting that the pope should come and pay his respect to
the great khan [i.e. khagan]. Universal claim stood against universal claim
(Dawson 1955; Bowden 2009). The envoys to the great khans brought back
new information that made for much more detailed representations in the
West of people and life in the East.18 However, when both the Ilkhanate state
(Mongol-ruled Persia) and the Khipchak Khanate first converted to Islam
and then, later in the fourteenth century, went through periods of internal
strife, it affected the possibility for European missionaries and merchants to
take the land route through these areas in order to reach destinations further
east. As a result, direct contacts between the European continent and the East
suffered, and European continental representations of the East were once
again dominated by ‘dreaming and speculation’, as de Rachewiltz (1971: 207)
puts it. What this meant was that when Muscovy emerged, Western rulers did
not know what to expect. Already in 1481, Emperor Frederick III addressed
an appeal on behalf of the Germans in Livonia to Poland and Lithuania,
Sweden and the Hanseatic cities about this noted but unknown entity
(Halecki 1952: 8). Direct contacts between Muscovy and the Holy Roman
Emperor ensued in 1486, after two and a half centuries of Mongol rule.
 Europeans and the steppe 27
In the early 1500s, Russians themselves were far from certain about what to
make of their Mongol connection. There was a duality in the Russian
knowledge production about these relations which goes to the heart of how
Russo-Mongol relations are relevant to Russia’s entry into the European state
system. On the one hand, as has been demonstrated convincingly by Charles
Halperin, Russian contemporary sources, both the chronicles paid for by
princes and literary genres such as the byliny (folk songs), finessed a technique
of not touching on the fact of Mongol suzerainty directly. As Halperin (1987:
8, comp. 63) puts it:

The Russian ‘bookmen’ (writers, redactors, scribes, copyists) of the

Kievan past were accustomed to explaining Russian victories and defeats
in skirmishes with nomads as signs of God’s pleasure or displeasure with
his people. They had never been called upon, however, to rationalize
absolute conquest. Instead of confronting the ideologically awkward fact
of utter defeat, the bookmen finessed the fact of Mongol conquest by
presenting Russo-Tatar relations as merely a continuation of Kievan
relations with the steppe with no change of suzerainty involved. Thus the
Russian bookmen raised the ideology of silence to a higher level and
threw a veil over the intellectual implications of Mongol hegemony.

However, once the Mongols seemed to be a spent force, there was a need to
tell a story about Russia’s history as having some kind of continuity. A solu-
tion that lay close to hand was to forge a new role for the Russian leader as
being not only a great prince, but also a tsar. The problem was that the term
‘tsar’ was a translation into Russian not only of the Greek term basileus (i.e.
Byzantine emperor), but also of khan. The implication of these eponymous
translations was that these two entities were treated on a par. Note that the
fall of Constantinople is at this point half a century back. There was no
longer a basileus in Constantinople. The hegemon to live down was the khan
in Saray. Vassilian, bishop of Rostov and a close adviser of Ivan III, came up
with an answer to this problem, namely to raise the status of Ivan III to that
of tsar and so live down the very idea that there was ever such a thing as a
tsar in Saray. The link should be that of basileus to tsar, and the khan should
be treated as nothing but an impostor (see Cherniavsky 1970).
However, there is an interesting split in representations of Muscovite rule
here, for as I have tried to demonstrate above, once the domestic work of
establishing the basic continuation of Russia’s legitimacy as a Christian power
was done, Muscovy actually started propping up its claims of being an
imperial power on a par with the Holy Roman Empire by invoking its con-
quests of the successor states of the Khipchak Khanate, notably Kazan’ and
Astrakhan.19 In a situation where Europeans knew little of Mongol or even
Asian ways (little, not nothing: there had, after all, been continuous contact),
Russia chose to base its claims for recognition partly on its Mongol connec-
tion. This move flowed from hybridization, and the self-evident way in which
28 Iver B. Neumann
Muscovites performed the move goes to show how this hybridization had
become doxic (not least, one would suspect, because there was now little to
fear from the former overlords). Muscovy opting for a Mongol translation
imperii was clearly detrimental to the Russian polity’s relations with Europe,
where Mongols were remembered as clear-cut barbarians. Even as late as in the
early 1800s, when Napoleon’s propaganda machine needed anti-Russian slurs,
one of those that really caught on was ‘Grattez le russe et vous trouverez le
tatare!’ (scratch a Russian and find a Tatar) (Halperin 1987: ix). This saying is
not without substance, however. An example from everyday life may be the
Russian taboo against shaking hands across thresholds. A ritual example of the
lingering importance of hybridization today may be found in that key object
of anthropological inquiry, burial rites. In addition to the standard funeral,
Russians come together 40 days later. The religious explanation for this is to
do with shadowing the Ascension; the deceased’s loved ones congregate to ease
the soul’s passing to heaven. Note that this is a common practice amongst
Muslims, but not so amongst other Christians. Yet another example, this time
from a core area for International Relations (IR), namely diplomacy, con-
cerns the restrictions imposed on movements by diplomats which were in
evidence continuously from the Mongol period until the fall of the Soviet
Union, a shadow of which remains even today. Remnants of the way things
were done during Mongol rule are still readily observable in Russian life.

Conclusion
Rus’ should be categorized as a suzerain system of polities centred on Kiev, rather
than as a single polity. The polities were lineages led by princes. Neighbouring
powers, including steppe-dwelling peoples, were brought into the fight
between lineages on a regular basis. Once the Mongols destroyed Kiev in
1240 and established a new layer of Mongol overlordship, this loose suzerain
system of lineage-based polities characterized by a high level of conflict and
open lines to allies from the adjacent steppe became part of an imperial
structure – that of the Golden Horde. For some decades afterwards, the
Khipchak Khanate was itself still part of an imperial structure. The Khipchak
Khanate ruled Rus’ according to standard operational Mongol procedures.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century, two lineages, now thoroughly
territorialized in the cities of Moscow and Tver’, fought for predominance
amongst the Rus’. Moscow owed its victory to the superior way in which they
had played the alliance game vis-à-vis the Mongols compared to other Rus’
polities. From the 1370s on, in order to underline how Moscow was changing
the suzerain system of Rus’ lineages into a polity centred on Moscow, it is
customary to refer to this polity as Muscovy. Muscovy was still subservient to
the Khipchak Khanate, and would remain so for another 100 years, until the
Golden Horde fell apart in the first decade of the 1500s.
As Mongol suzerainty waned, relations with steppe polities nonetheless
continued. When, in the early decades of the fifteenth century, rival Mongol
 Europeans and the steppe 29
khans were not able to maintain order amongst the local Tatar princes of the
Dnieper steppes, some of these formed semi-independent detachments that
became known as Cossacks. Vitautas of Lithuania hired some of them to
man the steppe frontier. Slavs who were similarly employed also came to be
known as Cossacks (Vernadsky 1953: 289). When, in the 1440s, Moscow
decided to resettle the Tatars who had joined its grand duke’s service, ‘the best
solution seemed to be to establish a network of advance posts along the
southern border of Russia, close enough to the Tatar-controlled steppes so
that Russia’s military leaders could both watch the movements of the Tatars
and repulse them when they came’ (Vernadsky 1953: 331, comp. 320). A
former khan’s son, Kasim, had a claim on a particular stretch of the frontier
around the town of Gorodets, and so in 1452–53 Moscow created a separate
polity for him there. Gorodets was renamed Kasimov upon Kasim’s death in
1471, and went on to become a separate khanate which survived until 1681,
as Muscovy’s vassal and serving ‘primarily as nomadic auxiliary troops’
(Halperin 1987: 109). By then, Muscovy had annexed all the Khipchak
Khanate’s successor states.
As was demonstrated most recently by the key role played by Russian fed-
eral subjects such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan during the dissolution of
the Soviet Union (Neumann 1999: 183–206), successors of those successor
states are still a distinct presence in Russian politics. Through the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, it was fashionable for Russian aristocratic families
to sport their Mongol connections. After Peter the Great’s reforms, with the
fading of the Crimean Khanate, which was the Khipchak Khanate’s principal
successor state in cultural terms, and with Russia’s increasing Siberian
expansion, the Tatar experience took on a more and more subterranean role
in Russian historiography. The role of the Tatar and also of other identities
such as the Kalmyk (successors of a specific Mongolian tribe) to present
Russian national identity awaits further study, but there has certainly been
ample hybridization. Tatars, Kalmyks, Bashirs and other groups whose col-
lective memory is tied up with having been part of the Khipchak Khanate
remain liminal to Russian identity.
The Mongol connection and the hybrid character of the polity of Muscovy
coloured Russian entry into the European states system. Muscovy itself chose
to seek recognition from the continental European powers, with which con-
nections increased steadily in the fifteenth century and after the fall of the
Mongol Khipchak Khanate, as successors to that Khanate. The bid for
recognition was presented by dint of a number of practices that were taken
directly from the Mongols. Continental European powers were therefore
warranted in seeing Muscovy as a partly Asian polity.
It should also be clear, however, that the political logic of what was going
on in the North, between Scandinavians, Lithuanians, Poles, Germans, the
Rus’, the Khipchaks, etc., was one where confession had importance, but not
necessarily overwhelming importance. It is simply not the case that an over-
arching polity, be that Christendom or its successor Europe, stood against
30 Iver B. Neumann
other polities. Neither is it the case that the continental European powers
imposed a ready-made system of interaction on Muscovy (or on other
Northerners, for that matter). It is very hard to identify a clear geographical,
social or political boundary between Europe and non-Europe in the period
under discussion here. Rus’ polities before the Mongol intervention had
interaction with steppe polities as one of their defining traits from the very
beginnings in the eighth century.
I have argued that the area called Rus’ which the Mongol forces subdued at
the end of the 1230s was a loose suzerain system of lineage-based polities
characterized by a high level of conflict and open lines to allies from the
adjacent steppe. I have also argued that the establishment of a Mongol
imperial order centred on the Golden Horde and lasting for around 250 years
meant that when Muscovy emerged as the Golden Horde’s self-acknowledged
successor polity, it was as a hybrid polity with state institutions and diplo-
matic practices that bore deep marks of its steppe heritage. Furthermore,
Muscovy’s emergence came as a result of, among other things, a century of
alliance politics where the principal actors were the Khipchak Khanate,
Muscovy and Lithuania (Lithuania/Poland). It is an indictment of IR as a
discipline that its focus has tended to be so narrow that not even inter-polity
relations in the immediate vicinity of Europe such as these have been deemed
worthy of much attention.
There are a couple of lessons to be drawn here. First, the editors are right
to point out in their Introduction that we should not think of the past as
being culturally homogenous. From the 220s BC, steppe relations were about
building up multiethnic empires, which sustained themselves, among other
things, by attacking sedentary polities to the south: China, Persia, the
Byzantine Empire, etc. If, as in the fourth century, a steppe empire had no
luck in China, it could regroup and attempt a devastating attack on the
Roman Empire instead. As a result of all the ensuing hybridization, of which
Russia is a key example, there simply is little or no cultural ground on which
to found a division of the world into discrete civilizations (cf. Bowden 2009).
A second lesson to be drawn concerns the status of nomadism in world
history. Barry Hindess has noted about present-day migration discourse
how:

The assumption here is that, even if they move around within it, people
will normally be settled in the society to which they belong … In fact, the
historical record suggests a different story; namely, that large-scale
population movement is as normal a feature of the human condition as is
long-term territorial settlement … Nevertheless, the system of territorial
states and the techniques of population management developed within it
have turned the movement of people around the world into an excep-
tional activity, something that can and should be regulated by the states
whose borders they threaten to cross.
(Hindess 2000: 1494)
 Europeans and the steppe 31
This is certainly so. All European peoples (with the possible exception of the
Basques) hail from the steppes, and it took millennia before there was any
meaningful distinction to be made between the two. Let us not forget that the
first occurrence of the concept of Europe in mediaeval history hails from the
crowning of Charles the Great in the year 800. He crowned himself emperor,
amongst other things, to celebrate his victory over the Avars, a steppe people.
In a very real sense, the Russian experience with the steppe is an historical
coda of the European experience with the steppe.
A third point goes to the core of this volume. In a European comparative
perspective, with the exception of the Balkans, Russian experiences with non-
Europeans were particularly long lasting, and they included 250 years of
suzerainty. In a global comparative perspective, if we juxtapose Russian-
Mongol relations with the European-non-European relations that were to
follow in the early modern period and which are the topic of the other chap-
ters in this book, the similarities are overwhelming. Even more interesting is
the fact that Russians, being Christian notwithstanding, in many ways came
to be Other-ed in the very same way as (other?) non-Europeans in that period.
I have discussed this topic at some length elsewhere (Neumann 1996, 1999).
Suffice it to point out that the roots of critical development theory are to be
found in the writings of a Russian Jew, namely Leo Trotsky. It was his reading
of Russia’s development as ‘combined and uneven’ in a world dominated by
(Western) Europeans that formed the template on which intellectuals in other
parts of the world began to theorize development. To the degree that there is
a line to be drawn from critical development theory to post-colonial scholar-
ship, and to the extent that this book embodies the former, the structural
parallels between Russo-European relations on the one hand, and Chinese-
European, African-European, Latin American-European relations, etc., on
the other have their counterparts in the knowledge production about these
relations in Russia on the one hand, and other countries such as China, India,
Turkey, Persia, Algeria, Brazil, etc., on the other.
I noted above a propagandist put-down from the court of Napoleon: ‘scratch
a Russian and find a Tatar.’ There is nothing empirically wrong in this statement.
Russian culture is a thoroughly hybridized phenomenon. What is wrong with this
slogan is the modernist preconditions that lend it its negative propagandistic
force, namely that hybridization is bad. That value judgement was not pre-
dominant in the world before the arrival of the anarchical society. It is likely to be
buried together with the modernity of which it was such a characteristic part.

Notes
1 The ruler of Muscovy, who had taken the title of tsar in 1547, annexed the successor
polity of the Khanate of Kazan’ in 1552 and the Khanate of Astrakhan in 1556.
2 Beyond the Khitans, there is an uninterrupted tradition of steppe empires reaching
back for at least 1,500 years. From the perspective of their neighbours to the south,
the rise of the Mongol empire was a working accident: ‘There was a standard
imperial Chinese policy for dealing with them. They would be carefully watched,
32 Iver B. Neumann
and if one nomadic chief seemed to be gaining power and influence at the expense
of others, Chinese subsidies, recognition and titles would be offered to one of his
rivals, who would be encouraged to cut the upstart down to size. Should the new
protégé in his turn seem to be becoming dangerously powerful, the process would
be repeated’ (Morgan 1986: 35).
3 The break came in the late 1250s, when the Khipchak Khan Berke broke ranks.
The Great Khan in Karakorum had assigned the Caucasus to Batu’s Khipchak
Khanate. The Great Möngke reversed this decision, giving it to the rivalling
Mongol polity of the Persia-based Il-khans instead. The Caucasus remained a bone
of contention between the Khipchak Khanate and the Il-khans (and also to their
successors, the first of whom was Timur-lenk) and mutatis mutandis down to the
present era. When Möngke died, the struggle over the Caucasus became the main
factor in determining the Khipchak Khanate’s and the Il-khan’s positioning in the
succession struggle. The Il-khan candidate (Hülagü) won. The leader of the Khip-
chak Khanate (Berke) answered by taking a step unprecedented in Mongol
imperial history – namely to forge an alliance with Mamluk Egypt against his
fellow Mongols, the Il-khans. The 1261 alliance was followed up by a commercial
treaty, which opened up for trade that proved lucrative to both sides (basically
slaves for luxury goods). This trade was of utmost importance for the Golden
Horde until, in 1354, the Ottoman Turks took over control of the Dardanelles from
the Byzantines. The Ottoman Turks effectively put an end to the Golden Horde’s
Egyptian trade.
4 He was followed by his brother Qubilai (Kublai Khan, 1260–94). Qubilai con-
centrated on China, and was not much of a presence in other parts of what was
now increasingly the former Mongol empire.
5 A correspondence is often assumed between the four sons and the subsequent
Mongol-led polities in China, Persia, Central Asia and Russia, but as pointed out
by Jackson 1999, this is too neat.
6 The Alans were a Farsi-speaking people (and so by the lights of the day arguably
further removed from the Mongols than Turkic-speaking peoples like the Khip-
chaks). Eventually, a large number of them settled in Khanbaliq (now Beijing),
where they were converted to Christianity by Archbishop John of Montecorvino.
They became a mainstay of the Mongol army. Kagan Toghon Temür sent an
embassy to the Pope in 1338, asking the Pope to send a new pastor, as well as for
his blessing. De Rachewiltz (1971: 188) sees the key reason for this as being the
kagan’s ‘desire to please the military chiefs on whom depended the security of the
state and the emperor’s own safety’.
7 Soviet historians like Bartol’d have suggested that Batu was co-ruler, but Allsen
(1987: 54–59) and others have convincingly refuted the argument.
8 For example, in 1256–57, Prince Gleb Vasil’kovich of Rostov journeyed to
Karakorum, and returned with a wife, a Mongol princess (Allsen 1987: 183–84).
9 ‘For example, Cyril, the Metropolitan of Kiev, who at first supported the anti-
Mongol princes of Galicia and Volynia, in the end (1252) threw his considerable
weight behind Alexander Nevsky, the prince of Novgorod and champion of
accommodation’ (Allsen 1987: 122).
10 Since one of the points I am trying to make is that Europe’s eastern frontier is a
hybrid, it should be pointed out that the boundary just drawn is also in need of de-
differentiation. For example, Mongol power resulted in ‘a revival of the old steppe
traditions at the court of Hungary’ in the latter half of the thirteenth century
(Vernadsky 1953: 180–81).
11 The Nogay, named after the Mongol Nogay Khan, based in the Caucasus around
present-day Kalmykia and harbouring a number of Khipchaks, were at logger-
heads with the rest of the Golden Horde in the 1290s, and established themselves
as a khanate in 1319. They ‘built a power base in the Crimea and the Balkans and
 Europeans and the steppe 33
contested with the khans of the lower Volga for control of the Golden Horde’
(Halperin 1987: 18).
12 The two other cities to be ruled by grand dukes, Nizjniy Novgodor and Riazan,
came up short on both counts.
13 Vernadsky (1953: 167), whose major thesis throughout his multi-volume history is
the rise of Russian nationhood (preceded by a ‘federal’ Kievan state period),
nonetheless stresses how Alexander’s brothers’ and sons’ failing to settle in Vladi-
mir upon becoming its grand duke constituted ‘the temporary victory of the apanage
(udel) principle over that of the nation state’.
14 From the 1250s onwards Galicia and Kiev came ever closer to the Lithuanian
kingdom, and were eventually absorbed by it. The Russian aristocracy asserted
themselves strongly, however, to the point that a variant of Russian (White Rus-
sian) became the kingdom’s official language. A number of nobles eventually
gravitated back to Muscovy (cf. Backus 1957).
15 Tver’ did not give up, though. In 1382, it allied with Khan Tokhtamesh of the
Golden Horde against Moscow.
16 The fifteenth-century political cabal in these parts turned on a familiar alliance
pattern. In the east the Golden Horde strove to hang onto its suzerainty in Russian
lands, which were increasingly dominated by Muscovy. In the south the Crim-
ean Khanate tried to stem the increasing influence of the Russians on the Golden
Horde. In the west the Lithuanians tried to encroach on Russian lands. Logically, a
basic alliance pattern emerged whereby the Golden Horde and Muscovy paired up
against Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate. Once the Golden Horde unravelled,
there was elite integration. During Russia’s Time of Troubles, the Tatar aristocracy
rallied to the Russian cause against the Poles. The Tatar aristocracy was placed
side by side with the Russian one in 1784 (Spuler 1965a: 91). The Crimean Tatars
had a rather different end of it. Their final raid on Moscow, in 1571, ended with
them actually being able to force the Muscovites to pay, but that tribute never
seems to have been paid. Once the hetman Bogdan Khielnitski transferred his
loyalties from Poland to Russia in 1654, the Poles and the Crimean Tatars once
again made common cause against Russia. The Crimean Tatars remained a
potential ally for Russia’s opponents until they were incorporated into Russia after
the Russian victory over the Ottomans in 1774.
17 This is not to say that the relationship between Muscovy and this second most
long-lived of the Golden Horde’s successor states was not volatile. The Crimean
Tatars burnt Moscow to the ground as late as in 1571. That, however, did not keep
certain boyars in Muscovy from considering the Crimean khan as a possible ruler
(cf. Ostrowski 2000).
18 Janet Abu-Lughod’s interesting attempt to theorize the world system before Eur-
opean hegemony is marred by her specious readings of these reports. Although she
herself notes that their use of imagery is of the same kind (and frequently even
parading the same specific ideas about monsters and strange humanoids) as con-
temporary Chinese texts about western lands, she does not hesitate to heap scorn
on leading European scholars of the period like William of Rubruck (Abu-Lughod
1989: 162; comp. de Rubruquis 1990).
19 As late as the seventeenth century, the émigré Muscovite bureaucrat Gregorii
Kotoshikin explained that the ruler of Muscovy was a tsar by virtue of Ivan IV’s
conquest of Kazan (Halperin 1987: 100).
2 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana,
1453–1774
Ayla Göl

Introduction
Historical diplomatic relations between European powers and the Ottoman
Empire (1299–1923) are usually regarded as the most enduring and equal
of Europe’s relations with the non-European world. Though the Ottoman
Empire was historically and geopolitically embedded in the ‘diplomatic
system of Europe’ through warfare, trade and bilateral agreements (Mansel
2010: 15), it was never regarded as part of Europe and did not know its place
in the hierarchy of European powers until it was formally admitted as the
‘sick man of Europe’ in 1856 (Adanır 2005). In the narrative of the English
School on the expansion of international society, the Ottoman Empire was
the first Islamic entity to be admitted to international society in 1856 (Bull
and Watson 1984b). The ‘inclusion’ of the Ottoman Empire was followed by
Japan and China in the late nineteenth century, as non-Christian and non-
European civilizations gave the expanding European international society its
multicultural and ‘universal’ character (Naff 1984; Zhang 1991; Yurdusev
2003; Suzuki 2005). However, the idea that the West was keenly engaged in
establishing relations with other civilizations has usually been presented from
the perspectives of European powers. As Paul Keal (2000: 64) rightly points
out, the inclusion of non-Christian and non-European states is ‘a vital but
often neglected part of the story of international society’.
While ‘high imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century integrated different
cultures, civilizations and religions into a hierarchical international society,
this process was arguably the consequence of an unprecedented expansion
of European imperialism and domination to the other parts of the globe
in the nineteenth century. One intellectual legacy of this process is that it pro-
duced a Eurocentric model of the world that put the dominant West at the
centre and thereby tacitly relegated the rest of the world to subordinate positions
(Hobson 2004). As the editors of this volume argue in the Introduction, an
immanent critique of Eurocentrism is necessary not only to understand the
parallel historical experiences of non-European societies in other regions of
the world, but also to explain the existence of a plural international order.
 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana 35
Such an exercise is also useful in overcoming conventional understandings
of Ottoman history, which has reduced the complexity of the Ottoman
Empire’s political, territorial, military and economic structures into one of an
Islamic order (cf. Heywood 2002: 431). Until the emergence of a revisionist group
of Ottoman historians in the mid-1980s who published in English (Imber
2002; Heywood 2002; Finkel 2005; Mansel 2010), the approach to studying
Ottoman history was a product of ‘myths and stereotypes’ that portrayed the
Ottoman Empire as a social ‘outsider’ (Heywood 2002: 431), a view also
found in the narratives of the expansion of international society (Bull and
Watson 1984a). However, as Finkel (2005: xiv) describes it, the ‘black hole’ that
is Ottoman history stems mostly from the West’s ‘old narrative’ of the Otto-
man Empire, which is an integral part of producing orientalist discourses of the
Islamic past for many centuries (Halliday 2009: 1). In the twenty-first century,
it is a matter of urgency to remove the ‘iron curtain’ of misunderstanding
between the West and Muslims in general and the status of the Ottoman Empire
in the international order, in particular before the arrival of anarchical inter-
national society. Against the backdrop of these main ontological assumptions,
this chapter aims to contribute to the critiques of the Eurocentric approach of
the English School by examining the ‘rise and dominance’ of an Ottoman-
centred regional order at the crossroads of the Balkans in Europe, the Middle
East and North Africa, with specific reference to 1453–1774.
A critical examination of the Ottoman history during this period has the
added value of making empirical contributions to theoretical arguments on
three issues. First, the rise of Ottoman power in the Balkans between 1453
(the date of the Ottoman capture of Constantinople, present-day Istanbul)1
and 1774 (the symbolic date of the Ottoman decline after the Treaty of
Kutchuk Qainarji – Küçük Kaynarca) indicates that not only had the Eur-
opeans been in contact with the Ottomans as a non-European actor much
earlier than the nineteenth century, but also Muslim Turks were in a powerful
position after the capture of Constantinople to dictate their norms and rules
on the basis of European weakness in their relations with Western powers.
Second, the Ottoman dominance in regional politics between 1453 and 1683,
the so-called ‘Pax Ottomana’ (the Ottoman peace) in Anatolia, the Balkans, the
Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus, contests the assumption that
international relations between Europeans and non-Europeans is character-
ized by the domination of Western powers (Çiçek 2001; Ortaylı 2007: 7).
Third, the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic and economic relations as well as
warfare with major European powers (Venice, France, Austria-Habsburg and
England) in the West and non-European powers (Iran and Russia) in the East
help us to understand the existence of a plural international order before the
arrival of the anarchical European international society in the mid-nineteenth
century. It also shows that the Europeans were not the only actors in the
diplomatic relations of the Ottoman Empire.
The chapter proceeds as follows. The first part of this chapter provides a
critique of the expansion of international society as argued by the English
36 Ayla Göl
School of International Relations (IR), with particular reference to the place
and status of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it offers an alternative histor-
ical account of the rise of the Ottoman principality in Europe and the cultural
hybridity of the Ottoman system, which straddled both Western and Eastern
civilizations. The next section examines the Ottoman expansion towards
Europe after the capture of Constantinople, which highlights the superiority
of Ottomans and how the empire set up the regional order of the Pax Ottomana
and imposed their rules and norms on European powers. Here, I focus on the
dominance of the Ottoman-centred regional order – Pax Ottomana between
1453 and 1683 – and offer an empirical critique to Eurocentric narratives of IR,
which frequently assume Western ascendancy. The last section highlights the end
of Pax Ottomana and the retreat of the Ottoman Empire in the post-
Westphalia international system in the eighteenth century. The chapter concludes
by highlighting the ‘added value’ that the study of the Ottoman Empire offers for
more recent debates over civilizational interactions and pluralism, as opposed
to the longstanding claims within the English School that a common (Western-
based) culture is necessary for establishing international order.

Rethinking the expansion of international society and

the Ottoman Empire
The expansion of international society to the non-European world has become one
of the dominant themes of the English School. The first important work
examining the case of the Ottoman Empire was Thomas Naff’s contribution
to Bull and Watson’s (1984a) edited volume on the expansion of international
society.2 As highlighted by Bull and Watson (1984c: 427), the Ottoman Empire
was regarded as ‘not only non-European in culture and race, but the historic
enemy of the Christendom’. Neumann and Welsh (1991) subsequently introduced
a new research agenda for scholars of international society by arguing that
the Ottoman Empire was the ‘other’ in the definition of European identity. In an
influential book, The Evolution of International Society, Adam Watson (1992:
312) maintained that social contracts in the form of regulatory machinery
‘operated between the European grande republique and the Ottoman Empire
since the mid-nineteenth century. Such contracts have been constantly revised
and will continue to be revised’. It is clear that these scholars share the idea
that the Ottomans were a ‘social outsider’ with limited ‘societal’ interactions
with the European world.3 However, this idea needs to be rethought by ‘telling
the story’ of the empire from a non-Eurocentric perspective before the arrival
of European international society in the nineteenth century.

The rise of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire, as one of the ‘three empires in the Mediterranean
that survived to the twentieth century’ (Ortaylı 2006: 7), dominated an area
that not only included most of the territories of the eastern Roman Empire,
 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana 37
but also large portions of the Northern Balkans in Europe and the north Black
Sea coast at its zenith in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although
most of the frontier regions in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Near East
experienced continuous warfare, most of the other provinces in the Anatolian
hinterland enjoyed a long period of peace and prosperity under the rule of the
Ottoman military and bureaucracy (Uyar and Erickson 2009: 281).
The rise of the Ottoman principality (Osmanlı Beyliği) (the word Osmanlı
was corrupted to ‘Ottoman’ in English) from a small tribal polity to one of
the most powerful Muslim empires on the margins of Europe across three
continents was one of the most remarkable events of world history.4 Even
when the decline of the empire was first described as ‘the Eastern Question’ in
European history after the defeat of Ottomans against the Russians in 1774,
and then as ‘the sick man of Europe’ later in the mid-nineteenth century, the
empire’s rule still stretched over three continents: Asia, Europe and Africa.
Geopolitically, it included the parts of the Balkans, the entire Near East
(present-day Turkey and all the Arab states from Iraq to Libya), and North
Africa (modern Tunisia and Algeria still had at least some nominal connection
with Constantinople). This would continue until its ultimate disintegration after
the First World War (Albrecht-Carrie 1958: 41; Quataert 2000: 5).
Historically, it was in 1352 when the Ottoman Turks under the leadership
of Orhan Bey brought the Ottoman frontier to Constantinople, securing a
foothold for the Ottomans on the European continent for the first time. In the
fourteenth century, the Ottoman principality expanded into Europe under
ambitious sultans such as Murad I (1326–89) and Beyazid I (1360–1403). In
1389, ‘Serbia had first become an Ottoman vassal state after the battle of
Kosovo’ (Finkel 2005: 59). In 1396, the Ottomans won the Battle of Nicopolis
(Niğbolu savaşı) against an allied force from Hungary, France, Venice and
some other smaller contingents in Europe, which was widely considered as the
last large-scale crusade of Europe’s Middle Ages. These historical events are
particularly important not only to emphasize the advance of the victorious
Ottomans into the Balkans as a gate to Europe, but also to highlight the
weakness of European power.
Before the capture of Constantinople, the Ottoman policies towards Western
powers were not only characterized by warfare but also by the establishment
of diplomatic relations and alliances in the Mediterranean. The Ottoman
Sultan Bayezıd signed a trade agreement with Venice in 1388, and utilized it
for strategic purposes to prevent Venice’s involvement at the battle of Kosovo
when the Ottomans attacked and established rule in Serbia as a vassal state.
By maintaining good relations with the Turks, in return, Venice protected its
commercial interests in the Ottoman dominions and the Black Sea region.
Based on mutual commercial interests, Ottoman–Venetian relations . remained
friendly until the war between the two states from 1423 to 1430 (Inalcık 2009:
109; Shaw 1976: 47).
In the fifteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty under the rule of Murad II
(1421–51) undertook a period of great expansion both in the Balkans (such as
38 Ayla Göl
Thessaloniki, Macedonia and Kosovo) and in Anatolia . (such as Ankara and
Konya) (Uyar and Erickson 2009: 1; Ortaylı 2007; Inalcık 2010: 60). In short,
after the period of the establishment of the Ottoman principality (kuruluş
devri) between 1299 and 1452, the age of the Ottoman Empire (yükseliş devri)
between 1453 and 1683, Pax Ottomana, is generally regarded as the crucial
era that transformed the empire into a world actor (Kunt 1995a: 23–30, 78–82,
120). The Ottomans continued to grow and involve themselves increasingly in
European diplomacy at the turn of the sixteenth century. Under Beyazid II’s
rule (1481–1512), the external affairs of the empire were shaped by the mili-
tary campaigns in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and Anatolia that set the
stage for the Ottoman-centred regional order. The Ottoman–Venetian war
(1499–1502) was particularly significant for the beginning of Ottoman dom-
inance in the Mediterranean, which confirmed . the Sublime Porte’s status of a
‘sea power’ in the international arena (Inalcık 2010: 132–34).
At the height of their power, the Ottomans shared world history with
powerful European states such as Habsburg Spain, Elizabethan England and
the Holy Roman Empire, as well as Valois France and the Dutch Republic
(Quataert 2000: 3). During this period, as Ortaylı (2007: 13) argues, ‘Osmanlı’
was no longer the name of a tribal principality but an ‘imperial identity’ that
indicated until 1683 the superiority of the Ottoman Empire over their Eur-
opeans counterparts and the rise of Ottoman agency in world history. After
this date, the empire was in decline (çöküş devri) until 1922. Nevertheless, the
Ottoman Turks continued to be perceived as a ‘serious threat’ to European
collective security and identity until its complete disintegration and transition
to a modern Turkish nation-state in 1923.
In realpolitik terms, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the
Ottoman Empire was a de facto significant European power, controlling
between a quarter and a third of the continent (Rich 1999: 443). As Watson
(1992: 116) argues, the Islamic ‘Turkish Empire that survived into the twen-
tieth century’ had the most remarkable impact on the ‘European system and the
evolution of international society’. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a
crucial event that marked the rise of Ottomans and highlighted European
weakness. It elevated the small tribal Anatolian principality into an imperial
state by consolidating the expansion of Ottoman power into Europe and their
military superiority over European states. Among other civilizations, Naff
(1984: 145) states, the Ottoman Empire played a decisive role in two important
movements in Europe: ‘the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-
Reformation, which together with the Renaissance transformed European
society and led ultimately to the creation of an international society in Eur-
ope’s image’. As Finkel (2005: 58) highlights, the ‘fall of Constantinople to
the Ottomans was a matter of horror for the Christian West, which feared an
ever more aggressive policy of conquest’. From the European perspective, the
Turkish attack reinforced the image of the ‘dangerous Ottoman-Turk’ and
justified the defence of the Christian faith and identity (Neumann 1999: 45). Hence,
the capture of Constantinople by the Muslim Ottoman Turks represented
 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana 39
more than just the material loss of territory for the Europeans. It created the
image of the ‘barbarian Muslim Turk’ and a real ideational threat to European
security and Christian collective identity with reference to the ‘consciousness
of the Turk’ (Coles 1968: 145). In particular, it meant that the Christian
communities and churches of Asia Minor – Anatolia (Anadolu), which was
considered part of the Near Eastern origins of ‘modern Western civilization’ –
were no longer under ‘Christendom’ but Islamic Ottoman rule (Mann 2005:
31). Unsurprisingly, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 was regarded as a
‘world-historical accident’ (Mann 2005: 508) by European rulers and obser-
vers. In contrast, Turks celebrated this event and Ottoman historians considered
it the beginning of a ‘new era’ (Yeni Çağ) in their history, signalling their
superiority to the Christians (Kunt 1995a: 80–88).

Governing the Ottoman Empire

While the fall of Constantinople acted as a ‘homogenizing’ force for Eur-
opeans, it also had unprecedented consequences for Ottoman domestic and
foreign policies, in that they had to enter into much denser relations with both
their Eastern and Western neighbours. Domestically, a new social system
emerged after the conquest of Constantinople, where the weak Byzantine
state’s practice of granting a series of economic privileges and extraterritorial
rights to the Genoese, the Venetians and other Italian settlements in the fif-
teenth century was preserved and continued by the Ottoman state (Karpat
1973; Shaw 1976). Mehmed II (1444–46, 1451–81) kept some of these Italian
colonies’ special privileges in order to continue trade relations that had laid
the foundations of the millet system, which was initiated to organize the
remaining different religious and cultural groups. The millets were essentially
religious communities with cultural autonomy. The leaders of millets were not
‘considered alien to the system but an organic part of the bureaucratic appara-
tus. They maintained order and eventually collected taxes and fines’ (Karpat
1973: 32–33). Hence, through the millet system, the peasant masses were
linked to the central government, leaving little room for the use of religion by
local leaders in the Balkans and Anatolia.
As argued by Ortaylı (2007: 11–12), the millet system was the basis of Pax
Ottomana, which meant the harmonious existence of various millets under the
Ottoman rule. Pax Ottomana was based on two principles: ‘equality’ between
Muslims and non-Muslims (Hellenic-Christians and Jews); and ‘peace’ under
the Ottoman governance. Similarly, it is argued here that the Ottoman
Empire’s dealings with its European neighbours shared common features with
the millet system, in that religious differences were recognized and tolerated in
order to establish regional peace and stability. In their foreign relations, the
sultans did not demand cultural/civilizational assimilation as a prerequisite
for diplomatic relations, as the Europeans would do later in the nineteenth
century. Such an unorthodox interpretation of Ottoman history leads us to
rethink the agency of Ottoman Empire in European international relations.
40 Ayla Göl
Reinstating the agency of the Ottoman Empire in European affairs
The Ottoman Empire became significantly involved in the international relations of
Europe through warfare, diplomacy and trade relations, as well as its Islamic mis-
sion as the successor to the great Muslim caliphates of the past. However, as
Naff (1984: 143, emphasis added) emphasizes, the ‘logical conclusion ought to be
that the Ottoman Empire was, empirically, a European state. The paradox is that it
was not’. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire was never regarded as part of Europe
until the mid-nineteenth century despite the fact that it still had large territories in
the Balkans and was involved in European political and military politics. Never-
theless, it had to be taken into account as a major power by all the European states
as long as it was militarily powerful and perceived as a threat to international order.
The paradox was deepened by the policies of European powers to include the
Ottomans into ‘systemic’ relations but exclude them from ‘societal’ relations. The
house of Osman had a different socio-political organization – its millet system –
and a different religion and identity to the European states (Ortaylı 2006: 87–89).
For Europeans, the fact that the Ottoman Empire had different principles of exis-
tence, institutions, norms and values from those of Europe made it a social ‘out-
sider’ as well as an historical enemy. ‘In the world of the European mind, the
Ottomans were alternately terrible, savage and “unspeakable” and at the same
time’ it was pictured as a militarist, authoritarian and despotic oriental empire,
which was not recognized as a European state until 1856 (Quataert 2000: 7).
However, there is another side to the coin as well. As stated earlier, the
story of the ‘inclusion’ of the Ottoman Empire needs to be told from a new
perspective to challenge the prevailing Eurocentric character of international
society. In contrast to existing accounts that imply that the Ottoman Empire
was ‘excluded’ from the international order, it could be argued that the
Ottoman Empire did not want to be a part of European international society
or system during its climax. Arguably, the Ottoman sultans considered them-
selves superior to their Western counterparts and excluded the empire from
the European society of states, rather than being ‘excluded’ by Europeans. As
one of the most significant symbols of diplomatic relations, the history of
exchanging ambassadors between the Ottomans and European powers sup-
port this argument. Interestingly, the Sublime Porte accepted the first permanent
foreign diplomat, French Ambassador Jean de La Forêt, in 1535 and later English
Ambassador Sir William Harbourne in 1583 and other European ambassadors to
Constantinople at certain times for limited periods. Permanent Ottoman
ambassadors were not sent to Western states until the eighteenth century
(Shaw 1976: 181–82; Yurdusev 2009: 77).
Furthermore, our preoccupation with European international relations has
also blinded us to the simple fact that the Europeans were not the only actors
in Ottoman foreign affairs and the Ottomans also engaged in both Western
and Eastern relations. In the early sixteenth century, once military advance
and peace was secured on the European front, the Ottoman Empire would
expand towards the Anatolian front in the east. This took place during Bayezid II’s
 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana 41
(1481–1512) campaign against the Safavid Empire, which had taken advantage of
Ottoman passivity in Eastern Anatolia and pushed their Shiite proselytizing
efforts. In 1501, Shah Ismail (1501–24) came to power as the founder of the
Safavid Empire in Iran and captured the city of Tabriz. Extending his influ-
ence in Iran and to Azerbaijan, the shah also sent many provocateurs to
Anatolia in order to turn the Ottoman subjects against the empire. After-
wards, Shah Ismail launched a propaganda war against the Ottomans, which
contributed to leading the empire into political
. chaos and a fight for the
throne among young princes (Şehzadeler) (Inalcık 2010: 137).
In order to balance the threat from Safavids due to the increasing numbers of
Shiite rebellions against the Sunni Ottomans in the eastern front, the Ottoman
.
sultan accepted the Venetian request to sign a peace treaty in 1502 (Inalcık
2010: 135–36). After Yavuz Selim I (1512–20) dethroned his father with the
support of Janissaries in 1512, he continued to expand the empire’s eastern frontier
and defeated Shah Ismail in the Battle of Chaldıran two years later. Sultan
Selim I extended the eastern and southern frontiers of the empire between
1516 and 1518 by establishing Ottoman rule in Egypt, Jordan, northern Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and the Hejaz – the Holy cities of Mecca and
Medina. In Ottoman history, taking vassalage of most Arab lands indicated the
beginning of a new phase: the caliphate period, as will be explained later.
Hence, the ‘rule and dominance’ of the Ottomans in the Muslim world was
another sign of its rise to great power status, which once again challenges the
Eurocentric interpretation of international order, where the histories of
non-European empires and their agencies in world history to construct regional
orders have been consistently neglected. When the Ottomans defeated the
Mamluk sultanate in 1517, they imprisoned the last Abbasid caliph, Al-
Mutaakkil, in Cairo. Al-Mutaakkil was later sent to Constantinople, where he
surrendered the caliphate to Selim I, which started a new era of a caliphate
period in Ottoman history. Under the rule of Selim, the Ottoman territories
spread to three times their former size, but it was his successor, Suleiman the
Magnificent (1520–66), who further expanded upon Selim’s conquests to
make the empire a world power. The house of Osman thus not only became
the ‘protector’ of the Muslim world against the ‘infidel’ Christian world but
also established the Ottoman-centred regional order – Pax Ottomana – in the
Balkans and the Middle East until the seventeenth century.

The age of Pax Ottomana in practice

The idea of Ottoman peace – Pax Ottomana – was shaped by the principles of
equality and stability in the Balkans and the Arab Middle East. As indicated
with reference to the millet system, the Sublime Porte recognized the equality
between Muslims and non-Muslims – Christians and Jews – and, therefore,
the Ottomans dealt with the Muslim and Christian worlds in a similar manner.
While the Ottoman sultans prioritized state interests over cultural/civilizational
ones when dealing with European powers, the Arab Middle East had become the
42 Ayla Göl
centre of trade relations and enjoyed prosperity under the Pax Ottomana.
Unlike its European counterparts, the Sublime Porte did not insist on the cultural
homogeneity of the conquered provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
The principles of the Pax Ottomana in foreign affairs were supported by
the policies of Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century: his kanuns
(law) overruled Islamic law, which would not conflict with making a ‘formal
military alliance with an infidel’ (Shaw 1976: 98). Whereas the Europeans
took religious identity into account when forging alliances or entering into
diplomatic agreements, the Ottomans under Suleiman the Magnificent were
(perhaps surprisingly) less concerned about religious matters and civilizational
differences. Instead, economic and military interests were a primary source of
concern for the Ottomans. This tends to be ignored by Western scholars (Naff
1984: 148). Paradoxically, one can argue that although Sultan Suleiman had a
world outlook less constricted by his religion, Ottoman–European relations
were deep down partly influenced by European religious concerns, given that
the Ottomans continued to be perceived by Europeans as the ‘social outsider’
because of their Islamic identity and culture.
Furthermore, the age of Pax Ottomana strengthens the arguments about
the heterogeneity and multi-civilizational character of international orders.
Yet, in the context of international relations, the Eurocentric view of the
expansion of international society had led English School scholars to engage
with its universal character. As Linklater and Suganami (2006: 74–75) pointed
out, the institutions of international society had their origins in the European
civilizations, but their expansion to the rest of the world brought a multi-
cultural global international society. Bull and Watson (1984c: 429–33) pre-
viously argued that the European international society of the nineteenth
century had cultural homogeneity, while the global international society of the
late twentieth century became culturally heterogeneous. This interpretation of
the expansion of international society creates an existential paradox for the
English School: the universal and multi-civilizational character of interna-
tional society challenges the hegemony of its common European civilizational
origin (O’Hagan 2000: 115). The fact that the Ottoman-centred regional
order in the Balkans, the Arab Middle East and North Africa allowed the Turks
to produce a multicultural, ‘hybrid’ system of diplomacy supports the exis-
tence of the plurality of powers and cross-cultural engagement beyond the
European self-definition and positioning at the centre of international order.
One could argue that ‘the eventual globalisation of the European system was
not a foregone conclusion and it would theoretically have been possible for
the Ottoman-centred system to have become the global norm with Europe on
the periphery’ (Bennison 2009: 57).

Europe on the margin of the Pax Ottomana

The rise of the Ottoman Empire as a major power between Europe and the
Mediterranean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is emphasized in
 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana 43
this section to offer a critique of the two main claims of the English school:
first, the Ottoman Empire was never regarded as a great power in Europe.
Second, the Ottomans were ‘excluded’ from the international society because
they did not share the European corpus of common interests, values, rules,
laws, norms, customs, institutions and procedures until the mid-nineteenth
century. These claims overlook the fact that the Sublime Porte reached its
highest stage of dominance as an imperial power under Kanuni (the law giver)
Sultan Suleiman’s (Suleiman the Magnificent) reign and established the Ottoman-
centred regional order. There were three important characteristics that gave
the empire its supremacy: the Sublime Porte became an integral part of Eur-
opean diplomacy in the sixteenth century; a new system of capitulations was
established, within which the Ottoman set the rules of trade and diplomatic
relations with European powers; and the Ottoman policy of balancing
between Western and Eastern powers was developed, which institutionalized
the unique Ottoman diplomatic system that survived to the twentieth century.
First, the Sublime Porte became an integral part of European affairs and
diplomacy as a major power. This is particularly important to challenge the key
assumptions of the English School that the Ottoman Empire was not a ‘great
power’ and was only formally ‘included’ in the (European) international society
in 1856. The Ottoman supremacy can be traced back to the early sixteenth cen-
tury: the capture of Belgrade in 1521 and Rhodes in 1522 was a manifestation
of Suleiman’s westward strategy to advance into central Europe while Europe
was preoccupied with a war between the Habsburg Emperor Charles V and
Francis I (1515–47) of France (Shaw 1976: 91). The Ottoman victory of 1526
at the Battle of Mohacs against Hungary allowed the Sublime Porte to advance
further its interests in European affairs. The Ottomans were encouraged by the
general atmosphere in Europe when the Habsburgs, the pope and England formed
anti-French alliances that divided Christian unity. When Francis I appealed to
Suleiman for help to restore the balance of power, the Ottoman sultan provided
military and economic assistance to France against the Habsburgs. However, the
Ottoman–French alignment was short-lived, and Francis I and Charles V ended
their conflict under papal pressure to unite Europe against Islam (Shaw 1976: 99).
The attempt to unite Europe against Muslims clearly did not prevent the first
Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529. As noted earlier, the Ottoman attack at the doors
of Vienna strengthened the image of the ‘barbarian Muslim Turk’ as a real threat to
European security and Christian collective identity since the fall of Constantinople.
The supremacy of the Ottoman power was not only limited to military
affairs. It was also reflected in political and economic relations. For example, the
Ottomans imposed their own rules in their interactions with European mer-
chants. The 1536 French–Ottoman trade agreement was modelled on conces-
sions given to Venice and Genoa earlier by the Sublime Porte. The Ottoman
sultan was the only authority to decide the rules and norms of these concessions,
which. allowed the virtual freedom of French merchants from the Ottoman
law (Inalcık 2010: 283). It was the unilateral decision of the Ottoman sultan
that gave the right to the Europeans to travel and trade freely and to pay low
44 Ayla Göl
customs duties on imports and exports within Ottoman territories. ‘In essence,
this made what came to be called the community of Franks in Constantinople a
kind of millet and provided the mode for privileges subsequently bestowed on other
European nations wishing to share the trade of the Levant’ (Shaw 1976: 97). As
mentioned with reference to the millet system earlier, cultural and religious differ-
ences were acknowledged and tolerated in order to establish trade and diplo-
matic relations, which laid the foundations of Pax Ottomana.
Second, and accordingly, a new system of capitulations was established,
which not only highlights the supremacy of Ottomans but also the impor-
tance of economic interests in Ottoman-European relations. While analysing
the expansion of the international society, the economic dimensions that
shaped relations between the European and non-European worlds prior to the
European ascendance have not usually been taken into consideration (but see
Buzan 2004; Schouenborg 2013). The expansion of international trade to
non-European markets is, therefore, another important dimension to add to
the expansion of international society, which serves as another important
critique of what is lacking in the existing English School scholarship. Early
English School writers (see Naff 1984; Bull and Watson 1984a) largely dis-
regard the importance of economic interests in the form of capitulations
between Europeans and Ottomans. This results in ignoring the fact that as a
result of the convergence of commercial interests with the Ottomans, Europe
was – at least partially – an active participant in the Ottoman-centred
regional order, even before the ‘formal admittance’ of the Sublime Porte into
European international society in 1856.
It is important to note that the ‘Capitulation system’ that emerged during
the sixteenth century was qualitatively different from its nineteenth-century
counterpart, in that trading privileges were granted by the sultan alone as an
imperial favour, and not under the threat of European military coercion (as
was the case three centuries later). The trade agreements illustrated basic
conceptual differences between the Ottomans and the Europeans. For the
Ottoman Sultan, it was an ahdname (contract) that ‘was not regarded as a
formal alliance but rather a convenient instrument of policy, fashioned uni-
laterally against the Habsburgs’ (Naff 1984: 148). Technically, there were no
capitulations in the agreement. They were granted to France in 1569 only
after confirmation by an ahdname of Sultan Selim II (1566–74). The uni-
lateral character of these ahdnames reflected Suleiman the Magnificent’s view
of ‘the inferiority of Christian Europe’ and his belief that no European ruler
was equal to the Ottoman sultan (Naff 1984: 146–48). These capitulations
were granted by the Ottoman sultan unilaterally and they would . become
invalid at the sultan’s death unless reconfirmed by his successor (Inalcık 2010:
283). The unilateral character of capitulations indicated the self-perception of
the Ottoman sultan as superior to his European counterparts.
The privileges granted by the Ottoman Empire gave France commercial and
political pre-eminence in the Middle East, lasting into modern times (Shaw
1976: 177). More importantly, the Ottoman–French trade agreement had some
 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana 45
secret military and political terms that not only confirmed the existence of
what could be called the beginnings of a ‘capitulation system’, but also indi-
cated the first direct Ottoman–European interaction. In return, for the Otto-
mans, their alliances with France – usually against Venice and the Holy
Roman Empire – was most probably aimed at decreasing the possibility of a
European union in the form of another Crusade against the Turks, but it also
contributed towards increasing the role of the Ottoman Empire in maintain-
ing the European balance of power. This indicates the existence of enduring
agreements between the Ottoman Empire and France, and challenges the
claim that a (Western-based) common culture is necessary for establishing any
meaningful relations between different entities.
The third characteristic that defined the Ottoman-centred regional order was
that Suleiman the Magnificent developed a new policy of balancing Western and
Eastern powers: the possibility of a two-front war based on the Holy Roman
Empire and Safavid alliance was perceived as a real threat by the Ottoman
sultan, and therefore the Sublime Porte did not wage war against the one
without ensuring peace on the other front. Hence, the Sublime Porte did not
shape its foreign affairs based on cultural or religious differences but strategic
considerations. Moreover, the Ottoman Empire’s sheer size meant that it was
compelled to engage in diplomacy between two very different cultural entities
simultaneously: that between Western Christendom and the Islamic world.
The diplomatic practices that emerged as a result were not necessarily Islamic
in character, but instead based on the bestowing of trading privileges and
peace treaties. They were able to deal flexibly with different religious/cultural
polities that bordered the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman historians agree that
instead of either imposing its own structures or imitating the Western or
Eastern models, the Ottomans had a tendency to preserve and transform
existing practices into systems of their own (Kafadar 1995; Uyar and Erick-
son 2009; Ortaylı 2006: 16). Consequently, the Europeans were thus just one
among many other participants in the series of diplomatic relations that the
Sublime Porte had established under Pax Ottomana.

Acceptance of Ottoman superiority

In the late sixteenth century, the Sublime Porte continued its involvement in world
politics by engaging systematic wars against Europe, as mentioned earlier.
The Ottoman policy under the rule of Sultan Murad III (1574–95) was to
gain the support and friendship of England, which already had a more direct
interest in Mediterranean affairs. While Ottoman naval power was beginning
to decline as a result of a series of costly battles in 1569–71, England was
expanding its naval power and international commercial interests, within
which Anglo–Ottoman ‘formal diplomatic and commercial relations began in
1583 when Murad III granted Queen Elizabeth I a treaty of peace and
friendship’ (Horniker 1942: 289). When Queen Elizabeth I addressed Sultan
Murad III as the ‘Great Turk’, the sultan responded by implying that the
46 Ayla Göl
Ottoman Empire was not only an ally of England but also the protector of
the queen. A registry copy of the letter from Murad III to Elizabeth in 1580
informing her that the privileges had been granted, ended as follows (Skilliter
1977: 115–16):

And you, for your part, shall be steadfast in your submission and obedi-
ence to our door of felicity, and never cease from continually submitting
and imparting the items of news which have occurred in those parts and
of which you have been informed.

Afterwards, two English ambassadors were sent to Constantinople in 1583 in

order to obtain a capitulation agreement. Interestingly, we do not see much evi-
dence of the notions of European superiority that were to colour Europe’s
relations with the non-Western world, and still do to this very day. Queen
Elizabeth appears to have demonstrated a degree of deference towards the sultan’s
power, and the latter’s non-Christian identity does not appear to have been a
hindrance towards establishing commercial and diplomatic relations on
Ottoman terms. Similarly, religious concerns do not seemed to have stopped
Murad III from accepting emissaries from an ‘infidel’ country, provided they
were prepared to accept notions of Turkish superiority. A new capitulations
agreement was signed between the English and the Ottoman empire on 3
May 1590, giving. England a similar position to that of France in the trade of
the Near East (Inalcık 2010: 308). Although (apart from the visit of the
Ottoman Ambassador Mustafa to England at the Court of James I in 1607)
the incidence of Turkish emissaries visiting England was remarkably low,
the regular visits of English merchants and diplomats to the Sublime Porte
ensured the continuance of this inter-cultural exchange (Ellis 1824: 83–
88). English merchants were allowed to travel and trade freely in Ottoman
dominions, and formed the Levant Company, which established the English
commercial interests in the Middle East that lasted into modern times (Shaw
1976: 182).
These historical facts can be interpreted as indications that Ottomans were
not interested in taking part in the diplomatic system of Europe but saw
themselves as superior and accepted foreign ambassadors unilaterally, on Otto-
man terms. Crucially, the Europeans did not insist on reciprocal exchanges of
diplomats (as they would do later in the nineteenth century), as the Ottoman
Empire was reluctant to establish a permanent diplomatic presence in Eur-
opean capitals during this time. It is therefore arguable that they were tacitly
accepting the Ottoman sultans’ visions of foreign relations. As long as the
Ottoman Empire remained sufficiently powerful, this political arrangement
continued, and was capable of dealing with most diplomatic interactions that
took place between the European powers and the Sublime Porte for more
than two centuries.
It could, of course, be argued that the somewhat unilateral nature by which
the Ottoman rulers imposed these arrangements made it difficult for true
 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana 47
‘societal’ relations to emerge between the two parties. Such views could also
be reinforced by the fact that religious and cultural identities seem to matter a
lot more to the Europeans when compared to the Ottomans, who (in similar
fashion to their millet system) were quite prepared to deal with this matter
more flexibly. For instance, when the Ottoman armada was ready at the
Albanian coast to join France in the invasion of Italy in 1537, the Turks –
who had regarded the Ottoman–French trade treaty of 1536 as a coalition of
forces (Shaw 1976: 98) – were surprised that the French failed to keep their
promises. For France and other European powers, the Ottoman–French
treaty was a temporary ceasefire with the Ottomans,
. and was not regarded as
‘a treaty or alliance’ (alliance ou société) (Inalcık 2010: 158). This was prob-
ably the first lesson to be learned by the Ottoman sultan about the nature of
European politics that ‘infidel friends would abandon all agreements when it
suited their interests in Europe to do so’ (Shaw 1976: 98). The change of
alliances indicated that it was the power of the pope and Christian ethos (‘la
république chretienne’) that prevented France from forming . a military alliance
with a Muslim ruler against another Christian country (Inalcık 2010: 158).
While these historical facts serve as a powerful reminder not to overstate
our case for the emergence of deep social relations between the Ottoman
Empire and the European world, this does not mean that the construction of
an international order was impossible or did not take place. Here, it is worth
reminding ourselves that European unity against the ‘Muslim other’ at times
only came about as a result of papal pressure (as noted above), and in its
absence the Christian Europeans were more than capable of entering some
form of diplomatic relations with the supposedly ‘infidel’ and ‘dangerous’
Muslim Turks. Furthermore, the distinction between ‘systemic’ and ‘societal’
relations as conceptualized by the English School is ultimately unhelpful: as
Alan James (1993: 273) argues, ‘any meaningful interactions between two
polities is extremely difficult without some societal relations emerging at some
point, and it is equally hard to establish some objective “tipping point” when
“systemic” relations become “societal’”. The so-called ‘inclusion’ of the
Ottomans into European relations strongly challenges the English School’s
theoretical debates and binary juxtaposition between international ‘society
and system’ (James 1993), which simplify the complex socio-political and
economic relations that took place across historical and religious-cultural
lines. Neither does the Ottoman Empire’s unilateral imposition of the rules of
diplomacy vis-à-vis the Europeans, nor its initial reluctance to ‘assimilate’
itself into European rules of international engagement, suggest that the Turks
and the Europeans were incapable of establishing any form of socio-political
order between themselves.

The end of Pax Ottomana

The Ottoman Empire continued to dictate the terms of interaction vis-à-vis
the Europeans, despite its alleged ‘exclusion’ from European international
48 Ayla Göl
society. This would only change when its decline finally forced both the Eur-
opeans and the Ottomans to alter their stances. In the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, the Ottomans continued waging systematic wars against Europe. It is
worth emphasizing that during Sultan Mehmed IV’s reign of 39 years (1648–
87), the empire’s territory had reached the largest in its history, and the
second siege of Vienna in 1683 became the symbol of the involvement of the
Ottoman Empire in European affairs.
Nevertheless, the decline of the Sublime Porte was inevitable, due to inter-
nal crises and the political intrigues within the Ottoman palace. The defeat of
Ottoman forces by the Austrian and Polish armies in Vienna signalled the end
of Ottoman military superiority, which, to a certain extent, decreased the
perception of the Ottoman threat to Christian collective identity and security.
As Quataert (2000: 2) argues, 1683 marked the ‘permanent reversal of power
relations between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires’, and after this date the
‘Ottomans never threatened Central Europe again’. Mustafa II (1695–1703)
continued to engage in military campaigns against the Habsburg monarchy,
the Polish-Lithuanian union and the republic of Venice during his reign. After
the defeat of the Ottomans by the victorious European powers, a two-month
peace congress between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League – including
Austria, Poland, Venice and Russia – took place. The congress was concluded
by the signature of the Treaty of Karlowitz – Karlofça – in 1699, ending the
Austro–Ottoman war of 1683–97. It was the first treaty in which the Otto-
mans lost their territories and, therefore, it has been accepted as a landmark
for the beginning of the Ottoman decline. Thereafter, although the Ottomans
struggled to dominate the territories in the Balkans, they stayed in control of
south-eastern Europe – including the modern-day states of Bulgaria, Serbia,
Greece, Romania and others – for 200 more years (Quataert 2000: 2).
The impact of the international treaty of 1699 was rather paradoxical in
Ottoman–European relations, in that while the Ottoman state was seen as
in decline, it was given an equal status to take part in European affairs. It was in
1699, when Europeans gained self-confidence about their military superiority
after the defeat of Ottoman forces, that they decided to invite ‘the dangerous
Ottoman-Turk’ to participate in a European congress for the first time (Naff
1984: 150; Neumann 1999: 51). After this date, the survival of the Sublime
Porte in the European state system dominated the agenda of European
powers for an entirely different reason. The new rising power in the East was
the Russian Empire. Historically, Ottoman–Russian rivalry was shaped by the
dictates of geography, at the heart of which was a struggle for the control of
the Turkish straits. This struggle caused the animosity that precipitated 13 Otto-
man–Russian wars over the course of four centuries, the first in 1676 and the last
in 1914 (Rubinstein 1982: 1–2). Consequently, the Sublime Porte continued its
historically rooted ‘policy of balance’, which was based on securing a Western
ally against the Russian threat in the East (Armaoğlu 1987: 43). Moreover,
the new diplomacy was compatible with rules and principles of the European
balance of power system. The European diplomatic relations evolved around
 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana 49
the so-called ‘Eastern question’ over the next two centuries. As Lenczowski
(1990: 32) argues, ‘more concretely, the Eastern Question may be narrowed
down to the manoeuvring of various European powers to prevent Russia
from encroaching too much upon the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’.
Thereafter, the Ottomans retreated from European politics and closely
involved themselves in eastern affairs against the Russian threat. Hence, the
Europeans were thus just one among many other participants in the series of dip-
lomatic relations that the Sublime Porte had established under its rule. For instance,
when Russia took advantage of internal turmoil in Iran and attacked it in
1724, the Ottomans launched a military campaign to protect Iran. The
Russo–Ottoman treaty was signed in Constantinople, which left Azerbaijan to
the Ottomans and Dagestan to Russia. In internal politics, Ottoman history
had been identified with cultural reforms – the Tulip Era (Lale Devri) as a
time of literary, cultural and artistic improvement – under Ahmed III
(1703–30), and the military reforms of Mahmud I’s (1730–54) reign. During
this period, the empire’s external relations were shaped by continuing wars
with Iran over the control of the Caucasus. During Sultan Mustafa III’s
(1757–74) rule, the Ottoman–Russian rivalry continued in the Near East. The
Ottoman defeat by the Russians in the war of 1768–74 led the Sublime Porte
to recognize the need for European allies to protect the integrity of the
Empire once again. When the war was concluded with the Treaty of Kutchuk
Qainarji (Küçük Kaynarca) in 1774, it became the most significant symbol of
the Ottoman decline. According to this treaty, it was formally accepted that
Russia would have a permanent ambassador in Constantinople and it would
also have the right to protect all the Orthodox Christian members of the
Ottoman Empire (Kurat 1990: 28).
The treaty of 1774 was also of great importance in the history of the Near
East. Crimea gained its independence. For the first time, the Ottomans agreed to
pay war compensation to another country. This set the tone of relations
between Russia and the Ottoman Empire until 1914; it established the prin-
ciple of foreign interference in the Ottoman Empire, and with the capture by
Russia of some of the coastline of the Black Sea, it led to Russia’s involve-
ment with the straits, which was not removed until the twentieth century. The
stark reality following this treaty was that the Ottoman Empire was in decline and
could no longer be defended without the support of European allies. However,
the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid I (1774–89) turned the Treaty of Karlowitz
into a diplomatic victory in the east by claiming the power of the Ottoman
caliph as protector of Muslims in Russia (Kunt 1995b: 46–49). As discussed
earlier, it was in 1774 that the title of the caliph was used for the first time
and acknowledged as having political power outside Ottoman borders.
Paradoxically, the significance of the Ottoman caliph increased when the
Ottoman borders were shrinking and European politics were being gradually
‘secularized’ after the establishment of the Westphalian system. ‘The uni-
versality of the Ottoman caliphate became a fait accompli in the nineteenth
century’ as a consequence of the need of Muslim leaders to unite around one
50 Ayla Göl
central institution in order to oppose Europeans (Karpat 2001: 49). Meanwhile,
Britain and France established close relations with the Ottoman Empire as
continuation of the earlier capitulations agreements throughout the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; what was different, however, was
that trade privileges were demanded by the European powers and awarded with
reluctance from the increasingly feeble Sublime Porte. Selim III (1789–1807) was
the first sultan who recognized Ottoman weakness and the importance of being
part of the European states system. Choosing to stay out of European diplo-
matic institutions was becoming less of an option, and the Sublime Porte
established permanent embassies in major European capitals. Hence, the first
Ottoman Embassy was opened in London in 1793 as an indication of opening
diplomatic channels and communication between the two empires and civilizations
(Neumann 1999: 53; Yurdusev 2004: 5).
During the new phase of Ottoman-European relations, Selim III benefited
from Anglo–French support to achieve his military reforms of the New Order
(Nizami Cedit) period (Kürkçüoğlu 2004: 132). As discussed earlier, Britain
and France established their commercial and political pre-eminence in the
Middle East that would survive to modern times. It was not an historical
coincidence that Britain became the major trading partner with the Anglo–
Ottoman Convention of 1838 and the reforms in domestic politics and the system
of taxation were promised by the Ottoman state in 1839 and 1856 (Quataert
1994: 764). The Treaty of Paris was signed in 1856 to end the Crimean War of
1853 between the Russians and the Ottomans, and had a distinctive meaning
for Ottoman–European relations. On the one hand, it recognized the continual
disintegration and decline of the empire; on the other, the Sublime Porte was
‘admitted’ to the European society of states (Ortaylı 1987: 90). It is important
to emphasize that the signature of the Treaty of Paris in 1856 was closely
related to this economic dimension and should not only be interpreted in
political terms as the ‘formal admittance’ of the Ottoman Empire into the
expanding European international society. When the Ottoman ruling elite
decided to sign the Treaty, they could not anticipate its long-term socio-economic
consequences. As Braudel (1984: 483) argues, after this date, Ottoman inter-
actions with the industrialized, capitalist and expansionist Europe through
trade and diplomacy would sound the death knell of its greatness as an Islamic
empire.
The final and the longest century of the Ottoman Empire was the nine-
teenth century, which was acknowledged as a period of reform and revolution
(Ortaylı 1987). In foreign affairs, the Ottoman Empire lost its status as a
‘great power’ in Europe when all its Balkan territories were stripped away by
the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 (Quataert 2000: 2). Nevertheless, Ottoman rule
remained in the Middle East and North Africa until the end of the First
World War. In domestic politics, reforms were introduced to save the empire,
but many agree that the imperial reforms accelerated the collapse of the
empire and precipitated the Turkish Revolution of 1908 that led to the rise of
Turkish nationalism and the establishment of the modern Turkish state in
 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana 51
1923. However, as Zhang (1991: 9) argues in the case of China, it is
important to recognize that these reforms constituted what Bull described as
‘domestic processes of political and social reform which “narrowed the dif-
ferences between Asian and African political communities and the political
community of the West, and which contributed to a process of convergence”’.

Concluding remarks
This chapter has forwarded an alternative interpretation of Ottoman history
by outlining the 400-year prelude to its formal ‘inclusion’ in the (Eur-
opean) international society in 1856. The historical analysis of this chapter
seeks to contribute to theoretical arguments by adding the value of the
empirical study of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Three general findings stand
out: first, the chapter supports and advances the general critique of Euro-
centrism in the English School approach to understanding the expansion
of international society by emphasizing the necessity of a pluralist
approach to the study of international relations that goes beyond the arri-
val and subsequent ‘expansion of international society’ in the mid-nineteenth
century. Based on the critique of Eurocentric perspectives of this particular
historical epoch, it argues that instead of being ‘excluded’ by the Europeans
from the European society of states, historically, the powerful Ottoman
Empire did not seek to be ‘included’ in the European international society or
system. Rather, some European states participated in Pax Ottomana on the
conditions and terms dictated by the Ottomans. Such an interpretation high-
lights the agency of the Ottoman Empire as an independent and dominant
non-European actor in its own constructed international order in a certain
historical period.
Second, the ‘rise and dominance’ of Pax Ottomana at the crossroads of the
Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa between 1453 and 1683 shows not
only how Europe was, in fact, at the margins of the Ottoman-centred regional
order, but also highlights the existence of a plural international order, where
the European international system/society was just one of many international/
civilizational orders with which the Ottoman Empire interacted. Moreover,
the supremacy of Ottoman rule was historically evident in three key events: the
capture of Constantinople, the establishment of the caliphate period and the
capitulations granted unilaterally by the Ottoman sultans. These events put
the Ottomans in a powerful position to dictate their norms and rules on the
basis of European weakness.
Hence, from the Ottoman Empire’s perspective, it is erroneous to assume
that the Sublime Porte was never a part of the ‘European international order’,
as diplomatic relations between the two had continued almost uninterrupted
for more than 200 years. Conventional analyses stress that only after the
Ottoman Empire’s decline and its ability to exercise its agency towards the
Europeans diminished could it be considered to have become a ‘participant’
(albeit one whose position was often questioned) in European international
52 Ayla Göl
society. This analysis is in line with Karl Polanyi’s (1957: 8) argument that in
1856:

… the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was declared essential to the

equilibrium of Europe, and the Concert of Europe endeavoured to
maintain that empire; after 1878, when its disintegration was deemed
essential to that equilibrium, its dismemberment was provided for in a
similarly orderly manner.

Of course, this perspective only serves to reinforce the view that the accep-
tance of European/Western norms and rules is ‘the only game in town’ when
it comes to establishing an international order on the basis of shared values
and culture. This, arguably, is the consequence of the Ottoman ‘barbarian’
image due to its Muslim identity and culture, as mentioned with reference to
orientalist views of Islam. More importantly, it was a consequence of an
unequal expansion of European imperialism and unprecedented domination
over the other parts of the world in the nineteenth century. One can argue
that while the expansion of (European) international society brought different
cultures, civilizations and religions together into a hierarchical international
society, it also produced binary oppositions by placing Europe at the centre
and the rest of the world at the periphery. Such a hierarchical order implied
the imposition of Western culture, norms and rules over the non-Western
world and left no room to acknowledge the complexity and interdependence
of interactions between Western and non-Western civilizations.
Third, by highlighting the relative lack of Ottoman concern towards civili-
zational/religious differences in their relations between both Western and
Eastern civilizations, I hope to have demonstrated that ‘coexistence and sym-
biosis’ between Islamic and Christian civilizations was ‘possible and probably
more common’ for centuries before the arrival of (European) international
society in 1856 (Kafadar 1995: 19). This seems to indicate that international
order need not be based on a ‘common culture’, but can, and has, at least in
Pax Ottomana, had a multicultural and heterogeneous basis. The English
School has often concerned itself with the question of the need for a common
civilizational/cultural basis for the establishment of international order. Such
debates have at times been undergirded (albeit implicitly) by the belief that the
acceptance and internalization of ‘Western values’ will bring about stability
and moral progress in an anarchical international realm, but does international
politics have to be established on the basis of Western cultural homogeneity?
As shown in other chapters in this volume, we have seen that non-European
polities and the Europeans were at times perfectly capable of entering into
diplomatic relations in the absence of cultural domination, and in some cases
the non-Europeans were able to impose their value systems on the latter. The
Ottoman case, however, demonstrates that while the Ottoman rulers did dic-
tate the terms of diplomacy vis-à-vis the Europeans, they were surprisingly
flexible when it came to accommodating cultural/civilizational differences.
 Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana 53
Despite the fact that its territorial borders neighboured both the Western and
Eastern worlds, this neither resulted in a ‘clash of civilizations’, nor did it
prove to be an obstacle to establishing some sort of political order. This holds
important implications for the conventional emphasis on civilizational
homogeneity as a prerequisite for some form of international order.
By way of concluding, and with reference to the contemporary ‘clash of
civilizations’ thesis between the West and Islam (Huntington 1993, 1996), the
weight of empirical evidence discussed in this chapter indicates that the
‘inclusion’ of an Islamic empire in (European) international society needs to
be analysed within a broader historical context, rather than on the basis of the
nineteenth-century Eurocentric standards of ‘civilization’. The interactions of Eur-
opean and non-European polities before the expansion of European interna-
tional society shows that there was a process of collaboration and acculturation
as well as conflict of their relevant cultural systems. In the twenty-first century,
such an historical claim is too important to be overlooked, given the challenges
of post-9/11 global politics.

Notes
1 The name Istanbul was not officially and exclusively used until the 1930s. The
result of this has been a confusion and interchangeable use of Constantinople and
Istanbul (particularly by Western scholars). In this chapter, I use the historical
name of Istanbul, Constantinople, for the sake of consistency.
2 The concept of international society can be found in the classic writings of Hedley
Bull, Martin Wight, Adam Watson and John Vincent as ‘the legitimate founders’
of the English School of International Relations (Dunne 1998: 15; Linklater and
Suganami 2006: 41–42). These scholars characterized a society of states that ori-
ginated in Europe and was based on common norms, values and institutions as
identified by Bull (Linklater and Suganami 2006: 108–13).
3 This classic differentiation was based on Hedley Bull’s classification of system and
society in IR literature. According to Bull, ‘(a) system of states (or international
system) is formed when two or more states have sufficient contact between them,
and have sufficient impact on one another’s decisions, to cause them to behave – at
least in some measure – as parts of a whole’ (Bull 1995: 9). Furthermore, in his
analysis, the definition of international society refers to a society of sovereign
states. ‘A society of states (or international society) exists when a group of states,
conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the
sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their
relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions’. He
then argues that certain common interests, common values and certain rules bind
the members of an international society. ‘At the same time they co-operate in the
working of institutions such as the forms of procedures of international law, the
machinery of diplomacy and general international organisation, and the customs
conventions of war’ (Bull 1995: 13).
4 The official name of the Ottoman state (Osmanlı devleti) was Devlet-i ‘Aliyye
Osmaniyye (Sublime Ottoman State – translated as the Sublime Porte into Eng-
lish). It is generally agreed by historians that the people known as the Ottomans
(Osmanlı or Ottoman Turks) settled in Asia Minor (Anadolu – Anatolia) . in the
mid-1200s as a Turkic tribal group led by Ertuğrul Gazi (1198–1281) (Inalcık 2010;
Ortaylı 2007: 13). Amongst his three sons, Osman Bey (Osman I, 1258–1326)
54 Ayla Göl
declared his independence from the Seljuk sultanate. Although the foundation of
the Osmanlı Beyliği is generally accepted as 1299 there is no agreement on the
exact establishment date of the Osmanlı Beyliği as. an independent principality.
While Uyar and Erickson (2009: 11) suggest 1301, Inalcık (2010: 17) suggests 27
July 1302 as the correct foundation date of the state. Although the term Osmanlı –
Ottoman – originated with Osman Bey it was his son Orhan Gazi (1281–1360) who
transformed. a principality into a ‘sovereign entity’ by capturing the city of Bursa in
1326 and Iznik in 1330 in a victorious battle against the Byzantine Empire (please
note that the term ‘sovereignty’ is not used in the sense of European sovereign
states here).
3 Curious and exotic encounters
Europeans as supplicants in the Chinese
Imperium, 1513–1793
Yongjin Zhang

Introduction
In receiving Lord Macartney’s mission in 1793 in the Imperial Summer
Palace in Chengde outside Beijing, the ageing Emperor Qianlong, already in
his early eighties, wrote a poem, part of which reads:

Formerly Portugal presented tribute;

Now England is paying homage.
They have out-travelled Shu-hai and Heng-chang;
My ancestor’s merit and virtue must have reached their distant shores.
Though their tribute is commonplace, my heart proves sincerely.
Curios and the boasted ingenuity of their device I prize not.
Though what they bring is meagre, yet,
In my kindness to men from afar I make generous return,
Wanting to preserve my good health and power.
(Hsu 1990: 159)

Three ideas to which the ageing Chinese emperor alluded here are important
for our considerations. First, the Qing Imperium was a Chinese world order
presided over by Imperial China and its Son of Heaven, while also being open
to the participation of non-Chinese peoples and states. Second, one of the
central institutional constructs of this Pax Sinica was the tribute system,
which regulated and made possible such participation. Third, Europe, and in
the first instance Portugal, came to participate in this Pax Sinica as one of
many tribute-bearing states. What the ageing emperor could not foretell is the
symbolic significance of the value that the Macartney Mission represented
and its importance in shaping the history of Imperial China’s relations with
Britain and with an expanding European international society, not to mention
the coming clashes between two international orders and civilizations, Chi-
nese and European, in the mid-nineteenth century.
Emperor Qianlong’s rejection of the Macartney Mission, in the words of
James Hevia (1995: 231), is symbolic of ‘the Qing Court’s refusal to allow
British penetration of China in British terms’. With hindsight, Lord
56 Yongjin Zhang
Macartney’s ill-fated mission signals unquestionably the beginning of an end
of an historical pattern of interactions between China and Europe. The
existing literature and historiography of China’s international relations in both
English and Chinese, have, for different political and pedagogical reasons,
concentrated overwhelmingly on what might be called the ‘post-Macartney’
period, particularly after the Opium War of 1839–42, when the terms of
China’s international engagement were dictated by the expanding European
international society. China’s international relations, in other words, started
with the Opium War, when the West brought the international to the Chinese
world. Traditional China had foreign relations, not international relations
(Teng and Fairbank 1954; Fairbank 1968). Historical accounts of interactions
between China and Europe in the period between the sixteenth and nine-
teenth centuries have been conveniently consigned to the history of intellec-
tual and cultural exchanges (see, for example, Zhou 2010; Zhang 2009;
Mungello 1999; Waley-Cohen 1999; Zhou 1987). They rarely feature in any
meaningful way in the International Relations (IR) literature concerning
China. This is both an anomaly and a puzzle.
What underlies this problematic anomaly in the existing literature is a
subterranean Eurocentrism in the interpretation of world history, as other
chapters in this book also contend. This is true of even international theories
that put particular emphasis on the historical context of theorizing. Take, for
example, the grand historical narratives about the expansion of European
international society articulated by the English School scholars (Bull and Watson
1984a; Buzan and Little 2010). In these narratives, the European expansion
into East Asia becomes meaningful only when the European society of states
globalized the Westphalian system of sovereign states in East Asia and when
the European standard of ‘civilization’ was imposed on China after 1842, and
on Japan after 1853 (Gong 1984a; Suzuki 2005). It is curiously silent about the
historical relationship between Europe (the West) and East Asia (the rest)
before the West established its global domination, when it was the Chinese
and other non-European actors that regularly dictated terms of engagement
for European states and non-state agents alike in various regional interna-
tional orders beyond Europe. Existing IR scholarship pays insufficient atten-
tion, if any, to a long historical period of sustained interaction between
Europe and East Asia before the beginning of the nineteenth century when
East Asian states, China and Japan in particular, exercised considerable
agency in defining norms and principles of international orders in their own
regions (as Suzuki’s chapter in this book also shows).
For nearly three centuries after the first group of Portuguese traders ven-
tured into the Chinese waters and landed on the territory of Imperial China
in the early sixteenth century, the interactions between China and Europe at
the systemic and societal levels – economic, social and even political/military –
were sustained and significant. Europeans – be they missionaries (the Jesuits,
the Augustinians, the Dominicans and the Franciscans) or traders (the Por-
tuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the British) – sought to participate in
 Curious and exotic encounters 57
Pax Sinica with determination, diligence and enthusiasm. Sometimes this
participation took place on terms of parity and equality, but more often
Europeans had to accept, albeit reluctantly, inferiority vis-à-vis the Chinese
within the social structure of the hierarchy of the Chinese order. The pene-
tration of exotic Chinese goods and the diffusion of the images and ideas of
China as a curious land into Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies both also stand as testimony of such interactions (Zhang 2009). Even
after the formation of the Westphalian system in Europe in 1648 and with
accelerated European expansion into East Asia, the two international socie-
ties, Chinese and European, enjoyed a kind of peaceful co-existence for
almost 200 years until the Opium War in 1839–42.
This chapter provides a brief analytical account of the experience of three
groups of Europeans – namely, pioneering Jesuits, warriors and merchants,
and embassies and diplomats – and their encounters with and participation in
the Chinese Imperium before the rise of the West. More specifically, this
chapter refers to the period between 1513 (when the first Portuguese reached
the Chinese shores and landed near Canton) and 1793 (when Lord Macart-
ney returned to London after his ill-fated China embassy). If the Jesuits were
pioneers in cultural and social engagement in Imperial China as a ‘curious’
land, European traders sought to establish sustained economic and trade
exchanges with the exotic empire to exploit its immense wealth. European
diplomatic initiatives, on the other hand, accompanied the endeavour of these
cultural and economic agents and sought to support them. The examinations
of these European attempts highlight a variety of approaches in early Eur-
opean encounters with rich intellectual and cultural traditions of Imperial
China, its social customs and institutions, its intricate trading institutions and
regulations, and its diplomatic tradition and practices.
I seek to advance three key arguments in this chapter. First, the European
expansion into China started in the sixteenth century not the nineteenth cen-
tury, which was accompanied by notable contestations, mediations and
negotiations between Chinese and European worldviews. During this period
of European expansion, the two world orders, Chinese and European, seem to
have managed a sustained and prolonged period of peaceful coexistence, with
only isolated instances of violent conflict between the sixteenth and the nine-
teenth centuries. Second, there is no historical evidence to suggest that in the
period under consideration, the European society of states made any con-
scious efforts to draw Imperial China into the international order of its own
construction. On the contrary, European state and non-state agents partici-
pated in the East Asian order primarily defined by local interests, institutions
and agendas. Their participation plays a significant role in reinforcing and
reproducing the hierarchical social structure of the Chinese world order in
this period. Third, such political, cultural and commercial participation by
both state and non-state European agents in the Imperial Chinese political,
social and economic orders is highly contingent upon the Europeans accom-
modating, adapting to and/or accepting norms, values, rules and institutions
58 Yongjin Zhang
in the prevailing Chinese world order. In other words, it is Imperial China that
dictates the terms of engagement. In this light, the Macartney Mission in
1792–93, as the first British embassy to China, can be regarded as among the
last attempts by the Europeans as supplicants to seek their participation in
the institutional order presided over by Imperial China. This is in sharp con-
trast to the pattern of engagement and conflict between China and the Eur-
opean international society in the post-Macartney period, when the latter
imposed by force and coercion the Westphalian institutions on East Asia,
dismantling in the process the traditional East Asian international order (Hsu
1960; Zhang 1991; Wang 2005).

Pioneering Jesuits
The contribution of the Jesuits as cultural agents to the intellectual and cul-
tural exchanges between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries has been widely acknowledged (Rowbotham 1942; Treadgold 1973;
Young 1983; Mungello 1989). The lasting impact that the Jesuits have exerted
is to be found more as an intellectual venture rather than as a spiritual one.
The Jesuits, for example, provided Europe with the first substantive informa-
tion about Chinese culture and society and made an indispensable contribution
to the emergence of Sinology – the study of China – as a discipline in Europe
(Millar 2007; Zhang 2009). They also introduced European science and Wes-
tern learning into China (Peterson 1998; Du and Han 1993). As the first
group of Europeans who sought sustained social contact with and penetration
into the Chinese Imperium, the difficulties presented to the Jesuits were for-
midable, as they were confronted with an advanced culture such as they had
never seen before. Imperial China’s social structure and the Confucian socie-
tal configuration made such an accommodation even more demanding.
Accommodating Christianity to indigenous culture took on a completely dif-
ferent meaning in this social and historical context.
The secret of the Jesuits’ success, if any, lies in their attempts to participate
in Imperial China’s social, political and religious orders through accom-
modation, adaptation and even integration before carrying out their Christian
mission of conversion. The genesis of the Jesuit policy of accommodation in
East Asia is often traced back to St Francis Xavier, one of the founding
members of the Jesuit order. Xavier’s experience in Japan in 1549–52, in par-
ticular, convinced him not only of the need for the Jesuits to learn to speak,
read and write in native language and to compromise with local culture, but
also the imperative to have great talents among the Jesuit missionaries so that
they could meet the locals on equal terms intellectually, if the mission were to
be successful. ‘It is self-evident’, he wrote:

What we want here are powerful intellects, practised in dialectics, gifted

with a popular eloquence, quick to follow error in its shiftings and even
to anticipate them, able to snatch the mask from lies which plausibly bear
 Curious and exotic encounters 59
the semblance of reality, to unravel sophisticated arguments, and to show
the incoherence and mutual contradiction of false doctrine.
(Quoted in Young 1980: 5)

Similarly, Alesandro Valigano, as ‘Visitor of all Jesuit missions in the Far

East’ in the 1570s, advocated a strategy of penetrating China by ‘a con-
frontation with the intellectual aristocracy on its own level of language, social
customs and superior talent’ (Treadgold 1973: 8).
The key to the formulation of such an approach is the Jesuits’ realistic
assessment that Imperial China, as the ‘Mightie Kingdome’ (Lach 1965), was
in many ways equal and even superior to Europe both intellectually and
materially. The Jesuits, as D.E. Mungello (2005: 81–82) writes:

[r]ecognized that the Chinese, unlike those in other technologically or

materially less advanced parts of the world, could not be converted by
overawing them by the European might. Rather, the Chinese needed to be
approached as intellectual equals and shown through sophisticated
arguments that Christianity was in harmony with some of their more
fundamental beliefs.

Matteo Ricci, who arrived in China in 1583 and is said to be China’s first
immigrant from Europe in the modern sense, was universally regarded as the
pioneer in formulating and practising the Jesuits’ accommodative approach to
Imperial China. Clearly acknowledging the advanced nature of the Chinese
civilization, he remarked in his journal that ‘of all the pagan sects known to
Europe, I know of no people who fell into fewer errors in the early ages of
their antiquity than did the Chinese’ (quoted in Treadgold 1973: 12). In
practice, Ricci’s compromise with local culture started with him taking up a
Chinese name, dressing in the traditional silk robes commonly used by Chi-
nese literati, being carried about in sedan chairs, hiring domestic servants and
even letting his beard grow. In order to approach the literati on terms of
equality, Ricci learned to master Confucian classics. He not only spoke Chi-
nese, but also read and wrote classical Chinese, the literary language used by
the Chinese literati, the crucial social group that Ricci came to believe held
the key to the success of the Jesuits’ attempt to convert the Chinese to
Christianity. Ricci proudly called himself a Xi Ru (西儒, a Confucian scholar
from the West). Adopting the lifestyle and identity of Chinese literati was of
more than symbolic value. It helped Ricci to develop the Jesuits’ accom-
modative approach in close collaboration with the Chinese literati, the Jesuits’
closest counterpart in terms of education, social standing and moral cultiva-
tion, who were the most respected in Chinese society and the most influential
in the Chinese bureaucracy (Young 1983; Mungello 1989).
Ricci’s accommodative approach had several more sophisticated thrusts. As
a learned man from the Europe of High Renaissance, Ricci made good use of
his knowledge of European science for the benefit of the Jesuits’ missionary
60 Yongjin Zhang
enterprise in China. Using European cartography, Ricci produced the first
map of the world with all place names given in Chinese. To accommodate the
Chinese view of their country as the Middle Kingdom, Ricci adeptly placed
China near the centre of the map. In close collaboration with Xu Guangqi –
one of his high-profile converts, who was credited with having pioneered
Imperial Ming’s knowledge formation about the West – Ricci produced
translated works in Chinese on Western geography, astronomy and mathe-
matics, including in particular the first six books of Euclid’s Elements of
Geometry.
Ricci took another ingenious and compromising approach to choosing the
Chinese characters to be used in his translation of the Christian monotheistic
God. He was convinced that the two Chinese characters Shangdi (上帝 Lord
on High) in the traditional Chinese texts could be retained conceptually and
literally in his translation referring to God. In his famous essay Tianzhu shiyi
(天主实义, ‘The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven’), the first significant Jesuit
text in Chinese, published in 1603, Ricci was explicit. In his words, ‘The God of our
country is the same as Chinese Shangdi’, and ‘Our God is the Shangdi in Chi-
nese classics’ (Huang 1987: 58). He also came up with a new term, Tianzhu
(Lord of Heaven), to be used by missionaries and their Chinese converts ‘to
avoid cultural overlays of Shangdi’ (Mungello 1989).
Taking advantage of the relative intellectual openness in the unusual social,
cultural and political contexts embodied in ‘the syncretic spirit of the Ming’,
Ricci and other Jesuit pioneers embarked on an effort to create a Confucian–
Christian synthesis.1 In Tianzhu shiyi, regarded by Ricci (1985) as a ‘pre-
evangelical dialogue’, the main purpose of the narrative was to engage the
Chinese literati in philosophical, rather than religious, discussions. Ricci
adapted many passages and arguments from the highly esteemed canonical
Confucian classics to illustrate how Christianity and Confucianism were
compatible and complementary to each other. In the same spirit, Xu Guangqi
reformulated the role of Christianity in China as ‘supplementing Confucianism
and fighting against Buddhism’ (补儒易佛, bu ru yi fo) (Liu 2008: 477–78).
The use of Shangdi would be later entangled in the so-called Chinese Rites
Controversy (Minamiki 1985). The central issue of this controversy concerns,
however, rituals that Chinese performed in honour of their ancestors as well
as Confucius. While Ricci and the Jesuits were prepared to accept that certain
rites to ancestors were superstitious, they argued that these rites had impor-
tant social and moral meanings, which did not violate the monotheistic
nature of the Christian God. This proved most controversial among mis-
sionaries in China. It led ultimately to Pope Clement XI’s Constitution of
Prohibitions on the Chinese Rites in 1704, which ‘hit the sunshine of royal
approbation and finally drowned the Church in a deluge of destruction’
(Rowbotham 1942: 116).
Ricci’s ultimate achievement is very often seen as obtaining the permission
of the Imperial Court of the Ming Dynasty for the establishment of the first
European missionary residence ever in the capital of Beijing in 1601. Though
 Curious and exotic encounters 61
Ricci never secured an audience with the emperor, he was granted freedom of
movement in the Forbidden City, the emperor’s residence. This was no mean
achievement. A more lasting achievement was, however, that Ricci’s accom-
modative approach provided a benchmark against which the Jesuits and other
missionaries would be accepted and tolerated (or not) within the Chinese
Imperium. Significantly, this benchmark survived the collapse of the Ming
Dynasty and persisted when cultural conditions in China became less fertile
for Christianity in the period leading to the final showdown of the Chinese
Rites Controversy in the early eighteenth century (Minamiki 1985). Emperor
Kangxi, whose reign spans a 60-year period between 1662 and 1722, regarded
Ricci’s practice as setting up a tradition. In remarks made to Messabarba,
who led the second Papal Legation to China in 1720, the Emperor said:

If you want to discuss the doctrine of China, you must necessarily penetrate
deeply into the Chinese literary style, and study Chinese literature thor-
oughly: only then will you be able to argue. I, the Emperor, do not know
any Western tongues, and therefore I do not discuss anything Western.
(Huang 1987: 63)

Not surprisingly, Emperor Kangxi issued numerous decrees in which all mis-
sionaries in China were urged to follow the practice of Ricci in order to
obtain imperial protection (Liu 2002). For Kangxi, ‘the practice of Ricci did
not imply merely a kind of method, a set of means, to achieve a certain pur-
pose, but a basic attitude of respect for Chinese civilization and culture, obe-
dience to Chinese laws and a following social customs like a native Chinese’
(Huang 1987: 58).
It should be properly acknowledged that the Jesuit and other missionaries
were accepted and tolerated within the Chinese Imperium also because of the
useful service they could render to Imperial China using their secular knowl-
edge. In the extremely violent and chaotic transition from the Ming to the
Qing dynasties in the mid-seventeenth century and the unpredictable unfold-
ing of episodes of the Rites Controversy involving changes of court politics,
power and policies, the Jesuit missionaries – Adam Schall and Ferdinand
Verbiest among them – remained dominant in the Imperial Bureau of
Astronomy for 150 years after 1629, as their advanced knowledge of astron-
omy and mathematics was exploited by successive imperial rulers to make
imperial calendars and enhance the legitimacy of their rule. Some astronom-
ical instruments the Jesuit missionaries made, including a quadrant, a sextant
and a celestial globe, are still on exhibition in Beijing today. The so-called
court Jesuits – those Jesuits who served in the imperial court of the Qing –
also provided services as the architects of the Imperial Summer Palace (Yuan
Ming Yuan, 圆明园), as military engineers, as court painters and as court
interpreters for visiting European embassies, and for Imperial China’s nego-
tiations with Russia for the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 (Sebes 1961) and the
Treaty of Khiakhta in 1727. The Jesuits, Waley-Cohen (1999: 106) writes,
62 Yongjin Zhang
‘worked extremely hard and with considerable success to satisfy imperial
demands for both aesthetic pleasure and practical science and technology’.
This partially explains why several Qing emperors in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries – Emperor Shunzhi and Emperor Kangxi, in particular –
all had close relationships with the so-called ‘court Jesuits’ (Rowbotham
1942).
It is probably true that in their encounter with Imperial China as a ‘curious land’,
the Jesuits sought ultimately ‘to change China into something acceptable to
them, to make China partake of Western values’ (Spence 1980: 5). In this
initial encounter under our considerations here, however, the Jesuits found
that they had first to make themselves acceptable in the Chinese Imperium by
adopting China’s social customs and to accommodate the traditional Con-
fucian values into Christianity. As the outcome of the Chinese Rites Con-
troversy ultimately testifies, the terms of engagement were not dictated by the
Vatican but by Beijing. The intervention of the Vatican and the insertion of
the international personality of the Papacy in the Chinese Rites Controversy
not only led to the abrupt end of the Jesuit encounter, but the banning of
Christianity in China by the Yongzheng Emperor in 1724 (Gu 2002).

Warriors and merchants

The Jesuits’ intellectual, spiritual and social encounters with the Chinese
Imperium in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries had been preceded and
were accompanied by activities engaged by two other groups of Europeans,
warriors and merchants in search of exotic spices and wealth. As Geoffrey Hudson
(1965: 236) writes, ‘when the Portuguese first reached China from Malacca
[in 1514], there was no thought except for material commerce and for an
arrangement with the Ming emperor to secure this’. Like the Jesuits, European
warriors and traders found the Chinese ‘a people of great skill’ and ‘on a par
with ourselves’ in their very early encounters (Bitterli 1989: 134). They were
struck by ‘the richness of its commerce, the infinite number of its revenues’.
European rulers would, they believed, ‘feel very small before this great Mon-
arch’ (Spence 1980: 43). They were also ‘favourably impressed with the
orderly management of trade’ (Wills 1984: 37). Unlike the Jesuits, however,
their first-hand experience was not primarily with the cultural and intellectual
stalwarts of traditional China, but with the greatest single economy in the
world in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries; an elaborate regional
trading network in maritime Asia; a strong military power; and a highly
bureaucratized state which tightly controlled and regulated Imperial China’s
trade. Though their knowledge about China was neither sufficient nor accurate
at the time, when the first Portuguese ships sailed into the mouth of the Pearl
River in 1513–17, Europeans were under no illusion that Europe was in any
way superior to China in terms of commerce, wealth or military power.
As the earliest European traders to reach the Chinese shores, the Portu-
guese had sought to participate in an elaborate existing regional trading
 Curious and exotic encounters 63
system in maritime Asia – China, Japan, Taiwan, South-East Asia and
India, among others – rather than attempting to reinvent one. The Portu-
guese capture of Malacca in 1511 was a significant step in this cross-cultural
encounter. Wills (1998: 334) describes the beginning of the Portuguese
participation:

In [the] Cheng-te [Zhengde] period [of the Ming, 1505–21], ships from
Southeast Asian tributary states were allowed to come as frequently as
they wished, without regard for the limitations of time and number spe-
cified in the regulations of the tribute system and their trade was taxed …
This Southeast Asian trade, officially approved, but in violation of basic
rules of the tribute system, provided the matrix for the flourishing trade
between Siam and Melaka and South China, within which matrix the
Portuguese began their relations with China.

The early attempts by the Portuguese to participate in Chinese trade were full
of drama, and not free from violent military conflicts (Zhang 2005). Appear-
ing at the mouth of the Pearl River near Canton unannounced in 1513, the
Portuguese were allowed to trade on board their ships, but not to proceed to
Canton (Wan 2001; Zhang 2005). The first Portuguese embassy, regarded as
an unknown tribute bearer from the Great West by the Ming court in Beijing,
was subsequently permitted to proceed from Canton to Beijing in 1520. Yet,
from the very beginning, the Portuguese attempts were doomed to fail
because of mutual misperceptions as well as the Ming court’s displeasure
about the Portuguese capture of Malacca, a loyal tributary state to the Ming,
and the reckless behaviour of the Portuguese sailors and soldiers. Simao Peres
d’Andrade, who commanded the Portuguese ships in their second expeditions
to Canton in 1519, was noted to have ‘refused to pay the Chinese the usual
customs duties, administered justice according his whims, and began building
fortifications in the teeth of opposition’ (Bitterli 1989: 136). The stories of the
Portuguese abduction and kidnapping of young children, which turned out to
be partially true, did irreparable damage to early Portuguese efforts. The
Chinese engaged the Portuguese in two sea battles in 1521–22, in Tunmen and
Xicaowan near Canton, driving away the Portuguese in both cases (Wan
2001; Wills 1998). After 1522, the Portuguese were officially banned from
trading with China for more than 30 years until 1554.
The ‘Sino–Portuguese War’ of 1521–22 is regarded by some Chinese his-
torians as the ‘first military conflict between China and the West’ (Wang and
Pan 2004). Significantly, few serious direct military clashes took place
between Imperial China and maritime European powers over the next three
centuries until the Anglo–Chinese Opium War in 1839, while the Portuguese,
the Dutch, the Spanish and the British were all engaged in, and occasionally
fought each other for the flourishing China trade. Europeans, however, also
took part in the imperial Chinese order in a different capacity, as warriors of
a different nature. Three cases are particularly noteworthy.
64 Yongjin Zhang
The first is related to the court Jesuits. Two examples would suffice here. In
1622, when Macao was under attack by the Dutch, Father Adam Schall
provided tactical and technological assistance to its defenders. In 1642, at the
request of the Ming emperor, Schall helped cast European-style cannon and
provided information on European military technology. Schall’s advice was
also sought by the emperor for the defence of Beijing against the onslaught by
the rebel Li Zicheng’s forces. Father Ferdinand Verbiest, who succeeded
Father Adam Schall as the Director of the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy,
was also skilled in the art of casting cannon. From 1660 to 1688, while ser-
ving the Qing court as an imperial astronomer, Verbiest was also responsible
for the casting of 566 cannon (Shu 1994; Witek 1996).
The second case involved the ironic return of Portuguese warriors in the
twilight years of the Ming Dynasty, over 100 years after their defeat in the sea
battles near Canton. The difference is that this time the Portuguese soldiers
were involved in defending the Ming. Between 1621 and 1647, the Portuguese
embarked on a number of military expeditions at the request of the Ming
court to assist the Ming in their military contest with the Manchu forces
(Dong and Huang 2009). A small group of Portuguese artillery men were
brought from Macao to Beijing to train the Ming soldiers how to use cannon
(Wills 1998: 352). Even as late as 1645, one year after the death of the last
Ming emperor, the Jesuit Father Francisco Sambiasi arrived at Macao from
Nanjing with further requests for Portuguese military aid in exchange for new
Ming concessions. The Portuguese initiatives to send military aid and aux-
iliaries to assist the Ming forces were clearly ‘an attempt to stabilise any fur-
ther deterioration in Portuguese relations with the Ming’ (Souza 1986: 198).
Wittingly or unwittingly, the Portuguese were embroiled in the internal politics
in the dynastic transition between the Ming and the Qing.
The third case concerns the Dutch military cooperation with the Qing
government, which needs a more detailed elaboration. Though the Dutch
East India Company (VOC) was only formed in 1601, ‘[t]he Dutch became
enthusiastic participants in the “China trade” almost as soon as they arrived
in Asian waters in the early seventeenth century’ (Atwell 1998: 396). Like the
Portuguese and other Europeans, the Dutch also believed that ‘they could
make more profits by inserting themselves into already existing systems of trade
and taxation’ (Keene 2002: 76). A series of high-handed approaches and tac-
tics, sometimes resorting to the use of force, were adopted by the VOC in the
early decades of the seventeenth century to establish a foothold on the Chi-
nese coast for the company’s China trade. The governor-general of the VOC,
Jan Pieterszoon Coen, once remarked that company ships should ‘pester and
hassle the whole coast of China to the maximum degree possible, so that the
Chinese will be forced to come to a negotiated settlement [with us], which will
undoubtedly happen’ (Kops 2002: 539).
The main thrust of Dutch diplomacy involved offering Dutch military
cooperation and naval assistance. This strategy was principally motivated by
the VOC’s long-cherished desire to secure possible trade concessions from the
 Curious and exotic encounters 65
Qing government, such as a long-term trade agreement, in carrying out its
China trade. It must also be understood against a complex background of
what Fernand Braudel (1994) calls ‘a global struggle between the Dutch and
the Portuguese’ and the established practices of Dutch diplomacy in East
Asia and its recent successes. The Dutch naval assistance to Raja Sinha II
against the Portuguese helped the conclusion of the Kandyan Treaty of 1638
(Keene 2002: 79–80). Also in 1638, the VOC military assistance to the sho-gun
in his quest to pacify Japanese Catholics won the company some trade con-
cessions, though carefully restricted (Kops 2002: 539).2 At the same time, the
newly established Manchu government, in need of consolidating its conquest
of the Ming, became open to considering the Dutch overture for military
cooperation and assistance to defeat the remnants of the Ming loyalists.
Among them was Zheng Chenggong (Coxinga), whose forces took over
Taiwan from the Dutch in 1662, and whose large and well-organized fleet of
both cargo and war junks had posed a serious threat to the Dutch position
and interests in China–Japan trade. There was therefore a convergence of
interests between the Qing government and the VOC in defeating Zheng.
As early as 1655, two ambassadors of the first Dutch Embassy to Beijing
sent by the VOC had received secret instructions to explore the possibility of
a naval alliance between the VOC and the Qing government against Zheng
and his fleet. The VOC could assist the Qing with ‘ships and personnel’ and
‘could put so much pressure on [Coxinga], that he would fall into the hands
of the Tartars’. However, the two ambassadors were also instructed to ask
what trade privileges the Qing government ‘would be willing to grant us’
(Kops 2002: 546). It was only in 1662, after the fall of Taiwan, however, that
the VOC sent 12 ships to the Chinese coast to attack Zheng’s outposts and
shipping in order to ‘restore the company’s reputation’. The Dutch also
opened negotiations for military cooperation with Qing officials in Fujian
province. An imperial edict subsequently arrived in Fuzhou authorizing a
joint naval campaign with the Dutch against Zheng’s forces, and granting the
Dutch the privilege to trade every year and to build a trading station in
Fuzhou. However, the edict was delivered by an imperial envoy from Beijing
only after the Dutch fleet had already left. In the ensuing 20 years, the Dutch
entered into a number of negotiations with the Qing government both in
Beijing and at various coastal locations on trading privileges in exchange for
Dutch military assistance. To the frustration of the Dutch, the Chinese offers,
if any, seemed to be always less than satisfactory, and constantly subject to
different interpretations (Wills 1968: 231–41; Wills 1998).
The sustained endeavour of the VOC with the backing of its considerable
military power had an ambitious goal to secure a binding agreement with the
Qing government for the Dutch trading privileges in China. It failed, not
because of the inherent lack of merits in this approach, but rather because
European traders were confronted by and had to work with highly regulated
and heavily guarded trade regimes when they inserted themselves into an
established trading network in East Asia.3 European traders, Rahman (2003)
66 Yongjin Zhang
writes, ‘followed the same trade routes, used the same ports and exchanged
the same genre of products. They first began to use the China trade to pro-
cure products for Europe, but what proved more lasting and lucrative was the
regional trade (or the country trade) involving Asian markets and trades’. In
so doing, European traders entered effectively a ‘controlled relationship’,
where they:

found their freedom of action limited both geographically and socially. It

was the Chinese and the Japanese who decided where the two cultures
meet, who should take part and which outside influence would be
admitted. Subject to drastic controls, trade was tolerated, even welcomed;
but the hosts made it plain that they did not need foreign trade and
wanted to decide the terms of the encounter.
(Bitterli 1989: 133–34)

Nowhere is such a ‘controlled relationship’ more compellingly demonstrated

than in the construction of Macao as a Portuguese enclave in the late six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in the implementation of the
Canton system in the eighteenth century in managing European presence in
Imperial China. In the words of Hudson (1965: 238):

The new race of sea barbarians who had appeared on the horizon of the
empire could not be admitted to imperial favour after they had shown
such truculence or disposition, nor could they be allowed to penetrate
into the interior of China, but as long as there was profit to be obtained
from dealings with them, they might be tolerated in certain ports.

Whether or not ‘Macao was given to Portugal for the services rendered by
Portuguese ships to the long suffering Chinese navy in dealing with the pirates
in the mid-1550’ (Hudson 1965: 238) remains contentious even today (Wan
2001: 94–103; Zhang 2004). It is nevertheless clear that allowing the Portu-
guese to build permanent settlement on the peninsula of Macao in 1557 was a
local solution to accommodate increasing numbers of Portuguese traders
along the Canton coast. When the official ban of the Portuguese traders was
relaxed at the beginning of the 1550s, the purpose of this local solution was to
confine the Portuguese traders in an isolated place on the periphery of the
Chinese empire. There was clearly no territorial concession on the part of
China. Not only did the Portuguese continue to pay ground rent, but they
also had to pay customs duties and harbour dues. Macao remained com-
pletely integrated into the Ming administrative systems, with a Ming garrison
(Huang 2003; Tang 1999).
The Chinese also exercised their authority to forbid the Portuguese from
fortifying Macao. Even after the failed Dutch military attack on Macao in
1622, only limited fortification of Macao was allowed by the Chinese, who
could also revoke such concession at will. Drastic restrictions of freedom of
 Curious and exotic encounters 67
movement were placed on the Portuguese settlers, when in 1573 a wall and a
gate, the Porta do Cerco (Circle Gate), manned by guards, were erected and
the Portuguese and other foreigners were forbidden to go beyond it without
permission. This Porta do Cerco:

… was opened chiefly when markets were held in Macao, about once a
week; afterwards the door was again locked and sealed with strips of
paper bearing official stamps. Since this was the only access to the main-
land, and the channel through which the town was supplied with food,
the Chinese could put the Portuguese under pressure, for whatever
reason, simply by ordering the Porta do Cerco be shut.
(Bitterli 1989: 143)

What Wills (1998: 351) calls ‘Macao’s charter of survival through submission’
took on a new shape in 1614, when the governor-general of Guangdong and
Guangxi sent officials to proclaim a full set of regulations. These consisted of
the following five points: 1 Macao must not harbour Japanese; 2 The buying of
Chinese people is forbidden; 3 All ships, including warships, must pay duties and
must come into Macao’s Inner Harbour. Anchoring and trading in the outer
islands is strictly forbidden; 4 Trade must be conducted in Canton, not at
Macao, and duties on goods must be paid there; 5 New construction on Macao
is strictly forbidden, but old structures may be repaired or rebuilt to match
their previous condition. The Portuguese were urged to obey these regulations
to the letter. The five points were engraved on a stone tablet that was set up in
front of the hall of the Loyal Senate in 1617 (see also Tang 1999). ‘These
regulations, and their revisions and expansions in the 1740s, were funda-
mental to Chinese policy toward Macao down to the nineteenth century’
(Wills 2011: 48).
The Portuguese acquiesced with these onerous regulations for two principal
reasons. First, even during years when such drastic restrictions were insti-
tuted, the China trade carried out by the Portuguese prospered. In one esti-
mate, ‘[t]he half century from 1570 to 1620 was generally one of peace and
prosperity on the south China coast. Portuguese ships carried Chinese silks
and other goods to Japan and returned with Japanese silver, perhaps 400,000
taels per year in the 1580s, 1,000,000 or more in the early 1600s’ (Wills 1979:
213). In other words, profit and prosperity of trade, not ‘freedom of trade’ or
‘freedom of movement’ was the goal of the Portuguese in Macao. Second, the
municipal government of Macao – a self-governing body established in 1595
and dominated by a resident Portuguese merchant oligarchy – clearly knew
that as the Portuguese enclave off the Chinese coast, Macao was completely
at the mercy of the Chinese state. ‘[T]he indignant trumpeting of captains-
major and captains-general about Portuguese honor and craven submission to
the mandarins’ (Wills 1998: 347) would not change this fact.
As in the case of constructing Macao as a Portuguese enclave, the Imperial
Chinese state established the so-called Canton system in the eighteenth
68 Yongjin Zhang
century as another attempt to control European – particularly British – trade
with Imperial China and to limit foreign contact to border areas. The evolu-
tion of the Canton system started with an imperial decree in 1759 explicitly
ordering that Canton be made the only port opened to foreign commerce.
Five Regulations for Dealing with Foreigners (防夷五事), first issued in 1760,
were expanded and revised in subsequent years into the New Eight Regula-
tions for Dealing with Foreigners (防夷新规八条) in 1835. These regulations
constituted the core practices and rules to which European trade in Canton
was subject. The so-called New Eight Regulations were, to put it crudely: 1
No foreign warships may sail inside the Bogue [the harbour approach to
Canton city]; 2 Neither foreign women nor firearms may be brought into the
factories [warehouse complex reserved for foreign traders within the harbour,
but outside the walls of Canton city]; 3 Foreign ships should not enter into
direct communication with the Chinese people and merchants without the
immediate supervision (of a native Chinese); 4 Each factory [each trading
nation had its own ‘factory’] is restricted to a maximum eight Chinese at its
service (irrespective of the number of its occupants); 5 Foreigners living in the
factories must not move in and out too frequently, although they may walk
freely within 100 yards of their factories; 6 Foreigners may not communicate
with Chinese officials except through the proper channel of the Co-hong;4
7 Foreign trade must be conducted through the hong merchants; 8 Foreign
traders may not say in Canton after the trading season [between October and
March] and should return home or go to Macao (Hsu 1999: 201). Needless to
say, foreigners living in these ‘factories’ were subject to Chinese law.
Was the initiation of the Canton system motivated by ‘Kangxi emperor’s
appreciation of the fiscal value of trade and his desire to control it in a cen-
tralized, uniform and fiscally rational manner’ (Wills 1968: 245–46)? How
much did the international trade of China flourish in the eighteenth century
under the Canton system? These are intriguing historical questions. They are
nevertheless not the central concerns here. It is worth noting, however, first
that the Canton system can be regarded as a continuation of Imperial China’s
efforts to quarantine foreign traders in its border areas; and second that
European submission to the Canton system was tenuous and contingent on
the delivery of profitability to foreign traders. European complaints against the
Canton system in the nineteenth century proved to be one of the contributing
factors that led to the Anglo–Chinese Opium War in 1839.

Embassies and diplomats

European trade with China in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was carried
out, in the words of Geoffrey Hudson (1965: 235), ‘unofficially and not by
treaty’5 and ‘subject to harassing restrictions’. Hudson also remarked that
‘China remained outside the world of diplomatic intercourse formed by the
European states and (including also its outer ring) such Asiatic powers as the
Ottoman Empire’. While it is true that maritime Europe and Imperial China
 Curious and exotic encounters 69
did not establish formal diplomatic relations until the mid-nineteenth century,
this does not mean that Europeans did not actively seek to form such a rela-
tionship with Imperial China before the nineteenth century. The Macartney
Mission in 1792–93 was preceded by a series of European embassies to Beij-
ing – the Portuguese, the Dutch and the Russian.6 When Lord Macartney
embarked on his intrepid journey of 2,340 miles from Canton to Beijing
through rivers and canals, he followed, literally, the well-trodden paths of
Dutch embassies and the Portuguese envoys more than a century ago.
In contrast to the intellectual and social encounters of the Jesuits, European
diplomatic ventures into Imperial China were not as determined and persis-
tent. Unlike the single-minded and sustained economic engagement of European
traders, diplomatic contacts were not only limited, but also tentative and inter-
mittent. The European embassies and diplomatic missions associated with
such ventures, as Wills (1984: 4) argued, ‘had diverse and distinctly unsyste-
matic origins in the shifts of Ch’ing court politics and coastal policies and in
the experience and goals of the Dutch and the Portuguese’. What these European
embassies and diplomats encountered, however, was the same well-entrenched
tribute system with an intricate ceremonial and institutional complex, the
origins and pedigree of which could be traced right back to 600 BC or earlier
(Zhang and Buzan 2012). They all had to deal with a time-honoured diplo-
matic tradition as part of Imperial China’s statecraft, which was believed to
have successfully managed China’s foreign relations for millennia.
The first Portuguese embassy to Imperial China (by the same token, the first
European embassy) to open up lucrative trade with China arrived in Canton in
1517. However, it was not until January 1520 that Tome Pires, the designated
ambassador of King Manuel of Portugal to the ‘king of China’, obtained permis-
sion to travel to Beijing. Tome Pires and his party did reach Beijing, but he ‘was
not admitted to an audience with the emperor: the authorities burnt the letter
from the King of Portugal, refused to accept presents, and showered the
delegation with reproaches’ (Bitterli 1989: 136). The first Portuguese embassy did
not fail because it mounted any challenge to the ceremonial and ritual order
of Imperial China, which formed the core of the Chinese tributary system or
to the Chinese diplomatic tradition. As is noted in the Portuguese records,
while waiting in Beijing for an audience with the emperor, embassy members
‘had to go on the first and fifteenth of every lunar month to prostrate them-
selves before the wall of the Forbidden City’ (Wills 1998: 338). It failed, as
discussed earlier, because of a combination of reckless and bellicose Portu-
guese commanders and soldiers in Canton, the Ming court’s displeasure
about the Portuguese conquest of Malacca and the Ming court politics prior
to the death of Emperor Zhengde.
In addition to the first Portuguese embassy to the Ming in 1520, a cluster
of European diplomatic overtures to Imperial China took place in the second
half of the seventeenth century, which included three Dutch embassies and two
Portuguese missions to Beijing. These are in chronological order, the first Dutch
embassy led by Pieter de Goyer and Jacob de Keyser in 1655–57, the second
70 Yongjin Zhang
Dutch embassy headed by Pieter van Hoorn in 1666–68, the Portuguese embassy
led by Manoel de Saldanha, 1667–70, the Portuguese mission led by Bento Pereira
de Faria, 1678, and finally, the third Dutch embassy headed by Vincent Paats,
1685–87 (Wills 1984; Kops 2002). A Russian embassy also came to Beijing from
the north after the conclusion of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689 (Sebes 1961).
Unlike Lord Macartney in Chengde in 1793, none of the European embassies in
the seventeenth century in Beijing challenged the ceremonial supremacy of the
Son of Heaven, the Chinese emperor, a core assumption and an institutional
cornerstone of the Chinese world order. Kowtowing to the emperor seemed to
be a non-issue. European embassies, like other non-European embassies from
inner Asia and South-East Asia, kowtowed not only to the emperor at the
imperial audience. As part of the embassy routine, the Dutch ambassadors
and their entourage also kowtowed at the Board of Rites when presenting gifts
and the official letter to an ‘altar like table’ symbolically representing the emperor.
The Van Hoorn embassy is noted to have gone to the Board of Rites to practise
the ceremonies they would perform one day before the scheduled audience
with the emperor. More full kowtows were performed after the audience at the
banquets given in the name of the emperor to entertain the embassies and
their parties at the Board of Rites (Wills 1984: 25–34).
European envoys seemed to have also conformed, without question, to other
ceremonial forms associated with foreign embassies under the Chinese tributary
system, carrying the banner of a tributary state in their lead boat and desig-
nating their gifts to the emperor as tribute, thus acquiescing in, at least cere-
monially, the tributary status of the countries they represented vis-à-vis
Imperial China. In return, they enjoyed cordial and relaxed receptions in Beijing.7
In addition to the formal audience with the emperor, ‘Saldanha had two
interviews at the Ch’ien-ch’ing Gate [with the emperor]; Pereira de Faria was
given a banquet in the imperial presence … , and the “tribute memorial” he
brought was read in Chinese, Manchu, and even in Portuguese, Paats had at least
one interview with the Emperor, who heard a translation of some kind of
memorial he had presented, asked questions, and listened to the European
music’ (Wills 1984: 32).
How can we explain why European embassies were seemingly unconcerned
about complying with the Chinese requests to conform to all these deferential,
and even humiliating, ceremonial rituals? One Dutch embassy, as we know
from the historical record, had been explicitly ordered to comply with all
Chinese requests in order to obtain trade concessions. Is it possible that the
Dutch and the Portuguese envoys, unlike their counterparts from inner Asia
and maritime Asia, chose not to accept the institutional and symbolic values
associated with kowtowing and other ceremonies while performing them? Or
is it simply because, at least in the case of the Dutch embassies, merchants as
diplomats (van Goor 2004) played a key role and as they ‘were servants of a
trading company and citizens of a republic, they did not have to worry about
the personal honor of a sovereign’ (Wills 1968: 249)? Jonathan Spence (1999:
42) was probably right in observing:
 Curious and exotic encounters 71
These various embassies and legations, though from proudly independent
sovereign states in the West, all adhered to the cumbersome Chinese
rituals of deference to the Chinese emperor – including the nine prostra-
tions of the kowtow, and the use of self-demeaning language – that the
Chinese considered an essential part of the tributary system of foreign
relations. By ignoring their own recently required codes of correct diplo-
matic contact between sovereign nations, in order to achieve their short-
term goals, the Westerners were unwittingly shoring up the Qing Court’s
views of Chinese superiority.

By submitting themselves to the ritual order of Imperial China, these European

embassies, therefore, helped produce Pax Sinica in East Asia. The main-
tenance of the pretence of the ceremonial supremacy of the Chinese emperor in
all these European diplomatic overtures certainly lent itself to making it possible for
European embassies to carry on their missions. However, if their understanding
of the centrality of the ritual order in the Chinese Imperium was sound, their
knowledge of the role foreign embassies played in Imperial China’s tributary
system was grossly inadequate. For embassies from inner Asia (including
Russia) and East and South-East Asia, trade privileges and concessions associated
with the regular tributary missions were what they came to Beijing to request.
The European embassies, however, saw it as their principal goal to achieve
negotiations in the capital, most desirably directly with the emperor, for trade
privileges in and access to Imperial China. What the VOC had hoped for
when it dispatched its first embassy to China in 1655 was to have ‘an imperial
decree – written, sealed, and delivered – that would allow the company
unlimited trade with mainland China’ (Kops 2002: 570). No more and no less.
Such a European approach was invariably frustrated in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries because of its incompatibility with Imperial China’s
longstanding statecraft of managing foreign tributary missions and associated
activities as essentially part of a broad security strategy to limit foreign con-
tact, particularly in the capital, and to confine this contact, including trade
relations, to the border areas and trading ports, as far from the capital as
possible. We have already discussed the effectiveness of such bureaucratic
control in the cases of the construction of Macao as a Portuguese enclave,
and the operation of the Canton system. Also central to such a management
system of bureaucratic control was the strict unilateral bureaucratic regula-
tion of the size and frequency of tributary missions for each tributary state,
down to the amount of trade and the number of foreigners coming to the
capital. European embassies, like all other non-Chinese embassies, were sub-
ject to the same unilateral bureaucratic regulation in this regard.8
The biggest pitfall of the seventeenth-century European embassies is per-
haps not just that they did not realize ‘that embassies were primarily cere-
monial’, but that ‘the court did not ordinarily make substantive decisions
about foreign affairs except on the recommendation of the provincial officials
involved’ (Wills 1998: 336). Nothing better illustrates the ultimate importance
72 Yongjin Zhang
of bureaucratic decisions in determining the fate of European embassies by
the following imperial edict. While the first Dutch embassy led by Pieter de
Goyer and Jacob de Keyser was waiting in Beijing, the emperor sent an edict
to the Board of Rites, part of which reads:

So I order you [president of the board] and the other members, that you
people come to a useful decision regarding their [the Dutch] petition
which they did through this embassy, to be allowed to go and come in my
nation, and that you report back to me on it [the decision].
(Kops 2002: 561)

Such bureaucratic control in terms of policy decision added more woes to the
seventeenth-century European diplomatic missions to Imperial China.
While it may be true that ‘it was Dutch acceptance of Chinese form of
inequality that was primarily responsible for the avoidance of more explicit
conflict’ (Wills 1968: 249), it is the unilateral bureaucratic control on the part
of Imperial China that prevailed over the Dutch assumption of reciprocity in
regulating Sino-Dutch relations in the wake of three Dutch embassies. The
occasional Dutch references to ‘the law of all nations’ and ‘the custom of all
princes’ in their negotiations fell on the deaf ears of Imperial Chinese officials.
In his discussion of the Dutch embassies, Wills (1968: 248–49) made two
insightful observations on muted conflict in the Sino–Dutch diplomatic
encounters. First, in the Sino–Dutch negotiations, ‘these values (the concept
of a community of equal states adhering to a common code for intercourse, a
code increasingly formalised in international law) did not come into explicit
conflict but remained implicit in assumptions about the rational means to achieve
limited practical ends, such as trade and military cooperation’. Second, ‘there
is no indication that Chinese acceptance of international law and equality
among nations was a conscious goal of Dutch policy’. Given the Dutch
hegemony in Europe in the seventeenth century, it is significant that in this
early encounter between the Chinese and the European international societies,
the latter made no explicit attempt to impose European values, customs and
law on the former. European interactions with Imperial China at the state
level operated according to distinctive Chinese norms and institutions.

Conclusion
The early encounters between East [Asia] and West [Europe], Donald Lach
(1965: xii) argues, had a particular characteristic that is often obscured.
‘While Europeans dispatched trading, diplomatic, and religious missions to
Asia, Asian countries never sent similar missions to Europe on their own
initiative’. Further, not only were the relations between East and West ‘ordi-
narily conducted within a framework and on terms established by Asian
nations’, but also most Europeans were in Asia ‘on sufferance’. For almost
300 years between 1513 and 1793, Europeans as either non-state or state
 Curious and exotic encounters 73
agents – cultural, economic and diplomatic – had extensive and sustained, if
in some cases also erratic, engagement with the Chinese Imperium, in spite of
the formidable and seemingly impregnable barriers erected against foreigners
by Ming China, and reconstructed and reinforced by the Qing. In exploring
this ‘curious and exotic land’ for cultural enrichment and economic wealth,
Europeans became increasingly significant but invariably marginal partici-
pants in the longstanding cultural, economic and imperial order principally,
though not exclusively, embodied in the Chinese tributary system. From the
sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, European traders – first the
Portuguese, and then the Spanish, the Dutch and the British – were one of
many participating groups – smugglers and pirates among them – in the
‘China trade’. The economic impact they exerted on either Ming or Qing
China – arguably the greatest economy of the world at the time – was, however,
insignificant, if not entirely negligible.
In the discussions above, I have used a few examples to highlight a rather
obvious, but often obscured point, i.e. that it was Imperial China that uni-
laterally dictated the terms of engagement. It is also patently clear that the
diplomatic dimension of these ‘curious and exotic encounters’ was the begin-
ning of cross-cultural exchanges between two international societies – Chinese
and European – based on completely different concepts and conceptualiza-
tions of justice, order, legitimacy, and organizing principles of state and
society. Yet, Europeans did not challenge, if ever they did question, the
assumptions, worldviews, the legitimacy and predominance of the Chinese
world order they encountered. Rather, like other non-Chinese participants in
Pax Sinica, they accepted, acquiesced in or adjusted themselves to the
embedded norms, rules and institutions of the Chinese world order in con-
ducting what we refer to today as ‘international relations’ with Imperial
China.
In other words, in the first 300 years of European expansion into East Asia,
early modern Europe, even after its transformation into a society of states
post-1648, did not seek to incorporate structurally Imperial China into the
European international system/society, nor were Europeans particularly con-
cerned about the normative divergence of the two international orders, nor
the terms of engagement and institutional framework largely set out by
Imperial China for the meeting of two international societies. This regional
order, characterized by Chinese dominance rather than Western domination,
thus prevailed for over 300 years after the Portuguese first appeared along the
Chinese coast in the early sixteenth century. Two civilizations and two inter-
national societies seem to have managed to have a sustained and prolonged
period of peaceful coexistence – with only isolated instances of violent conflict.
This order came to an end only when the European society of states began to
impose its own type of international society on East Asia, and when the
European standard of ‘civilization’ was introduced to enforce a certain
kind of cultural unity as membership criterion for an expanding European
international society.
74 Yongjin Zhang
In his embassy to Emperor Qianlong’s China, Lord Macartney made an
insightful comment when he wrote ‘Nothing could be more fallacious than to
judge of China by any European standard’ (Macartney 1962: v). By the time
the second British embassy, led by Lord Amherst, was sent to China in 1816,
the British had vanquished Napoleon and become Europe’s most powerful
nation. A profound change was then underway, with the British contemplat-
ing the use of European power to impose their will and judgement on
Imperial China by the European standard of civilization. On his way back to
England, Lord Amherst had a private audience with the now-exiled Napoleon
on the island of Saint Helena. On hearing the suggestion that Britain might
use force against China, Napoleon remarked, ‘You say that you might awe
them by means of a maritime argument, and thus force the mandarins to
submit to the European etiquette. This idea is madness’ (Peyrefitte 1993: 517).
As we all know now, it is exactly the practices of what Macartney called
‘fallacies’ and what Napoleon remarked of as ‘the idea of madness’ that led to
the Opium War in 1839 and came to dominate Europe’s relations with China
in the century thereafter.
Revisiting this historical experience of cross-cultural exchange and civiliza-
tional encounters between China and Europe raises, therefore, three intri-
guing questions that are of theoretical and practical interest in understanding
global international society today. First is the inadequacy and incomplete
nature of the grand historical narrative of the expansion of international
society articulated by the English School. The analytical historical account
provided above is meant to extend the story of expansion of international
society, but told from a non-European perspective with temporal emphasis on
the period before the age of high imperialism in the nineteenth century. More
needs to be done along these lines to correct the Eurocentric nature of the
existing grand narrative. Second is the question of how and in what aspects
this formative encounter between Chinese and European civilizations and
international societies prior to the nineteenth century exercised any influence
on the formation of the European international society and its subsequent
imperialist expansion into Asia. As Geoffrey Hudson (1965: 236) long ago
observed, in the eighteenth century it was China that ‘was a great power cul-
turally in Paris than was Europe in Peking’, which ‘reached out and cast a
spell over its future conqueror, leaving indelible traces in the cultural tradition
of Europe’. Counter-intuitively, inter-civilizational dialogue of this nature
should have had notable influence on the evolution of European international
society. Little research has been done, however, on this subject by IR scholars.
Carrying out such research would also complement attempts ‘to explore the
role that the colonies played in the development of the European interna-
tional society’, suggested by Richard Little (Chapter 8) in this volume.
Finally, and most fundamentally, it asks the question: how much do cultural
differences matter in constructing a lasting, stable and peaceful international
order? The historical record examined in this chapter of a prolonged period of
relatively peaceful co-existence between the Chinese and the European
 Curious and exotic encounters 75
international societies in a non-European order should give us pause for
thought on the claim that only cultural unity and civilizational homogeneity
could provide a solid foundation for contemporary international society.
Instead, embracing cultural and political pluralism of an increasingly globa-
lized world, a critical interrogation of ‘cross-civilizational and cross-regional
interdependencies’ in global international society today (Kayaoglu 2010: 195)
is in order.

Notes
1 As Mungello noted, partly to justify their accommodative approach to China in
Europe, the Jesuits claimed that Confucianism contained truths derived from the
natural world and human reason and lacked only truths of revelation. They also
argued that most social and moral truths of Confucianism, such as honouring
parents and treating others as we ourselves would wish to be treated, were similar
to Christianity. Furthermore, Confucianism, though it lacked divine revelation,
was complementary to Christianity and could be used to enrich the teachings of
Christianity. See chapter 2 of Mungello 1989; see also Millar 2007.
2 Kops (2002: 546) further noted that, ‘Military assistance in exchange for trading
privileges also conformed to the VOC’s earlier dealings in Asia, not just with the
Japanese government, but also with the King of Siam as recently as 1650, so
neither the idea of nor the methods to negotiate an alliance were novel’.
3 It is particularly important to note that this was not a problem for European traders
only. It was a problem for non-European demand for trade, too. As Wills (1984:
20) notes, ‘In the mid-sixteenth century, the Ming mounted no effective diplomatic
or military response to Altan’s encroachments, and only after thirty years of
debate, military expense, and Mongol’s raids right down to the wall of Peking, did
they work out an arrangement that met the Mongol’s rather modest demands for
increased trade with China without jeopardizing China’s defenses’.
4 Co-hong refers to the guild of Chinese merchants authorized by the Qing government
to trade with Western merchants in Canton during the eighteenth and the early
nineteenth centuries. It is integral to the Canton system.
5 The exception is perhaps Russia, which did sign the Treaty of Nerchinsk with
China in 1689 to regulate its trade relations both at the border areas and in the
capital Beijing.
6 In those years, the Vatican also sent a number of envoys to both the Ming and the
Qing courts.
7 This is in sharp contrast with the fate of the Portuguese mission to Japan in the
mid-seventeenth century. ‘The Portuguese were expelled from Japan in 1639 (in
the wake of Shimabara Rebellion), and when in 1640 Macao sent an embassy to
please for reconsideration, the entire party of officers, merchants and seamen was
executed’ (Wills 1998: 353).
8 For a discussion of how non-European tributary missions were subject to such
bureaucratic control and regulations, see Bielenstein (2005).
4 Europe at the periphery of the
Japanese world order
Shogo Suzuki

Introduction
In the English School’s interpretation, the history of societal relations with the
non-European world and the (European) international society typically begins
in the late-nineteenth century on the back of European imperialism. The story
of Japan’s entry into European international society is no exception to this.
Prior to 1853, when US Navy Commodore Perry forced Japan to open its
borders to the Western powers, Japan is said to have entered a period of
‘seclusion’ during the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867), refusing
all contact with the West, except for Holland.
This narrative, however, is problematic in that it completely casts aside the
history of considerable contact between the Europeans and the Japanese. The
Japanese had gradually established trading relations with the Europeans
since 1543, when the Portuguese arrived at Tanegashima Island. The Spanish
arrived in 1584, as did the Dutch in 1600. The first Christian missionary, led
by Francisco Xavier, arrived in 1549, and successive missions were to follow.
Trading relations quickly followed: the Portuguese had begun trading activ-
ities in Nagasaki in 1570, followed by the Dutch in 1609 and the English in
1613. During this time all European powers were required to subject them-
selves to diplomatic rules as dictated by the Japanese, and this would continue
right up to the day that Perry arrived in Japan.
Why has this history of pre-1853 European–Japanese contact been relegated to
the background? The answer lies in the entrenched Eurocentrism amongst the
English School and other international relations theorists. Concerned with explor-
ing and ‘proving’ the possibilities of a ‘moral’ life in an anarchical international
order, scholars of the English School tradition have attempted to demonstrate how
norms of tolerance and coexistence have (uniquely) evolved in European
international history since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which eventually
spread throughout the globe (Keene 2002; Kayaoglu 2010). This identification
necessarily entailed the formation of a non-European ‘Other’ that was a passive
recipient of European norms. Stories of non-European strength are hardly
conducive to the construction of a morally superior European/Western ‘Self ’
 Europe and the Japanese world order 77
willing to spread progressive norms, and as such have been frequently for-
gotten.
Critiques of such Eurocentric historical narratives have long been articu-
lated in the field of Asian history (Tashiro 1982; Toby 1984; cf. Cohen 1984),
but the same cannot quite be said of the English School. While there is now a
growing awareness of the approach’s blindness to the darker sides of the
expansion of European international society (O’Hagan 2002; Keal 2003;
Suganami 2003; Suzuki 2005), the historical focus of scholarship within the
English School tradition has overwhelmingly been on the story of how non-
Europeans interacted under the context of European domination. However,
the interactions of the European and non-European actors are naturally much
more multifaceted. This chapter attempts to address this lacuna by examining
interactions between the Netherlands and Japan during the Tokugawa period.
It argues that the Dutch played a crucial role in the construction of the
Japan-centric tribute system within the East Asian international order. It also
seeks to rethink the longstanding English School question of whether in the
absence of a common civilization two different polities were able to construct
some form of meaningful social life between one another.

Rethinking European and non-European relations before

European expansion
The most important work on European and non-European interactions from
the English School is undoubtedly The Expansion of International Society,
edited by Hedley Bull and Adam Watson. As can be gleaned from the title,
the empirical focus is very much on a story of assimilation, when the non-
European polities were subsumed into the European-dominated international
order. The story here is (as noted above) presented generally as a ‘success
story’: as English School scholars viewed (European) international society as
a positive force that would mitigate the Hobbesian insecurities generated by
anarchy, its expansion was seen as a desirable development. This also meant
that the English School scholars’ view of the history of European interna-
tional relations was highly one-sided, where ‘Western societies’ achievement
of religious and political tolerance originated with Westphalia and was furth-
ered by subsequent treaties and conventions while non-Western societies’ lack
of religious and political tolerance was shaped by their intolerant and des-
potic past’ (Kayaoglu 2010: 195). Furthermore, because of the agenda to
demonstrate that a common civilization was not a prerequisite to the spread
of global norms, English School scholars depicted this historical development
as a relatively linear process. As O’Hagan notes, ‘[u]niversalist overtones sur-
face in Bull’s discussion of international society … he does imply that devel-
opment and progress have been linked to the expansion of the European
system’ (O’Hagan 2002: 129). As Adam Watson (1984a: 31) notes:
78 Shogo Suzuki
… the nineteenth century is notable for the creation throughout Asia,
Africa, and Oceania of Europeanized or Westernized élites. The Eur-
opeans and the Americans offered the instruction, and usually met with
an enthusiastic response … The mastery of Western governmental practice
and military technology enabled these élites to run a modern state.

It is important to note, however, that this narrative effectively robs many of the
non-European polities and their peoples of their agency. Because of the English
School’s implicit assumption that European institutions and norms are inher-
ently progressive, the adoption of European institutions and norms was seen as
something rational and inevitable – provided that the non-Europeans desired
to escape from their ‘backward’ or ‘regressive’ state of living (Suzuki 2009:
17–25). What is also visible here is that Watson’s narrative – alongside other
authors of the English School – at times appears almost blithely oblivious to the
fact that the expansion of European international society was often the result
of outright European coercion. Suganami (2003: 263) makes this point nicely with
reference to Watson’s discussions of the expansion of European international
society when he notes:

What is disturbing here is the conspicuous absence of the story-teller’s

aside, reminding the reader of one key feature of the [nineteenth] century –
imperialism. Watson’s observation … describes the state of the mind of
the complacent and ill-informed 19th-century European; the transforma-
tion could not have seemed so utterly innocuous to others.

This of course does not imply that the English School has been oblivious to
European imperialism and its evils. Indeed, scholars working in this tradition
have come a long way in terms of critiquing the Eurocentricity of earlier
works. Edward Keene, for instance, has provided a detailed critique of the
English School’s one-sided interpretations of Grotius and identified a more
coercive mode of interaction adopted by European international society in its
interactions with those polities and peoples deemed ‘uncivilized’ (Keene
2002). Paul Keal (1995, 2003; cf. Anghie 2006) has similarly focused on the
plight of indigenous peoples in the wake of the expansion of the society, and
has exposed how even natural law, which ostensibly entitled all of humankind
its protection, could function to justify the conquest of indigenous peoples
and the extinguishing of their cultures.
There does remain, however, an element of Eurocentricity in these argu-
ments, albeit implicitly. While the new approaches adopted by the more
recent English School works have succeeded in puncturing the more unbridled
celebration of Europe’s ‘civilizing’ mission that accompanied the expansion of
international society, their empirical focus is still firmly on the expansion of
Europe, with European states the subjects. John M. Hobson (2007a: 93) has
called this particular narrative ‘subliminal Eurocentrism’ which is critical of
the West but nevertheless assumes ‘that the West lies at the centre of all things in
 Europe and the Japanese world order 79
the world and that the West self-generates through its own endogenous “logic
of immanence”, before projecting its global will-to-power outwards through a
one-way diffusionism’. The history of Europe’s diplomatic interactions with
the non-European world prior to the expansion of European international
society, which was often dictated on the latter’s terms, is relegated to the realm
of insignificance.
Two factors account for this. The first is related to the construction of a
European identity based on exceptionalism, particularly in the case of authors
such as Bull or Watson. As Kayaoglu has pointed out, this ‘European self-
identification depended on various European other-identifications’ based on the
latter’s weakness and ‘backwardness’. The story of non-European strength –
both militarily and politically – is hardly conducive to constructing this eth-
nocentric identity, particularly as ‘the assertion of the complete superiority
and exceptionalism of the European political and legal order … necessitated
the European willingness to spread it’ (Kayaoglu 2010: 206).
The second factor is the English School’s distinction between an ‘interna-
tional system’ and an ‘international society’. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson
(1984b: 1) have defined an international society as:

… a group of states (or, more generally, a group of independent political

communities) which not merely form a system, in the sense that the
behaviour of each is a necessary factor in the calculations of the others, but
also have established by dialogue and consent common rules and institutions
for the conduct of their relations, and recognize their common interest in
maintaining these arrangements.

As international society is only presumed to have attained its global reach by the
end of the nineteenth century, any interactions between European and non-
European polities are implicitly regarded as ‘systemic’. This implies that no
common rules and interests emerged between the two, and it is therefore less
worthy of scholarly attention. This is problematic for a number of reasons. From a
more sociological point of view, it is wrong to conclude that common norms
and interests could not emerge between the Europeans and non-Europeans
until European international society expanded and the Europeans imposed
their own rules on the rest of the world. Rudimentary, functional agreements
of cooperation between polities can develop into deeper societal relations
(Buzan 1993). Furthermore, even if we do accept that it is extremely difficult
to establish some objective ‘tipping point’ when ‘systemic’ relations become
‘societal’, meaningful interaction between two polities is extremely difficult
without some societal relations emerging at some point (James 1993: 273).
In addition, we should also note that there is thus no reason to assume that
non-European polities’ relations with the Europeans prior to the expansion of
European international society were somehow uniquely ‘systemic’ and vice
versa. Many non-European post-colonial states still harbour deep-seated
resentment and suspicion towards continued Western domination in
80 Shogo Suzuki
international society today. Non-European states’ winning of independence
and subsequent entry into the society was based on their utilization of inher-
ently European norms such as sovereignty or national self-determination and
this is often (rather complacently) accepted as evidence of a deep acceptance
and strong identification with the Western-originated international order
today (Reus-Smit 2002: 503). However, such perspectives fail to reflect on
whether ‘the rules and institutions of international society represent a genuine
pluralist consensus or an expression of cultural hegemony’ (O’Hagan 2005:
217; cf. Brown 1995: 191). It is important to keep in mind that this fact may
not necessarily reflect an acceptance and internalization of Western norms,
but rather because in the face of continuing Western domination, non-Eur-
opean peoples had no other choice (see Bull 1984a).

Japan and Europe in the East Asian international order1

The aforementioned shortcomings in conventional English School accounts of
the world before the expansion of European international society are brought
into sharper focus by the case of Japan’s foreign policy prior to 1853. The
most important English School account of this particular period is of course
Hidemi Suganami’s contribution to The Expansion of International Society.
Suganami’s rendition of Japan’s international relations prior to the arrival of
European international society mirrors Eurocentric Japanese history which was
heavily influenced by modernization theory. According to this interpretation,
Japan’s encounter with European international society heralds the beginning
of a (felicitous) journey from feudalism to modernity (Dower 1975: 3–101).
Therefore, as Tashiro (1982: 283) notes, Japan’s policy of refusing contact
with the European world except the Netherlands evokes an image of ‘a closed
society having absolutely no contact with any other nation’ and ‘we find the
Edo period [the Tokugawa period] itself being defined as “the period of iso-
lation” or “the dark ages” or “the beginning of the Japanese tragedy.”’ While
this approach can be criticized for supplying a rather sanitized story of Eur-
opean imperialism, what is of most interest to our discussion is how the story
of interactions between non-Europeans fades into the background. The most
‘significant’ historical event worth of scholarly scrutiny in the diplomatic history
of East Asia is seen as the events surrounding the ‘impact of the West’.
With regard to any interactions prior to Japan’s ‘entry’ into European
international society, Suganami unsurprisingly provides a relatively sparse
narrative, pointing out that Tokugawa Japan had effectively cut itself off from
interacting with any European powers with the exception of the Netherlands,
whose merchants were required to reside in a secluded artificial island in
Nagasaki called Dejima. This policy – implemented gradually between 1633–41,
and known as sakoku – is implicitly regarded as creating ‘systemic’ relation-
ships between Japan and European international society, as both sides merely
‘accept[ed] the empirical reality of each other’s existence’ and had yet to take
‘the additional step of respecting one another’s right to sovereign
 Europe and the Japanese world order 81
independence’ (indeed, such a concept did not enter the Japanese lexicon until
the nineteenth century) (Linklater and Suganami 2006: 130). It is only when
Japan began to enter into relations based on international treaties and law in
the late nineteenth century – unequal though they were for the Japanese, who
were branded ‘semi-civilized’ – that its relations with the Europeans are said
to have become societal in nature.
It would of course be unfair to criticize Suganami for not providing a more
detailed analysis of the relations between Tokugawa Japan and the Europeans,
as his explicit goal was to explore the process by which the Japanese were
incorporated into European international society. Yet, the relative silence accorded
to the relations between the Netherlands and Japan prior to the expansion of
the society in itself sheds light on the enduring legacy of Eurocentrism. As
with other studies of the English School, the fact that Japan had limited its
interactions with Europe is deemed as ‘isolation’ from the world, which
ignores the diverse diplomatic relations the Tokugawa shogunate maintained
with Korea, China and the Ryu-kyu- kingdom (Toby 1991: 4–6). This notion –
which only sees diplomatic interactions dictated by Europeans and passive
non-Europeans as worthy of scholarly attention – is further strengthened
when we note that societal relations are only deemed to have emerged
between the Japanese and Europeans in the late nineteenth century, once
Japan had been forcibly assimilated into European international society. Any
possibility of deep, societal (and therefore ‘progressive’) relations emerging
between Asia and the European world on Asian terms is never seriously considered.
This could not be further from the truth, however: while many conventional
historical studies (on which Suganami’s work draws) tended to concentrate
heavily on examining Japan’s relations with the Netherlands, Japan was at this
time in a position to impose its own norms of diplomatic conduct to ‘foreign’
polities, and this would mean that the Netherlands would be incorporated
into the social structures of a particular international order based on the
terms of the Japanese.

The East Asian international order and Japan

Japan’s international relations under the Tokugawa shogunate were governed
by the constitutional structures of the East Asian international order, which
had originated in China and were undergirded by Confucian ideology (Reus-
Smit 1999; Fairbank 1968; Zhang 2001: 56; Mancall 1984: 13–39). As Yong-
jin Zhang (2001) has noted, in this social setting interstate relations were
conducted on a hierarchical basis, rather than sovereign equality: there was a
‘centre’ that stood at the apex of this order – usually China – and its ruler was
assumed to be a mediator between humankind and heaven. The maintenance
of these social hierarchies was seen as a crucial means of attaining social
harmony and ultimately the happiness of the peoples of the respective
member states of this international social order. Diplomatic relations between
states operated on the basis of ‘ritual justice’, which meant that legitimate
82 Shogo Suzuki
conduct was governed by elaborate rituals and ceremonies which functioned
to maintain and strengthen the given social hierarchy of the East Asian
international order.
These constitutional structures were expressed and reproduced through an
institution known as the tribute system. Under this arrangement, diplomatic
missions consisted of foreign emissaries presenting ‘tribute’ – gifts for the
ruler of the state that occupied a higher place in the social hierarchy – in
return for ‘favours’ such as investiture, trading rights and gifts of higher value.
These diplomatic interactions were governed by a set of elaborate rules that
served to illuminate that the ruler of the host country had attained the moral
authority as an ‘ethical ruler’, to the extent that foreigners were presenting
tribute and placing themselves below the ruler in the Confucian social hier-
archy. This made it a powerful means by which the rulers of polities within
the East Asian international order legitimated their rule.
Japan’s longstanding historical legacy of interactions with China and Korea
(both key members of the East Asian international order) and cultural learn-
ing from the Asian continent meant that the Japanese were deeply embedded
in the social structures of this Confucian-influenced international social
environment (see Howell 1998: 119–20). This meant that many of their dip-
lomatic institutions were broadly similar to those of other members of the
East Asian international order. This even extended to Japan’s so-called isola-
tionist policy, the sakoku. Tanaka Takeo notes the remarkable similarity of
Japan’s sakoku policy with the ‘seclusionist’ policies (known as haijin 海禁 in
Chinese) undertaken by the Ming and Korea. The policy consisted of the
state banning its peoples from private overseas travel and trade. It was first
implemented by the Ming Dynasty of China to prevent ‘Japanese’ piracy
(known as wako- or wokou 倭寇) and monopolize trade (Tanaka 1975: 85–86).
The policy eventually evolved to support the hierarchies of the East Asian
international order and was adopted by China’s neighbours. By forcing for-
eign merchants to participate in ‘official’ trade and its rituals, the member
states attempted to demonstrate and shore up their ‘superior’, ‘civilized’
status. ‘Therefore’, Arano (1988: iv) argues, Japan’s policy of sakoku ‘was not
necessarily a policy that “closed a state’s borders” but a policy to recognize a
given state’s desired way to conduct diplomatic intercourse’.
However, by the time of the Tokugawa, Japan’s acceptance of Sinocentrism
was somewhat waning. Instead, the Japanese placed Japan at the apex of
civilization.2 This process was hastened by the collapse of the Ming and the
rise of the ‘barbarian’ Manchurian Qing Dynasty in China. The Tokugawa
shogunate refused to send any tribute missions to China and admit to the
latter’s ‘superiority’. Instead, the Japanese began to invite their own neigh-
bours to send tribute to Japan instead. These diplomatic policies were hardly
‘isolationist’: rather, as Toby (1984: 96) argues, they:

… should be seen as part of a much larger foreign policy embracing

all of Japan’s world. That foreign policy made tradeoffs … The
 Europe and the Japanese world order 83
Tokugawa tradeoff was between unrestricted foreign commerce, on the
one hand, and the demands of sovereignty, security, and legitimacy, on
the other.

In order to reinforce the notion that the Tokugawa clan had unified Japan
and were the rightful rulers of the land, the first sho-gun, Tokugawa Ieyasu,
appealed to the fact that he had ‘unified the country … rectified administra-
tion and brought prosperity to the people; and his dynasty had already
attained its third generation’ (Toby 1984: 60), all of which fitted the Confucian
normative ideal. Korean and Ryu-kyu- (present-day Okinawa) rulers were
encouraged to send missions in order to demonstrate that the sho-gun’s pres-
tige had spread far and wide. As one Japanese feudal lord put it in the context
of the Korean missions’ visit to first Tokugawa sho-gun Ieyasu’s shrine in 1637, ‘The
Three Ambassadors paid their respects … solely because the three generations of
peace [between Japan and Korea] and the peace of Korea are due entirely to
the high grace of To-sho-gu-’ (Toby 1984: 99). The missions were hosted at the
expense of the shogunate, a practice that mirrored the Chinese custom of
paying for the expenses of the foreign emissaries.

Red-haired barbarians and the Japanese centre

What role, then, did the ‘red-haired barbarians’ – as the Europeans were
called – play in Japan’s international relations during this time? Relations between
the Europeans and the Japanese were primarily based on trade. However,
once Japan’s feudal rulers had consolidated their control over Japanese terri-
tory, the Europeans could become useful tools by which to demonstrate the
widespread nature of their prestige as righteous rulers and consolidate their
legitimacy to rule. To this end, the Europeans were incorporated into the
Japan-centric East Asian international order and interacted on the terms
dictated by the Japanese, playing a crucial role in the maintenance of its
structures.
Of course, societal relations between these two polities were not based on
international law or natural law as European international society was, given
that the Europeans and the Japanese did not share the same philosophical
traditions or god. Instead, in accordance with the principle of hierarchical
sovereignty, European states that interacted with members of the East Asian
international order had to be assigned a place within the social/civilizational
hierarchy. This was common practice for other states in East Asia, most
famously China, and the Europeans who wished to cultivate some form of
relations – trading or political – had to conform to these norms. Evidence of
this can be seen from the fact that Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣秀吉), the feudal
ruler of Japan in 1590–98, had ordered the Portuguese governor-general of
India and the Spanish rulers of the Philippines in 1591 to present tribute. The
Tokugawa shogunate was no different. As with the Chinese world order, ‘[t]he
Tokugawa regime created for itself a naturalized version of the sinocentric
84 Shogo Suzuki
world order of a civilized core surrounded by barbarian or at best imperfectly
civilized peripheries’ (Howell 1998: 119). By the time of the seventeenth cen-
tury, this had evolved into a division of the world into Japan (honcho- 本朝),
China (kara 唐) and the Occident (seiyo- 西洋, which encompassed the ‘outer
barbarians’), primarily based on civilization. While the former were char-
acterized by shared ‘writing systems and ethics [i.e. Confucian culture]’, the
latter were ‘countries that used horizontal writing systems, unlike Chinese
(唐土と差ひて皆横文字の国也)’ (Tsukamoto 1979: 9). Under this scheme,
Japan was placed within the Chinese cultural world (albeit at the apex),
which the Japanese astronomer Nishikawa Joken (西川如見) labelled gaikoku
in his 1708 work Ka i tsu-sho- ko- (華夷通商考). Meanwhile, the Dutch were
placed within the sphere of the gai i (外夷), or ‘outer barbarians’. Similar
schemes were deployed in the encyclopaedia Wakan sansai zue (和漢三才図会),
which was published in the early eighteenth century. The book placed the Dutch
and the Spanish in the category of the gai i alongside three-bodied monsters,
implying that the Europeans were entities only ‘“one class above beasts”
that did not meet the civilizational standards of the Chinese cultural world’
(Tsukamoto 1979: 10; Tashiro 1982: 289).
It is worth mentioning, however, that the Japanese neither entirely saw their
civilization as ‘progress in relation to the political, economic, and social
institutions and practices of a society’, nor as ‘a single and universal concept
used to describe a teleological process through which individuals and groups
became civilized’ like their Chinese or nineteenth-century European counter-
parts (Hirono 2008: 22). Whereas the Chinese (who shared with the Japanese
broadly similar culturalist views of the non-Chinese world) tended to hold
that Chinese civilization was inherently superior and that the Chinese
emperor could guide the ‘barbarians’ to progress, the Japanese came closer to
what Miwa Hirono (2008: 23; cf. Huntington 1996) calls a ‘pluralist concep-
tion of “civilizations”’, and viewed these three worlds as ‘self-governing
worlds with their own states, societies and cultures’ (Arano 1988: 53). This
divergence, Arano (1988: 53) notes, possibly originated from the fact that ‘the
Japanese state authorities had no choice but to construct their self identity
[自己 jiko] under the political and cultural influence of China, India or
Korea’. Nevertheless, the norms of the East Asian international order were a
‘heavy chain that bound the inner and outer worlds of the early modern
Japanese’ (Arano 1988: 61), and the Tokugawa shogunate did insist that
appropriate social rituals governing diplomatic conduct be observed by the
‘outer barbarians’. As Tashiro Kazui notes, ‘in [Japan’s] dealings with the
Ryu-kyu-s and Holland, which can hardly be described as normal diplomatic
relations between countries of equal standing, Japan insisted that it be paid a
sort of tributary mission’ (Tashiro 1982: 289).
This, of course, does not imply that the norms governing ‘ritual justice’ in
the Japan-centric tribute system had already been established by the Toku-
gawa shogunate when it began interacting with the Europeans. The rituals
themselves undoubtedly bore the hallmarks of the East Asian international
 Europe and the Japanese world order 85
order: in 1613 the English East India Company commander John Saris had to
spend five days ‘to prepare and transport presents from the king to the Japa-
nese shogun’, even before negotiations for the granting of trade privileges
began. This practice was carried out in China as well, where some form of
‘tribute’ was required in return for benevolent ‘favours’ to be bestowed upon
the European ‘barbarians’ (Klekar 2006: 93). Europeans – be they Portuguese,
or Dutch – were often not spoken to by the sho-gun. Instead, they were merely
invited to display their gifts in front of the Japanese ruler, who would
acknowledge their ‘tribute’ with a silent nod. A Dutch emissary to China 1667
was granted an audience with the Kangxi emperor in a style that also mirrored that
of Japan, making this ‘style of audience a uniquely East Asian one’ (Naga-
zumi 1990: 99). Nevertheless, the Tokugawa shogunate did face the same pro-
blem that the Europeans encountered later when dealing with non-European
peoples who had yet to be ‘digested’ (to use Wight’s words) into European
international society (Wight 1992: 50). Indeed, at times ritual protocol was
not always observed by the Japanese rulers, especially when the sho-gun him-
self was either personally favourably disposed towards the Europeans or had
specific desires for trading relations.3 Nagazumi (1990: 96) also points out that in
the early years of the rule of the first sho-gun, Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康), the
historical records list Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish gifts to the sho-gun
together, which is indicative that ‘there were no established rituals for receiving
gifts, including those from foreigners’. Consequently, a Portuguese mission
sent by the governor of Goa (described as an embaxadors by the Dutch) in 1611
was provided with horses by the shogunate free of charge, and proceeded to the
capital Edo (present-day Tokyo) dressed in elaborate velvet clothing and
playing musical instruments. This, Nagazumi (1990: 99) argues, demonstrates
that the Portuguese mission was treated in a similar style to a Korean tribute
mission, and is indicative of the still somewhat fluid position of the Europeans
in the hierarchical ordering of foreigners in Japan’s tribute system.

The audience question of 1627: consolidating hierarchical orders

The East Asian international order, however, ‘did not exist by itself; rather, it had to
be reconfirmed in the arena of external relations’ (Arano 1988: x). As the
Tokugawa shogunate sought to consolidate and legitimate its rule both to its
domestic and international audiences, it soon began to formalize the institu-
tional arrangements surrounding Japan’s interactions with the ‘outer barbarians’
and differentiate them from those who came from the East Asian cultural
sphere. In this sense, the Europeans would serve as an important ‘Other’ that would
function to highlight Japan’s own identity as a ‘civilized’ and paternalistically
‘benevolent’ head of the East Asian international order (cf. Neumann 1999).
A symbolic diplomatic incident that accelerated this process was the debate
surrounding the visit of Pieter Nuyts, the emissary of the Dutch governor of
Batavia, in 1627. Nuyts’s visit itself was prompted by a dispute between the
Dutch and the Japanese resulting from the former’s establishment of a port in
86 Shogo Suzuki
Taiwan. Keen to set up a base for trading with China, the Netherlands had
constructed a fortress in Anping, close to Tainan. In an attempt to improve
the competitiveness of their trading vessels, the Dutch began imposing a tax
on any exports from the port and sought to monopolize trade originating
from Anping, bringing them into conflict with Japanese licensed trading ships.
The Japanese side retaliated by closing the Dutch trading house (then still
located in Hirado 平戸) and banning the Netherlands from trading with
Japan. Nuyts was charged with the task of explaining the Dutch position and
avoiding an escalation of this diplomatic row.
Nuyts arrived in Hirado in 1627, and immediately got entangled in a
lengthy debate over his official status and the appropriate diplomatic rituals that
should govern his interactions with the Tokugawa officials and the sho-gun. The
Hirado fiefdom officials, upon hearing that this emissary was an ‘ambassa-
dor’, proposed that Nuyts ‘make the procession up to Edo as grand as he could’
(Nagazumi 1990: 107), and word also came from the shogunate in Edo that it
would pay for the horses and porters needed for the procession. Here, we can
see that the Dutch mission was treated as equivalent to a tribute mission from
a member of the East Asian international order, such as Korea or the Ryu-kyu-
kingdom. However, the Japanese officials’ interpretations of the nature of
Nuyts’s mission, as well as its very compatibility with the normative frame-
work of the East Asian international order, was soon put to the test when the
Japanese found out that Nuyts had a number of diplomatic matters to discuss
with the sho-gun. According to Japan’s diplomatic protocol, all visits by the Dutch
‘were to pay a visit to the sho-gun and present him with gifts. If there were
any other matters to discuss, these were to be requested via appropriate
intermediaries, and to be dealt with by the appropriate offices’, rather than
through direct negotiations with the sho-gun himself (Kato- 1981: 84).
Nuyts’s own official position also came under scrutiny during this time.
Most of his stay in Edo, notes Kato- (1981: 85), was spent dealing with repeated
questions over whether the ambassador:

(1) had come directly from the Netherlands; (2) was appointed and sent
by the Dutch ‘king’; (3) the document that accompanied him was written
and signed in Holland; and (4) the Governor of Batavia was related to the
‘king’, or merely a subject.

Nuyts explained that although he was an ambassador of the governor of

Batavia, ‘since the Governor governed the Dutch East Indies on behalf of the
king, he was effectively the sovereign of the territory, and it was international
custom to treat such ambassadors [despatched by sovereigns] with courtesy’,
and on this basis ‘he should be allowed an audience with the sho-gun as soon
as possible’ (Kato- 1981: 86, emphasis added). The Japanese officials were
‘deeply disappointed’ that Nuyts was not an ambassador from the king of
Holland, particularly as they had given him the highest level of treatment in
accordance with their diplomatic rituals, and Nuyts’s diary records that the
 Europe and the Japanese world order 87
feudal lord of Hirado was almost ordered to commit suicide for his erroneous
reporting of the nature of the Dutch mission (Nagazumi 1990: 110).
In the end, Nuyts was compelled to sign a statement that his mission was
‘to give thanks to the favours given to Holland by the sho-gun’, and that he
was not a special emissary from the Netherlands, and that his ‘mission was
not to make any demands to the sho-gun with regard to the dispute in Taiwan’
(Nagazumi 1990: 108–9). Although the officials of the shogunate attempted to
alter Nuyts’s status as a ‘merchant’ to allow an audience with the sho-gun
Tokugawa Iemitsu, ultimately the Dutch letter was deemed inappropriately
discourteous for the Japanese ruler’s eyes, and Nuyts was given the explana-
tion that ‘Ambassadors come to pay their respects to the ruler when they visit
Japan, not make demands’ (Nagazumi 1990: 110). At a certain level, we can
see Tokugawa attempts to ensure that the sho-gun’s image as a benevolent,
paternal figure (something that fitted the Confucian ideal) was not threatened
by an emissary from a lower-ranking polity making demands and implying
that the special favours given by the ruler of Japan were somehow inadequate.
Nuyts, of course, failed to see this point of view, which is unsurprising given
that he was operating under European normative structures. He was forced to
return, furious, to Taiwan empty handed. He meted out his revenge on the
Japanese traders in Taiwan, only to be ‘kidnapped by them and imprisoned in
Japan, before the authorities at Batavia could secure his release by eating
humble pie’ (Boxer 1984: 539).
The debacle of the Nuyts mission prompted the new governor, Jacques
Specx, to adopt a more conciliatory stance. He ordered the despatch of a new
mission to Japan in 1630, but this time told the mission that the Dutch East
India Company (VOC) ‘should not seek empty glory and honour; instead, we
need to ensure that we can obtain profits from free and unhindered trade with
Japan as before, as well as let the Japanese enjoy benefits [from trade with the
Netherlands]’ (Kato- 1981: 88–89). Crucially, Specx appears to have decided to
accept the Japanese hierarchical ordering of Holland (if not sincerely), and
warned the Dutch mission that ‘even if they encounter Japanese arrogance to
keep in mind that “the Japanese are a great and proud people and the Dutch
are a small and petty people”’. This policy, Kato- (1981: 89) argues, eventually
evolved into the use of the word keizers eigen volck (the servants of his
imperial majesty), which the Dutch would use when addressing the sho-gun.
Specx’s tactics were ultimately to bear fruit, and the Dutch were allowed to
reopen their trading house in Hirado and restart trade in 1633.
The Netherlands continued to play a crucial role in the construction of
Japan’s own ‘tribute system’ until the expansion of European international
society into East Asia. Such handling of the Dutch served to confirm the
‘outsider’/‘outer barbarian’ status of Holland in the Japan-centric tribute
system. The Dutch were required to pay a visit to the sho-gun in Edo (present-
day Tokyo), and this occasion served a similar function to tribute missions by
the Koreans and Ryu-kyu-ans, reinforcing the social structures of the East
Asian international order, albeit with Japan as the centre, rather than China.
88 Shogo Suzuki
By the time the Tokugawa shogunate had consolidated its rule, there was not
much room for manoeuvre for the Dutch, as far as diplomatic rituals were
concerned. There now existed strict, hierarchical ‘diplomatic’ protocols which
governed the etiquette of the Dutch visit, which befitted their ‘outer barbar-
ian’ status. The sho-gun did not ‘receive’ the delegation as he did for the Kor-
eans or the Ryu-kyu-an emissaries; rather, ‘the shogun was recorded … as
“viewing” the Hollanders, much as he had “viewed” entertainments offered by
the Korean equestrian troop or the Ryu-kyu-an musicians’ (Toby 1984: 190).
The Dutch were not allowed to speak to the sho-gun, and neither were they
allowed to present him with any petitions. The differential treatment given to
the Dutch by the Japanese (in contrast to their reception of the Korean or
Ryu-kyu-an missions) mirrored the Canton system of trade adopted by Qing
China, where ‘outer barbarians’ were segregated from the local populace and
allowed limited trade as an ‘imperial favour’.
The Dutch were well aware of their position within the Japan-centric tri-
bute system, and employees of the Dutch East India Company resident in
Nagasaki were instructed to be ‘armed with modesty, humility, politeness and
friendship, always behaving as inferiors’ (Boxer 1984: 539, emphasis added).
In a fascinating account that demonstrates how Tokugawa diplomatic symbols had
evolved since the time of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Engelbert Kaempfer, the German
physician to the Dutch delegation, recorded that in the audience with the
sho-gun, the Dutch trade representative greeted the Japanese rulers as follows:
‘kneeling, he [the Dutch trade representative] bow’d his forehead quite down to
the ground, and so crawl’d backwards like a crab, without uttering one single
word. So mean and short a thing is the audience we have of this mighty Mon-
arch’ (cited in Toby 1984: 193). The Dutch were even prepared to play the
fool in their audience with the sho-gun if necessary. Kaempfer reported that:

There was a Royal Viewing (jo-ran) of the four Hollanders [at which the
Europeans were required] to walk, to stand still, to compliment each
other, to dance, to jump, to play the drunkard, to speak broken Japanese,
to read Dutch, to paint, to sing, to put our cloaks on and off … In this
manner, and with innumerable such other apish tricks, we must suffer
ourselves to contribute to the Emperor’s and the Court’s diversion.
(Toby 1984: 194)

A number of points can be made from these incidents. First, we see that the
shogunate’s handling of the Nuyts affair demonstrates that by the time of Toku-
gawa Iemitsu, Japan had already established fairly concrete regulations con-
cerning foreign audiences with the Japanese ruler according to the official
status of the emissaries. Second, it is clear that the procedural norms
governing diplomacy in Europe – such as the treatment of an ambassador – were
deemed as simply incompatible with East Asian diplomatic norms and
rejected by the Japanese. Nuyts’s invoking of international customs meant
very little to them, as Japan’s own normative frameworks were governed
 Europe and the Japanese world order 89
by those of the East Asian international order, rather than European inter-
national society.
In contrast to the late nineteenth century, the Europeans were in no posi-
tion whatsoever to force the Tokugawa shogunate to accept and participate in
European norms of interstate interaction (see also Massarella 2001).4 As far
as the Dutch were concerned, their priorities lay in establishing themselves as
trading partners of the Japanese. During the 1627 audience dispute, the
Netherlands was still competing with the Portuguese for the sho-gun’s trading
privileges (their other rivals, the English, had closed down their trading house
in Hirado in 1623, following poor profits). Given the shogunate’s suspicion of
the Portuguese Jesuits, the Dutch were well aware that if they refrained from
proselytizing in Japan, they had the chance to monopolize Europe’s trade with
Japan – and they eventually succeeded in this endeavour in 1639, when the
Portuguese were banned from sailing to Japan. After this date, it made even less
commercial sense for the Dutch to get entangled in disputes with the
Tokugawa shogunate over diplomatic rituals. As Grant K. Goodman
(2000: 240, footnote 11) notes, ‘[u]p to the beginning of the eighteenth century
the profit for the Hollanders on their annual trade with Japan was over 50 per
cent, thus making it the richest Dutch trading post in the East’. Dutch trad-
ing fortunes waned later on, but even then there were opportunities for financial
gain to be made by engaging in smuggling with the Japanese (Keene 1969: 6).
Furthermore, there is some evidence of caution of the military prowess of the
Japanese on the part of the Dutch. Referring to Holland’s harassing of Portu-
guese ships, one VOC employee wrote to Governor of Batavia Jan Pieterszoon
Coen that:

… the Shogun of Japan was ‘no king of Makassar’ and he would not
tolerate the Dutch trying to intercept Portuguese shipping in Japanese
waters. He added that probably the king of Makassar did not like the
Dutch violating his neutrality either; but that he lacked the force to stop
it, whereas the Japanese most certainly did not.
(cited in Boxer 1984: 539)

In light of these considerations, the Dutch were effectively willing to incor-

porate themselves into the East Asian international order for the sake of
maintaining harmonious trading relations, and it is important to note that
this arrangement lasted for more than 200 years – this is still longer than
Japan’s encounter with and subsequent entry into European international
society, which was in its 157th year at the time of writing. They shied
away from confronting Japanese officials over diplomatic protocol by
simply not sending any ambassadors or letters from the Dutch sovereign
(Nagazumi 1990: 125). Instead, they limited their interactions with Japan to a
‘commercial’ basis, with any diplomatic interactions taking place between the
Dutch head of the trading house and appropriate officials of the Tokugawa
shogunate.
90 Shogo Suzuki
Rethinking international order and European domination
What implications does the case of European–Japanese interactions prior to 1853
generate for us? First, the case of Japan’s interactions with the Netherlands
suggests that a common culture may not be a prerequisite for societal rela-
tions between two polities. Martin Wight was of course explicit on the need
for cultural homogeneity, arguing that an international society ‘will not come
into being without a degree of cultural unity among its members’ (Wight
1977: 33). A shared civilizational background in Christianity may have indeed
played an important role in the emergence of European international society,
and a shared Confucian civilization was also a crucial ingredient for the
emergence of the East Asian international order.
Alexander Wendt, however, contests this view when he points out that the
‘mistake made here is thinking that “culture” (shared knowledge) is the same
thing as “society” (cooperation)’. However, ‘[s]hared knowledge and its var-
ious manifestations … are analytically neutral with respect to cooperation
and conflict … there is nothing about the absence of shared knowledge, a
world of only material forces, that necessarily implies a war of all against all’
(Wendt 1999: 253–54). The case of Japan and the Netherlands seems to
support this. The fact that the Dutch went along with playing their lowly social
role in the Japanese tribute system also shows that both Holland and Japan
recognized certain interests (if not common values) and ‘regard[ed] themselves
as bound by certain rules in their dealings with one another’ (Bull 1995: 13),
and this seems to suggest that the Japanese and Dutch had developed some
form of societal relations as defined by Hedley Bull. In spite of the lack of a
common cultural heritage, both states were able to maintain relatively peaceful
relations with each other for more than 200 years.
Second, an examination of relations between Japan and the European world
prior to the expansion of European international society seems to point to an
enduring tendency towards promoting homogenization in the English School.
The neglect of the history of interactions between the European world and the
non-European world rests, as mentioned previously, on the artificial dis-
tinction between ‘societal’ and ‘systemic’ relations. Despite the empirical
difficulties of distinguishing when and how ‘societal’ relations emerge
between two actors, many studies of the English School have assumed that
such relations were only possible when non-European polities were subsumed
into European international society and adopted European norms values. As
‘societal’ relations are seen as inherently desirable, this has the unfortunate
effect of reproducing Eurocentric notions of only seeing diplomatic relations
with the West as meaningful and worthy of scholarly attention. In this sense,
then, the ‘system’ and ‘society’ distinction serves as an intellectual device to
‘cut off’ an important legacy of the history of humankind into oblivion and
moral ‘backwardness’. Such views are no doubt strengthened by the Eng-
lish School scholars’ own moral convictions that societal relations with the
European powers had the positive effect of spreading progressive norms
 Europe and the Japanese world order 91
(associated with what Wight called ‘Western values’) throughout the world
(Wight 1966; cf. O’Hagan 2002; Suganami 2003: 259–66), and we continue
to see similar assumptions (albeit implicitly) in some liberal thinkers today
(see Bowden 2004; Reus-Smit 2005).
Of course, it is hard to deny that many of the Dutch were participating in
the reproduction of the social structures of the Japan-centric East Asian
international order somewhat reluctantly for instrumental reasons. This was
underscored in 1804, when Russian Navy Captain Adam Krusenstern, who
had sailed to Japan to seek diplomatic and trading relations, commented that ‘it
is to be regretted that an enlightened European nation, owing its political
existence to a love of freedom, and which has acquired celebrity by great actions,
should so far debase itself from a desire of gain’ (cited in Keene 1969: 5).
The then Dutch trade representative Hendrik Doeff retorted that while Kru-
senstern may have found such rituals humiliating to European sensibilities, ‘[t]he
compliments we observe with respect to the Japanese are the same as they
themselves show each other … Besides, one cannot expect that a nation to
which one comes in order to seek the friendship of the same should conform to
the customs of the visitors’ (cited in Keene 1969: 5, footnote). Later Dutch
observers such as C.T. van Assendelft de Coningh would also write approvingly
in 1851 (just two years before the arrival of European international society in
Japan) that the Tokugawa shogunate’s strict control of the foreigners was a
wise one, ‘for only in this way could peaceful relations have been maintained
for so long’. De Coningh was also critical of ‘the falsehoods spread abroad by
foreigners in Dutch service’, such as Kaempfer (who was German), ‘“who
displayed the baseness of ascribing to us the same creeping role in front of the
Japanese as they themselves showed in front of us when they crawled to us
begging for a job”’ (Paul 1977: 364). While we do need to take into account
the possibility that both Doeff’s and de Coningh’s accounts may be somewhat
patriotic, aimed at quelling European disapproval towards Dutch policy vis-à-vis
Japan, it is nevertheless interesting and significant that even some Europeans
did not always see the international normative structures imposed upon them
by Japan as problematic, and had even begun to see some normative benefits
of operating under the East Asian international order.

Conclusion
The examination of diplomatic relations between European and non-European
polities prior to the expansion of European international society, while a
neglected area of research within the English School, has the potential to
provide us with some insights into international politics today.
Despite their increasing acknowledgement of the darker history of the expansion
of European international society, it seems that many English School scho-
lars – as well as scholars who advocated the global dissemination of liberal
democratic governance in the context of the post-Cold War ‘liberal triumphal-
ism’ – still adhere to the view that only cultural/civilizational homogeneity can
92 Shogo Suzuki
achieve a truly peaceful, stable international order (Fukuyama 1989; Fidler
2000, 2001; Clark 2005: 180). This can be seen from the English School’s neglect of
the period when Europeans interacted with the non-European world on the
latter’s terms. This, to my mind, seems to mirror a tendency to obscure ‘the inter-
civilizational dialogues that played such an important role in the making of
Western and global modernity’ (Hobson 2007b: 417). The construction of
this narrative in turn serves to preserve the Eurocentric myth of an uncontaminated
‘Western’ civilization which is ‘a pure, self-constituting entity that created
modernity through its own indigenous properties’ (Hobson 2007b: 423). This
seems unwittingly to reveal the deep-seated notion among English School
scholars that European/Western civilization and political thought is an inherent
force for good, and that contamination by non-European ideas and thoughts
can only lead to moral regression. Such ethnocentric fears are today epitomized by
the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis forwarded by Samuel P. Huntington (1996), and
also visible whenever a non-European state was seen on the ascendancy: in the
late 1980s this took the form of the ‘Japan threat’ thesis, ‘which drew on the
“traditional” racial and cultural stereotypes to narrate Japan’s threatening “other-
ness”’ (Bukh 2010: 87; cf. Huntington 1993; McDowell 1990). We are beginning to
see the same phenomenon with reference to China (Halper 2010).
More recently, however, the USA and its allies have been bogged down in a
seemingly unwinnable war in Afghanistan and Iraq, with their hopes of
constructing a liberal democracy in these lands seemingly in ruins. This has
forced students of international relations to reflect on the limitations of imposing
self-perceived ‘progressive’ norms on different cultures. This, of course, has
long been the ‘central dilemma for international society’ and many scholars
who work in this tradition (O’Hagan 2005: 223). While the discussions above
may have served to highlight his more Eurocentric tendencies, it is important
to acknowledge that Hedley Bull himself oscillated between his ideological
commitment to Western values and recognition that in a much more cultu-
rally diverse international society, different cultural values would have to be
incorporated (Bull 1995: 305; Dunne 1998: 148).
The historical record presented here and in other chapters of this volume
may give us cause for some optimism, however. The notion that different
cultures could easily clash has been criticized by Jacinta O’Hagan (1995: 24–
25), who has pointed out in her critique of Huntington’s ‘clash of civiliza-
tions’ thesis that coexistence was possible between two different civilizations.
Very little research has been carried out on how different polities may be able
to establish societal relations without reverting to coercive ‘civilizing missions’
often resented for the almost inevitable baggage of cultural superiority.5 One
of the keys to answering this question seems to lie in the examination of the
history of European and non-European interactions prior to the expansion of
European international society, and it is high time that that English School
took up this challenge.
 Europe and the Japanese world order 93
Notes
1 This section has been published in Suzuki, S. (2012) ‘Europe and Japan’, Review of
European Studies 4(3): 54–63, particularly pp. 55–59, and has been revised and
reproduced here with permission.
2 It should be noted, however, that Japan was not exactly alone in its resistance
towards Sinocentrism: states such as Korea and Vietnam defied Chinese claims of
superiority at various points in their history. This, of course, has interesting impli-
cations for recent arguments (Kang 2007) that claim an Asian tendency to accept
hierarchical international relations.
3 The first sho-gun Tokugawa Ieyasu was particularly known for his openness towards
Europeans, even appointing William Adams, a Briton, as his adviser. A delegation
from the Netherlands (1611) and the former Spanish governor of the Philippines
(1609) were both spoken to by Tokugawa Ieyasu during their respective audiences
with the sho-gun. Nagazumi (1990: 100–1) states that this was possible because of
Adams’ personal introduction of the Dutch, as well as the sho-gun’s own desire for
trade with Spain.
4 This was the case for the English as well. The attack on Chinese, Portuguese and
Spanish ships by the joint fleet of English and Dutch East India Companies in
1621 near Japanese waters incurred the displeasure of the Tokugawa shogunate,
which imposed further restrictions on English and Dutch trading privileges. John
Osterwick, based at the English trading house in Hirado, wrote at the time that
‘the pres[en]t estate of this Countrie, towching our selfe & the Hollanders, you may
please to vnderstand that wee stand vppon ticklish points of loosing our priviledges
& to be put out of the Countrie’ (cited in Massarella 2001: 26). This again is
indicative that the Europeans were in no position whatsoever to dictate the terms
of how they interacted with the Japanese.
5 To my mind, even pluralists may not have the advantage here, as they also require
a certain degree of homogeneous political culture – predicated on the acceptance
of the Western institution of the sovereign state and other institutions of interna-
tional society – and do not allow for genuine tolerance of different cultures and
arrangements of international life.
5 A corrupt international society
How Britain was duped into its first
Indian conquest
Darshan Vigneswaran

… you will find how you became engaged in the founding and erecting a new Fort.
(Company servant preparing London for the news that
they had become a landed power in India)

Introduction
This chapter asks to what extent the English School concept of the ‘expansion
of an European society of states’ helps us to understand early encounters
between Europeans and non-Europeans on the Indian sub-continent. The
chapter tests this framework through an in-depth analysis of official corre-
spondence amongst members of the British East India Company at the
founding moment of British sovereign authority on the Indian coast in the
middle of the sixteenth century. The treaties established by the East India
Company to establish forts at places like Armagon and Chennai constitute a
key test case for the English School assumption that shared culture is a fun-
damental prerequisite of international sociability. East India Company ser-
vants and the negotiators for sub-continental princes and emperors came
from different cultural universes. Would cultural differences prevent them
from establishing agreements over who could rule what territory?
An English School approach provides us with few resources for under-
standing this important historical moment, because it fundamentally mis-
represents the thoughts of the primary actors in this historical drama. While
Company servants were interested in ‘expanding’ British territory, they had
no interest in the expansion of any civilizational standard of rule. While some
of the actors in these negotiations had European origins, they did not draw on
any discernible ‘European’ norms to determine with whom they would
negotiate, or on what terms. While normative concerns helped to shape how
Company servants understood their role, these were consistently trumped by
base material considerations. Finally, there was no actor resembling a ‘state’
participating on either side of these negotiations.
Having established this critical distance from an English School perspec-
tive, the chapter responds to the question framed by this volume’s editors: can
 A corrupt international society 95
shared ‘international’ norms emerge in the absence of a common culture?
Here, the chapter is more constructive while remaining sceptical of any hope
for a resuscitation of an English School agenda. I argue that the lack of a
common ‘culture’ between British agents and their sub-continental counter-
parts presented no significant obstacle to their efforts to realize shared norms
for how territorial jurisdiction should be distributed. However, the set of
norms that British agents and their sub-continental counterparts shared are
not those that have been emphasized by English School theory: war, great
powers, diplomacy, balance of power, international law or sovereignty. Rather,
the contemporary term that best defines the shared normative orientations of
these two sets of parties is ‘corruption’: a shared belief in their mutual pre-
rogatives to profit personally from sovereign institutions and infrastructure,
and particularly fortifications. Put simply, since both Company servants and
the underlings of sub-continental lords came from parasitic, rent-seeking
classes in their respective countries, both were keen to fabricate political
institutions that ensured their continued mutual gain.
Understanding this phenomenon requires that we abandon misleading the-
oretical starting points like a hypothetical ‘society of states’ and focus our
attention on the groups and individuals that actually determined when and
where the British acquired fortified territory in India. The ‘society’ that
defined, negotiated and contested the initial conquest of India, setting the
terms for British expansion over the next two centuries, is perhaps best seen
as a transnational clique of contending but cooperating agents, who sought to
capitalize on the benefits of new international trade.
International Relations (IR) scholars commonly seek to use the empirical
invalidation of one theoretical paradigm to support or buttress another.
Arguments invalidating the power of ideas or norms invariably seek to
advance the case for materialist or rationalist frameworks. This case study
does not suggest that such an approach would be particularly helpful. Despite
the fact that base material interests and the rational interests of traders help
to account for much of the behaviour of inter-continental negotiators in this
case study, this does not validate the merits of a materialist or rationalist
approach. Indeed, the chapter suggests that such approaches do similar
injustices to history. In particular, they fail to see that the ‘corrupt culture’
that undergirded the emergence of a rudimentary international society
between the British and Indian rulers and allowed this transnational elite to
divert public institutions towards private ends, was not a mere post hoc justi-
fication of utilitarian interests but a specific way of structuring how interests
were perceived and calculated that was peculiar to a specific historical setting.
As socio-cultural changes in the United Kingdom began to undermine the
culture of ‘old corruption’ in the middle of the eighteenth century, the ability
of British and Indian agents to collude in the expansion of British territory
also began to give way. Hence, the rather ahistorical models of material forces
or rational interests do not help us to understand why the terms of European
expansion became more normatively charged over time.
96 Darshan Vigneswaran
The remainder of this chapter will examine how the servants of the British
East India Company initiated the process of territorial acquisition on the
Coromandel Coast of the Indian sub-continent during the 1620s–40s. I will
build this argument by first describing the common approach of British and
Indian rulers towards commerce in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I
aim to show that rulers on the sub-continent and in the British Isles regarded
the exploitation of virgin markets as a process to be sanctioned and ‘farmed’
for personal gain. This account helps to contextualize a more specific historical
case study, which shows how the British East India Company’s employees in
India decided to establish the first self-governed British settlements in India. That
section shows how, despite the lack of direct approval from London, sub-
continental Company employees were able, with the encouragement of local
rulers, to establish a fortified presence at Armagon and Madras. In addition
to the theoretical argument, this discussion has the added value of an
empirical contribution to historical discussions – firmly situating Armagon [rather
than Madras] as the site where British territorial rule on the sub-continent began.
The discussion then goes on to show how these initial agreements set the
pattern for British acquisitions over the next century until cultural changes in
England set Indo-European relationships on a new path.
In constructing this argument, this chapter relies heavily on the archives of the
East India Company, and specifically the ‘Official Correspondence’ (OC)
records held at the British Library. These records consist of letters, instructions,
memoranda, treaties and agreements sent amongst factories in Asia, and between
factors (employees) and the directors in London. The collection provides
insights into the activities, perceptions and rationales of the mid- and upper-level
Company employees on the questions of expansion. These records, however,
must be read as the product of a limited perspective, leaving out European
competitors, junior factors and servants within the Company and indigenous
rulers. This latter category is of significant concern for the argument of this
chapter. The lack of first-hand sources on the preferences of Indian elites
means that we must rely on factors’ interpretations of their interlocutors’
underlying motivations and culture.1 This is complicated by the fact that the
Official Correspondence documents are necessarily political tools, crafted by
Company officials to convince their compatriots (and more importantly, superiors
and shareholders) of the merits of a particular course of action. While these
limitations are somewhat balanced by the fact that much of the correspondence
reflects the product of collective decisions and/or meetings amongst various
factors and/or ship captains, it is highly likely that much detail and nuance has
been deliberately omitted or edited in the self-interest of the authors, requiring
the analyst to rest significantly on interpretation and judgement.

Negotiating trading rights in seventeenth-century India

When British traders first began to arrive on sub-continental shores in the late
sixteenth century, they were attempting to establish themselves in a system of
 A corrupt international society 97
naval trade between Europe and Asia that had been forged by the Portuguese, but
was increasingly being dominated by the Dutch and the French. While Eur-
opean powers had established themselves as highly influential naval powers in
the Indian Ocean, this did not translate into a capacity to dictate terms to
local rulers. Instead, indigenous elites often skilfully played European powers
against one another as the latter sought to learn how questions of power and
privilege on the sub-continent could be decided, and to refine their approach
accordingly. For the most part, this precluded the possibility of exercising any
substantial forms of territorial rule. Europeans traded out of a series of ‘fac-
tories’ located in towns and markets at the discretion of, and under the con-
trol of, local rulers or fief-holders. Previous powers had pioneered the concept
of a fortified settlement, but the primary purpose was the fortification of port
towns against naval attack. As noted by I. Bruce Watson (1980: 71), ‘[w]hile
the Portuguese concentrated on levying tribute from the indigenous maritime
trade of the Indian Ocean, the Dutch utilized their forts to establish control
over the supply of fine spices in the south-east Asian Archipelago’.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Queen Elizabeth awarded a
Charter to a group of merchants to form the East India Company, in order
that she might profit from the growing trade in the East Indies. For the first
half of the seventeenth century the representatives of the East India Company
were relative novices in this world and were forced to learn, mostly through
experience, mimicry, and trial and error, how to establish their Masters’ mer-
cantile interests in the region. They came as supplicants to Indian courts,
seeking trading concessions from indigenous sovereigns while competing with
Dutch and Portuguese competitors for favour. Over its first two decades, the
Company established a small collection of factories across India (Surat, Pet-
tapoli and Masulipatam), Persia (Gombroon) and the East Indies (Bantam,
Celebes), and also had establishments at Dutch and Portuguese settlements in
St Tomé and Pulicatt. However, the agreements that the Company factors
reached with local rulers to acquire fortified footholds on the sub-continent
soon emerged as a key issue. Although piecemeal at first and heavily subject
to the continuation of sound relations with inland powers, the coastline
acquisitions of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta were key, becoming the cor-
nerstones of British claims over Indian territory and setting the terms for
subsequent expansion. The early Company utilized these outposts and the
advantages of bullion exports to gain a foothold in a range of pre-existing
Asian trading networks, acquiring calicoes, indigo, silk and pepper from a set
of existing coastal entrepôts (Bassett 1998: 3).2
By the time the Company wound up its operations in the middle of the
nineteenth century, Britain was the single greatest power on the Indian sub-
continent, but the basic principles that undergirded these original agreements
continued to define the constitutional character of their authority there. Key
principles, such as the notion that British rulers would exercise ruling pre-
rogatives on behalf of local rulers and that British laws would govern subjects
of the British Crown emerged in these early documents and remained central
98 Darshan Vigneswaran
to subsequent treaties. As a result, the East India Company records for this
period provide us with unique insights into the process whereby the British
participated in, internalized the principles of, and then subsequently realized
the limitations of the ‘international society’ that prevailed in India during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The non-Eurocentric international order

In order to comprehend the character of this international society we need to
engage critically with the Eurocentrism implicit in the English School’s
account of the expansion of international society. Most English School
accounts implicitly assume that due to the socializing power of culture or the
progressive nature of ‘Western norms’, many world regions will share norms
of political authority (O’Hagan 2002; Suganami 2003). Rulers who originate
from places that are far apart will possess different and/or incompatible social
norms, while those who share neighbouring geographical origins will share
certain understandings and norms about politics. In terms of English School
theory, this assumption is embedded in the distinction between international
systems as sites of minimal/mediated interaction and lack of social norms,
and international societies as sites of dense/close interaction and commitment
to common principles. This assumption is most clearly evident in work on the
expansion of European international society and investigation of the deploy-
ment of a standard of ‘civilization’ in determining which non-European
powers could exercise sovereign territorial prerogatives (Gong 1984a; Bull
and Watson 1984a; Keene 2002; Suzuki 2009). These works frame the ques-
tion of international order as one of resolving differences between European
and non-European international actors, usually in favour of the former.
According to most English School accounts, one of the core principles of the
European society of states is that of mutual recognition of exclusive sovereign
authority as the principal norm of territorial rule. In this respect, the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648 has long been regarded as the point when Europe shifted
decisively to a norm of territorial sovereignty, meaning a single actor’s exclusive
possession of rights of rule over bounded and contiguous territory. This norm
is said to have replaced the parcellized, multi-cephalic and blood-defined
norms of political authority that prevailed during the preceding feudal era.
This Westphalian threshold has been criticized by several authors. Benno
Teschke (2003) has argued, taking cues from Stephen Krasner’s (1999) earlier
suggestions, that Europeans did not decisively enshrine any specific form of
political authority in the treaties of Osnabrück and Münster. Deploying a Marxist
framework, he shows that the transition from feudal to modern sovereign forms of
rule was not a Europe-wide process. Instead, this transition was instigated by the
advent of capitalist agriculture and parliamentary rule in Britain. While
capitalism created an important condition of possibility for an ‘international
society’ based upon the principle of sovereign territoriality, this process was
achieved unevenly in Europe and throughout the rest of the world.
 A corrupt international society 99
The upshot of this argument is that Europeans did not share norms of territorial
authority, even after 1648. In fact, since capitalism did not arrive in all parts of the
continent all at once, but in England first and other parts of Europe there-
after, Europeans actually began to look more different than one another as the
diachronous logics of capitalism and feudalism compelled their respective mon-
archs and rulers to relate to territory in different ways. For this reason, it
makes little sense to approach early contacts between European and non-European
rulers as the early efforts to iron out differences between their respective,
regionally specific norms of territorial authority. To simplify, Europeans possessed
multiple, and not singular, territorial norms when they arrived in India.
With this artificial rendering of difference out of the way, this chapter
attempts to look at a more pressing question related to the early British con-
quests on the Indian sub-continent: what were the points of commonality
between members of European and non-European international societies that
created the rudiments of agreement over territorial conquest? Here, Teschke is
less useful, primarily because of his rather exclusive focus on landed accu-
mulation. While this helps to explore gaps in the story of the evolution of
inter-unit politics in Europe, it is not as helpful in the theatre of European
interactions with South Asia, where the decisive dynamic was mercantilist:
capital accumulation based on trade and not land.
Having opened with a broad discussion of the nature of British sovereignty
over a broad period of two centuries of Company rule, the remainder of this
discussion will hone in on the very beginning of this period. In what follows, I
argue that on the sub-continent, the process of establishing agreements about
who could rule what territory, and how these territories could be ruled, was
shaped by a common acceptance of a set of norms of mercantile governance.
Put simply, Europeans and non-Europeans shared a belief that the legitimate
ruler over a trading post was the actor who could guarantee that they would
use such territory to pay rents on wealth produced through the carriage and
exchange of goods to imperial overlords based in London, Agra, Golkonda
and elsewhere. Crucially, although Europeans were commonly able to co-
operate in various ways, their common cultural heritage rarely provided the
basis for more rule-governed behaviour amongst them in relation to territorial
expansion – with alliances and more temporary accommodations frequently
disturbed by conflict and political manoeuvring. Furthermore, within this
minimalist set of guidelines, power asymmetries were not necessarily expressed
as a European consensus on what territory non-European powers legitimately
owned, or how they should rule that territory, but rather which forms of rule,
and in what areas, the imperial centre was responsible for the ruling pre-
rogatives of its agents. Proceeding along these lines, Britain’s increasing power
in India was generally expressed through the piecemeal usurpation of indi-
genous rulers’ sovereign prerogatives rather than the immediate imposition of
European-style identities on non-European actors.
Going further, this chapter shows that the key points of transition in this order
did not necessarily correspond to changes in the relationship between land
100 Darshan Vigneswaran
and power. Drawing upon a broadly Weberian perspective of the development
of state power, this study aims to show that European power was not necessarily
practically exercised by metropolitan sovereigns. Put simply, the British
Crown, having alienated much of its responsibility for East Asian affairs to
the Company, had little influence over decisions regarding when and where it
was appropriate to expand its jurisdiction in India. Even the directors of the
East India Company in London did little more than rubber-stamp the deci-
sions that were being made on the ground. The changing balance of power
between sovereigns and their own agents, as European states acquired the
capacity to discipline their own colonizing agents, generated changes in the
principles and patterns of expansion in India.
This shift in our analytical and historiographical assumptions means that
the shift in balance of power between Britain and the Mughal Empire did
not immediately change the norms of sub-continental international society
that emerged between the Europeans (here, the British) and the indigenous
rulers of India, which were based on a shared desire for financial and material
gain. After Lord Clive triumphed at Plassey in 1757, territorial expansion
continued along similar lines in India for another 100 years, because the
British imperial state continued to possess limited control over its sub-con-
tinental agents. Change in the Indian international society only came later,
when the most powerful state (Britain) took on a bureaucratic-developmental
character. This process culminated in the 1857 Mutiny when the Empire
threw off the cloak of Mughal sovereignty and institutionalized a policy of
paramountcy in relations with other Indian states. Crucially, this was less
motivated by a need to impose traditional European standards of civilization,
and more compelled by the need to impose new British norms of governance.

Common principles of commerce

The Company Charter: expansion in European norms

Understanding the manner in which British agents negotiated the terms of
territorial conquest with South Asian rulers requires some attention to the
specific constitutional structures that had been established to regulate this process.
The British project of discovery and commerce in the Indian Ocean was a
very ‘bottom-up’ affair, having been initiated by a consortium of mostly
London-based merchants as a profit-seeking venture. Following on from the
example set by their Dutch counterparts and several other British projects of
discovery and trade in the North Sea and the Levant, the merchants peti-
tioned the Crown for permission to set up a chartered company that would
establish and manage trade around the Cape of Good Hope, in particular,
competing for control of the lucrative spice trade of the East Indies.
The East India Company was a semi-public body. Corporate strategy of the
Company was managed by a Directorate in London that answered to the Com-
pany Board and a community of shareholders. The Crown awarded the Company
 A corrupt international society 101
monopoly rights to engage in trade and diplomacy between South Africa and
Indonesia, subject to periodic renewal and revision of the terms of its Charter.
Meanwhile, day-to-day affairs abroad were managed by a series of Company fac-
tors, who reported to London via a ‘Presidency’ town (usually the key trading
post in that region).
To the contemporary observer, one of the most striking aspects of the half-
century of Company trade after its founding charter in 1600 is the remarkable
lack of concern for how lowly factors might absorb territory on behalf of the
Crown. While the original Charter covered in great detail how decisions
would be made at the Company headquarters and on Company ships, and
specifically provided for the Company to acquire the necessary land to set up
its premises in England, it did not specifically provide for the acquisition or
cession of sovereign authority abroad. Part of the reason for this apparent gap
stemmed from the fact that the British rulers who would ultimately become
sovereign over those lands that the Company controlled, were relatively
uninterested in how the Company acquired its share in the trade to the East.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the main question for
the Crown was how the Company could begin to generate profits for British
fiscal reserves, which had been radically depleted by successive wars.
The other concern was whether revenue could be raised without upsetting
relations with other European powers (and possibly instigating more conflict). For
Parliament, an institution that was becoming increasingly assertive over the
course of the century, the main issue was how individual parliamentarians
could augment Company profits (at this stage still prospective) and secure
Company property, particularly if they were shareholders or the clients of such, or
how they could acquire a share in the trade if they were not. Crucially, few
members of the London elite knew much about East India trade or about the
sub-continent itself and preferred to intervene in decisions about institutions
and finance located in the capital, rather than fiddle in the minutiae of overseas
strategy.3
Throughout the seventeenth century, a succession of new charters4 experi-
mented with the Company’s constitutional framework in order to make it
more profitable and flirted with the idea of opening up the trade to other
British trading companies and consortia. Once the Company had acquired a
significant number of factories and then forts, its representatives could then
use these acquisitions as bargaining chips in such debates, to justify the
exclusion of ‘interlopers’ (who possessed no such property) from the Com-
pany monopoly. However, the fact that the Company had become a govern-
ing body on the Indian continent simply did not, in and of itself, register as a
significant issue in public debate in London until long after these prerogatives
had already been exercised de facto, and de jure authorization had been acquired
from rulers abroad. The only significant restriction on the Company’s generous
trading monopoly was an explicit prohibition from encroaching on the trad-
ing settlements of Christian allies, which might precipitate conflict in Europe,
and the more general rule, applied to all Chartered entities in Britain and
102 Darshan Vigneswaran
abroad: that their laws not ‘be repugnant’ to English law. In this respect,
‘European norms’ barely applied.

‘Old corruption’: the underlying ethos of expansion

While territorial expansion did not feature as a major item of discussion in public
debate in early seventeenth-century London, it was a source of dispute between the
Company governors in London and their servants abroad. The directors were
predisposed against territorial aggrandisement (Bryant 1998: 32; Berger 1990:
60–62). Indeed, one of the main reasons why territorial sovereignty may
not have figured in the original Charter was that the directors did not
immediately recognize the importance of such a trading strategy. Hence, the
dictum of the first Ambassador to the Mughal Court, Sir Thomas Roe (cited in
Gledhill 1964: 4): ‘Let this be received as a rule that, if you will profit, seek it at
sea and in quiet trade; for without controversy it is an error to affect garrisons
and land wars in India.’
There were also some institutional factors that militated against the type of
investment strategy required to make such an approach work. The directors
were immediately responsible to their shareholders who, while having little
understanding of overseas trade, consistently held management to account
regarding the payment of dividends. The upshot of this argument is that while
the Company was by no means philosophically opposed to military force,
over its first 100 years, when profits were not always guaranteed, it preferred
the use of naval supremacy and other forms of coercive threats over fixed
investments in forts and landed warfare (Marshall 1998: 5–6).
The Company directors found it difficult to hold true to these maritime pre-
ferences. In part, this was due to the determining influence of distance, though
distance understood in its capacity-limiting role, rather than as a socializing
force. While the directors were interested in foreign policy, they were dependent
upon their employees’ judgement and interpretation of the strategic and mer-
cantile status quo abroad and, due to the huge distances and slow pace of com-
munication, could not exert direct control over the day-to-day management of
Company affairs until faster ships and routes and (much later) wire communication
were established. Factors could therefore often present their decisions to
establish relations with local rulers, make and break treaties, and build fortifications
as faits accomplis, and support these arguments through reference to a range
of immediate exigencies.
Of greater importance was that the socio-economic mores of the day specifically
prevented the directors from adopting a more hard-lined approach to the
use of Company funds for unauthorized expansion. Corporate and governing
practices in London at the time remained beholden to a neo-feudal system of ‘old
corruption’: ‘ … a parasitic system that taxed the wealth of the nation and
diverted it into the pockets of a narrow political clique whose only claim to
privileged status was its proximity to sources of patronage’ (Harling 1996: 1).
The British did not lack a sense of morality in public affairs.
 A corrupt international society 103
However, it was accepted that members of the elite were entitled to bend
these principles in the service of family, friends and colleagues. Inter-personal
linkages, on the one hand, amongst individual members of the Company
Board, shareholders, creditors, English exporters and their respective families,
and on the other, between these London alliances and the employ abroad,
influenced the way in which the organization accumulated wealth (Sutherland
1952; Chaudhuri 1986: 105). The directors could neither lay down a stringent
set of policy dictates regarding expansion, nor effectively censure all those who
disobeyed because the individualistic exploitation of Company resources was
the raison d’être of a Company job. Through the exercise of employees’ limited
rights to engage in personal trade, Company employment was seen as a
potential way of acquiring a personal fortune. Many applicants drew heavily
on personal connections to the Board of Directors to acquire their positions. These
patrons, in turn, often had the same understanding of the relationship, and gen-
erally obliged clients’ requests for jobs in the expectation that new employees
would repay on return (once they had established their own fortunes).
These dynamics came into play when opportunities for landed expansion
emerged.5 For the average senior Company servant who was attempting to
gain entry into the vast commercial networks of the sub-continent and to exploit
niche markets, there were significant advantages to be gained by stretching
and even contravening London dictates on this issue. While European powers’ best
route to trade monopoly was probably through the assertion of their growing
naval supremacy, gaining a permanent place in domestic markets required, at
the very least, a toehold grip on the Asian coastline. In more peaceful and
predictable regions this could be achieved by the posting of a permanent
‘factory’, composed primarily of administrators and clerks, in key port towns.
However, these factories’ capacity to generate a profitable trade was neces-
sarily limited by their dependence on local and other European rulers for
security, their reliance on ‘go-betweens’ to procure goods, and the British
factors’ lack of standing in local markets compared to other, more established
European traders. Incremental improvements could be achieved in the terms
of trade through subtle diplomacy and displays of naval prowess,6 but these
gains would always be uncertain, particularly given the Company’s lack of
knowledge of, and inability to predict changes in, inland political formations
and alliances. For Company servants, who were interested in establishing
personalized trading networks in order to enrich themselves and their patrons,
and who owed few direct responsibilities to the shareholding community at
large, this meant that there were strong incentives to try to improve the
Company’s position by seeking more permanent, fortified establishments.

‘Corruption’ in India: a perfect fit for an international order?

Local Indian rulers had good reasons to facilitate the establishment of such
settlements, particularly in the more fragmented political systems of the
south. There was significant competition over relationships with international
104 Darshan Vigneswaran
traders in general, and European traders in particular. These vast networks
created opportunities to access a range of military technologies, with guns
and horses at the top of the list. For a courtly culture that placed a high
premium on the symbolic display of wealth, the acquisition of foreign curi-
osities was also significant. Local rulers also had incentives to promote the
growth of commerce generally, because taxation of the movement of goods
was often one of their largest and most easily augmented revenue streams.
Crucially, the authority to decide whether Europeans were granted these
privileges was generally deferred by kings and emperors to local fief-holders
(nayaks). The idea that an allied sea power with minimal apparent capacity
for expansion inland would fortify a heretofore unprotected part of the
coastline at minimal cost to local coffers, tended to outweigh the nayaks’ fears
about permanently alienating territory. In addition to these factors, the per-
ception that European traders would contribute to the broader development
of military infrastructure appears to have outweighed the consideration that
the traders were a ‘foreign’ force.
Most peculiar to modern nationalistic sensibilities, and contrary to the
European approach at the time, was that unlike their British counterparts,
Indian rulers appeared to have attached minimal importance to the prospects
of their subjects becoming subject to an alien system of authority and law.
One of the founding principles of most British Charters to overseas compa-
nies was the notion that British subjects would be able to avail themselves of
British justice. In comparison, Indian rulers were willing to hand over con-
siderable rights to enforce commercial and penal law within European
enclaves. The upshot of this outline is that the nayaks, who were often directly
engaged in deciding whether and how British expansion might begin in India,
were open to a range of accommodations, as long as they could retain the
favour of their ultimate overlords.
To summarize, this image of decision making about the expansion of Brit-
ish power on the sub-continent contrasts significantly with standard English
School accounts. While Company servants had specific reasons to avoid con-
flict with other Christian powers, this only consisted of a proscription to pre-
vent disagreements with allies of the Crown. A common European ‘culture’
tended to influence decisions, but more in terms of identifying the techniques
that were necessary to develop successful trade rather than prescriptive guides
for the judgement of the merits of prospective indigenous sovereigns (the
‘standard of civilization’ case being a typical example of this). While distance
was a significant factor in these negotiations, it was less important as a source
of (de)socialization to international norms and more a capacity limitation,
exacerbating London’s inability to control Company servants.
In this context, principles that were shared amongst Europeans and non-
Europeans alike regarding the nature and purpose of trade constituted the
guiding rationale of mercantile territorial expansion. Both European and
non-European sovereigns adopted a largely hands-off approach towards the
activities of the East India Company, viewing the institution as a largely
 A corrupt international society 105
instrumental means of augmenting wealth, security and standing within their
respective spheres of influence. This does not mean that purely instrumental
factors decided when and where expansion would begin. The ‘old corrupt’ nature
of employment and social advancement in London society, and the ostenta-
tious Indian approach to wealth creation decided how their shared interests in
the rents of commercial transactions would be translated into concrete
arrangements over territorial rule. This also does not mean that there were not
significant cultural differences as regards the understanding of these transactions,
as suggested by the different approaches to subjects and foreign laws.

Beginning territorial acquisition

Surprisingly, the question of when the British first acquired ruling pre-
rogatives on the Indian sub-continent has not received much attention in the
literature. For the most part, scholars have been willing to take the establish-
ment of the factory at Surat in 1612 as the beginning of British settlement
and/or to accept Lord Clive’s larger acquisitions of Mughal fiefdoms around
Calcutta in 1757 as key ‘markers’ of British expansion. While these bookends
are useful, they fail to pinpoint the precise moment when Company officials
began to exercise political authority over Indian territory and the people
resident therein. For this, others have suggested that we look to the first
establishment of a fortified settlement (Bowen 1988: 160; Watson 1980). In
this type of establishment we see the Company providing protection and
administering justice: hallmarks of territorial authority.
For constitutional historians, the founding of Fort St George at Madras in
1640 is the landmark. The firman (fief) granted by Damela Vintutedro Nayak,
which included ‘full power and authority to govern, and dispose of the gov-
ernment of Madraspatam’, certainly looks like a transfer of political authority
over territory.7 The offer to ‘surrender the Town called Madraspatam and all
the Ground belongeth to it, the Government, and Justice, of the Town into
your [the Company’s] hands’,8 which came in the confirming firman, may be
seen as signalling a qualitative shift in the Company’s competencies from that
of a pure mercantile organization to a mercantile company with genuine
responsibilities to govern inland. If few people at the time, including the
immediate participants, saw any great portent in the negotiations that con-
cluded in the founding of Fort St George in Madras, the phase was crucial,
because it saw the Company move from an exclusively trading organization
based in factories that had been planted on the soil of other rulers, to a power
possessing (relatively) exclusive ruling prerogatives vis-à-vis specific portions
of land, including the authority to govern subjects of the indigenous rulers. At
issue here is the question of who were the legitimate rulers and for what
purposes they should exercise governing powers.
The task of tracing these origins does not end here, because although
Madras is clearly the first surviving Company establishment of this sort on the
sub-continent, it was not the first fortified settlement. In this respect it was the
106 Darshan Vigneswaran
successor to Armagon, a failed attempt to establish a fortified town at a
location to the north of Madras.9 Crucially, the decision-making process that
led to the de jure establishment of Fort St George was intimately connected to
the failed de facto efforts to establish a similar settlement at Armagon. Hence,
an adequate study of the origins of British territorial authority should not
simply concern itself with Madras (1639–53), but should extend backwards to
include some consideration of the reasons why Indian-based factors built
Armagon and why they dismantled their settlement there (1625–39).

The failed settlement of Armagon

This story begins at Masulipatam on the Coromandel (East) Coast of India.
The Masulipatam factors had originally received instructions from London to
settle here on the expectation that they would procure the woven and pat-
terned cloth that were specialty products of the region.10 Indian textiles had
relatively quickly emerged as a crucial item of trade for the Company. The
Dutch, who dominated the spice trade, soon discovered that Indian textiles
were in great demand across South-East Asia. By procuring textiles from
India, they could acquire spices in South-East Asia to send back to Europe
and reduce their need to trade precious metals brought from home. While the
British were able to procure textiles in other towns like Surat, South-East
Asian tastes for Indian textiles were highly sophisticated and diverse and the
Dutch successes in procuring fashionable goods on the Coromandel Coast
encouraged the British to follow suit (Sen 1962).
When the British first arrived at Masulipatam in 1611, they procured an
agreement from the local nayak of the king of Golkonda to establish their
factory and trade there. However, their successors consistently complained
that the nayak acted in various ways to interfere with their trade: he had
limited their freedom to trade by restricting them to do business at Masuli-
patam and appointing their intermediaries with merchants; he imposed
excessive and additional taxes on their trade; and he had prevented them
from settling their grievances with local merchants and producers.11 So, for
the first few years, Masulipatam was a failure for the Company, and the fac-
tors based there spent most of their time and energy on their private trade
(Foster 1902: 1).
It is not entirely clear who initiated the discussion of whether the British
should abandon Masulipatam. Some correspondence refers to letters that
were sent from a nayak near Armagon entreating the British to settle there.12
This suggests that the Masulipatam factors may have planted the idea in the
minds of Bantam officials. Whatever the case, in 1625–26 the Bantam Pre-
sidency sent orders via The Rose for their merchants to begin searching to the
south for a more suitable place to procure cloth. Both Bantam and Masuli-
patam factors looked to Dutch successes to justify the move south. Over the
same period, the Dutch had also established a factory at Masulipatam, but
experienced similar problems with the local nayak. They were better served by
 A corrupt international society 107
their fortified settlement in Pulicatt, which they had acquired from the Portu-
guese in 1609. Pulicatt was located much further to the south. Based on their
problems with the local nayak at Masulipatam, the British factors had con-
cluded that these fortifications had been a vital means by which the Dutch
had cornered the cloth trade because it helped to ensure their autonomy and
protection from local rulers on the coast.
The Rose was wrecked on the coast near Masulipatam in early 1626, but
the merchants rescued the instructions and sent an emissary in the salvaged
parts of the same ship to investigate the prospects of a settlement at Arma-
gon. Some 11 days later the emissary arrived and made contact with a group
of local merchants who welcomed them and encouraged them to settle there.
The same merchants also assisted the Company in procuring a cowl (written
grant) from the local nayak. This agreement acknowledged their rights to settle
and gave them a deal on customs and the right to mint coins but, according
to the servants’ reports, included no word on issues of the Company’s power
vis-à-vis local merchants or rights to fortify.13
Even at this early stage, there were signs of trouble ahead. The factors had
to pay an ‘ordinance’ – probably a ‘gift’ rather than a formal tax – to procure
the cowl and the Dutch were being spoilsports. A ‘Brahmin’ ambassador of the
Dutch had interfered in the negotiations, informing the nayak that the Eng-
lish would not be capable of building a sufficiently large and wealthy settle-
ment, and therefore should not be entertained. The factors were at best
ambivalent in their representation of the character of their European and
non-European competitors. In the same communication that cursed the
untrustworthy and greedy heathens, they bemoaned the lack of Christian
unity shown by the Dutch, who ‘like greedy gluttons, will rather stuff their
stomachs ‘till they surfeit, rather than spare (if in their power) the needy the
least morsel’.14 While Christian origins may have encouraged expectations of
good behaviour, they certainly did not necessitate a favourable judgement
about moral standing and commitment.
Despite the early warnings of trouble, the Company factors were fed-up
with Masulipatam and encouraged by the signs of a safe and strategically
located port and the good access to cloth, so they began the move to
Armagon. It is not clear whether they initiated this move with the intention to
build a fortress there. The preceding communication and permission from
Bantam had made no reference to such plans. However, given that a com-
munication to Bantam, written a little more than two months after landing,
noted that the brick and lime walls of Armagon were already finished, it
appears as though the settlers had always intended to fortify.15 This action initi-
ated a long campaign by the Coromandel factors to encourage Bantam to
provide monetary and material support to add to the fortification. Now was not
the time to be sparing, especially when faced by threats and betrayal by both the
land powers and the Dutch. With regards to the former, the servants were
mindful of their recent departure from Masulipatam. This ‘escape’ was
undertaken without the nayak’s knowledge or approval, and resulted in a
108 Darshan Vigneswaran
heated dispute over outstanding accounts. The affair seems to have been
concluded only when the Company, acting with sanction from Bantam, stole
a good portion of the Masulipatam fleet and held the nayak to ransom.
The security situation at Armagon provided the Company and the Cor-
omandel factors with little comfort, however. A domestic war threatened the
lands of their new benefactor there and the Dutch continued to harry their
ships and undermine their fortunes in the nayak’s court. Here, it is interesting
that the Coromandel factors gradually developed a more complex reading of
the nayak over the course of their first year in Armagon. Rather than a
characteristically duplicitous native, they came to view him as a man capable
of rising above these origins: ‘[he] stands more upon his promise, than any
covet of gain; which is a rare quality to be found in a Heathen.’16 The problem
was less the nayak, than the fact that he was surrounded by a court of intri-
gue, where both the Dutch and his own courtiers encouraged him to under-
mine his good faith. Perceptions of interlocutors’ intentions were as likely to
be based upon experience in negotiations as presumptions about religious/
cultural affiliation.
As the Coromandel factors began to contemplate their prospective military
power in Armagon, their requests to add to its fortification reveal a rapid
assumption of responsibility to provide protection for the local population.
While the need for the security of Company goods, possessions and personnel
was initially paramount in their decisions to fortify, they began to envisage
that the Company could and should take care of the security of its suppliers
and clients. At the same time as they made their appeals for cannon, materi-
als, engineers and money to assist in the completion of fortifications that
would help to ward off landed armies and thereby help them to stay compe-
titive with the Dutch, they also emphasized the importance of shielding the
townspeople from marauding armies and attracting more local inhabitants to
settle in their vicinity through promises of a more secure residence. While the
Coromandel factors seemed blissfully ignorant of the complex politics that
this would leave behind for future generations of Company servants, they
were quite aware that in asking for money to fortify, they anticipated
becoming a ruling authority of sorts. One communication expressly motivated
for additional resources to fortify on the grounds that, ‘in time, we should get
the whole government of the place into our own hands’.17
Whatever their perception of the merits of this strategy and its long-term
impacts, senior Company officials appeared unconvinced of the prospects of
the coastal settlement plan and issued orders soon after the settlement of
Armagon (it is not clear whether this came from Bantam or London) to dis-
mantle all the Coromandel factories. Then, somewhat surprisingly, the Cor-
omandel factors directly disobeyed this order. Instead, they consolidated
themselves temporarily at Armagon and the Dutch town of Pulicatt until the
effects of their piracy at Masulipatam were felt, and they could procure a new
firman for a factory there. Ultimately, Armagon proved to be a poor settle-
ment, plagued by the same trading problems as Masulipatam. Furthermore,
 A corrupt international society 109
since the factors were constrained by the apparent unwillingness of their
directors to invest, the defensive infrastructure remained poor. By the latter
part of the 1630s, when the issue had moved to the consideration of the pro-
spects of settlement at Madras, everyone involved had accepted Armagon as
moribund, with Coromandel’s reference to a ‘ruinous building’18 matched by
the new Surat Presidency’s description of the ‘mock fort’19 located there.
Of greater significance is the degree of leeway that the Company servants
had exerted in initiating this acquisition. While consistently constrained, and
sometimes provoked by their superiors, the Coromandel factors had inde-
pendently motivated for, and ultimately established, a fortified settlement on
the coast. In doing so, they had not acquired major powers from the local
ruler other than that of minting coins, but had quickly moved in terms of
their self-identity from the position of mere traders to providers of protection.
Ultimately, their ambitions to establish a fully functioning fort were not realized.
However, this process set the stage for the negotiations over an acquisition
that would lead London by the nose into a position of lasting and de jure
political authority in India.

Founding Fort St George

Given the apparent failures of their previous two settlements, it is with some
surprise that a few years after moving back to Masulipatam (leaving a skele-
ton staff in Armagon), the Company found itself embroiled in a project to
establish a third settlement on the Coromandel Coast. Unlike the silent failure
of Armagon, the establishment of the fortifications that would come to be
named Fort St George became the subject of protracted censure proceedings
in London and a blame game amongst overseas servants.20 Hence, the individual
characters in this story acquire greater significance than their counterparts
involved in the Armagon acquisition.
Again, the story begins with a nayak to the south of Masulipatam, luring
the factors to visit and investigate the prospects of settlement with promises of
access to good cloth. The key player in this saga, Francis Day, received this
offer from an emissary of the nayak, Damarla Venkatadra (or Venkatappa).
Day sought permission from Thomas Ivy, then head of the Masulipatam
factory, to head south and investigate. Despite having only recently (and
quietly) deferred orders (again, it is not clear if these were from Bantam or
London) to dismantle Armagon, Ivy conceded to this request. In 1639 Day
made his visit to the south and returned with surprisingly (and as we will see,
also suspiciously) good news about a small settlement called Madraspatam.
In a letter that he personally delivered to Thomas Cogan, who had by then
replaced Ivy as head of the factory, he all but begged for the Company to
take up this offer. He reported of an abundance of quality cloth for sale, and
a firman empowering the Company to set up a fort and settlement with, cru-
cially, an agreement to front the capital for the fort. In addition, they had
been offered good terms of trade, tax concessions, the nayak’s assistance in
110 Darshan Vigneswaran
settling accounts with locals, rights to mint and, importantly, ‘full power and
authority to govern, and dispose of the government of Madraspatam’. In a
classic ‘motivation’ letter, Day stacked up all of the arguments in favour of
settlement, including the prospect that the Dutch might beat them to the
punch, and perhaps more tellingly, that he had no personal interest in the
acquisition, with only the Company’s interest at heart.21
After receiving the request, Cogan asked Day to head back to Madras with
a horse as a gift to keep the offer open. Day, who was preparing to leave the
Company employ at this time, bargained for Bantam to pay off some of his
local debts in return for his agreement to accept the mission. Cogan then
began negotiations to acquire permission for the settlement. Interestingly,
although Cogan’s request was addressed to the ‘Company in England’, in the
first instance it only went as far as the Presidency, which had recently been
relocated from Bantam to Surat on the northern part of the West Coast of
India. Cogan employed some of Day’s arguments in this request and then
added two of his own impressions. First, he provided a list of reasons why, in
his assessment, the local nayak had made such a generous offer: a) encouraging
commerce will enhance his wealth; b) the fort will help guarantee his own
security; and c) he will be able to acquire new goods for his military and his
court. Second, he explained why, in terms of broader trading policy, the
Company should acquire a genuine fortified settlement: a) they needed trade
in some other goods so as to limit their sterling outlays; b) neither Armagon
nor Masulipatam were profitable trading centres; c) the Dutch had used their
fortified Pulicatt to dominate the trade; and d) the fortifications at Armagon
were worthless. In summary, Cogan argued that it was high time that the
Company got serious and realized that a long-term trading policy in the East
Indies required a fortification of this sort:

Why shall not we, in some things, imitate our inveterate and most mal-
icious Enemies [the Dutch]? Which is; as soon as any goods is bought, in
their private factories, send for it, in their small Vessels, to their fort at
Pulicatt; by which means they keep these People so much the more in
subjection, and still command their own.22

The Presidency of Surat, after apparently deciding not to wait for London’s
approval, responded to Cogan cautiously as regards the potential expenses
involved. However, he casually encouraged the establishment of a new and
fortified settlement:

You seem to be fairly far on with things anyway, it all seems reasonable
(so long as it is true), you seem to have thought things through … but
don’t liquidate Armagon or build St. George until you are well assured of
the Naik’s resolution to receive you, and assist in the fortification … If
you go forward with it, do what you resolve on to purpose; and build no
such mock forts as that of Armagon.23
 A corrupt international society 111
In 1640 Cogan and Day travelled with this endorsement in hand to dismantle
Armagon and establish the fort at Madraspatam. When they arrived, they
found out that the nayak had no intentions of paying for the fort.
Suddenly, the primary rationale for settling at Madras had unravelled. Recog-
nizing that they would need additional financial support to complete the work,
Day and Cogan sent a request to Surat, who forwarded the request to London. At
the same time, they decided to go ahead with construction, investing huge amounts
of Company resources in the work. Understanding Cogan and Day’s decision
making at this point is difficult, and is clouded by the ‘spin’ generated as each of
the actors involved in the chain of command sought to exonerate themselves.
A blame game began. The nayak’s position was that the interpreters had
misconstrued his offer. Day’s position was that the nayak was lying. Cogan’s
position was that Day had at best been foolish in accepting the nayak’s word
and at worst had simply misrepresented the nayak’s commitment for his own
gain. The position of the Company Presidency was similar, but they also
attributed some of the blame to Cogan who, after all, had sought to convince
them to support Day. All of these representations were communicated in one
form or another to the directors in London.24
What is striking – at least for the contemporary observer – is that during
this whole dispute, none of the sub-continental factors suggested that despite the
clear failure of their previous venture at Armagon, the fort and settlement
(with all their attendant responsibilities and implications for future Company
activities) ought not to have been established and/or new terms reached and/
or another site selected. Rather, the debate centred on the issue of who should
be censured for the (seemingly unavoidable) overspend on Company accounts.
Unsurprisingly, the response from London was unsympathetic, condemning
the Fort St George project (and possibly ordering it dismantled). Yet, when
the Company Presidency in Surat received these instructions they did not pass
on the message to the Coromandel Coast. Instead, they asked London to keep
the fort, based on the same line of security reasoning that had been offered
since the founding of Armagon: that the Dutch were similarly secured and that
the fort would allow them to trade independently of local influence (Foster
1902). At some point, word of London’s displeasure reached the factors at
Coromandel, as did London’s demand that the local nayak make good on his
promise of payment. By the time they received this message, Day had left the
Company employ. Cogan and his colleagues then scripted a reply pleading for
an alternative solution, remarking simultaneously on how faithful the local
nayak had been and contrasting this with how unpredictable nayaks and
locals are in general. In addition, they directly challenged the implicit logic of
the initial acquisition: that the nayak would pay for the fort. Instead, they
argued that it made no sense to accept the nayak’s part-ownership of the fort:

If these people build us a Fort, and pay the Garrison; in what security is your
estate, and our lives? – surely, in none at all: for tis far more freedom to
live without a Fort than within; unless the Fort be at’s [sic] own devotion.25
112 Darshan Vigneswaran
London was not impressed. In 1642, with no great change to the status quo in
Coromandel, the decision was made to censure Cogan over the affair. Cogan
was indignant in his communication, to the point of complaining, along with
his colleagues, over London’s dithering: ‘make a decision and let us be done
with it!’26 He organized his defence by preparing a letter in council with fac-
tors in Bantam that defended the Madras project as financially sound (but
not necessarily legally established) and returned to London to face the music.
The committee that assembled to investigate Cogan buried the whole affair.
Instead of holding Cogan to account and demanding that Fort St George be
dismantled, they voiced their disapproval of the construction but decided to
keep the fort:

although it were a very indiscreet Action, to go about the building of such

a Fort, when the Company’s Stock was so small; yet, if ever the Company
have a plentiful Stock, it may be very commodious and advantageous
for them.27

They then joined with Cogan in blaming Day for the entire affair. Day, who
could no longer be formally censured for his activities, was an obvious fall
guy. A year later he was reappointed (albeit for a short stint), without having
faced censure, in a command position at the fort at Madras. All this time, the
building of Fort St George continued, playing a crucial role in securing the
British position on the Coast over the coming years. The Coromandel factors
generally remained quite uppity about the whole issue, complaining to
London of their ‘unthankful employment’ in the founding of Fort St George
(Foster 1902).
While a forensic examination of the motivations and justifications of the
building of Fort St George is impossible, on the available evidence we can
make some fairly rough estimates of how this acquisition took place. Day was
struggling at Armagon and saw no prospects of improving his personal trade
there. After scouting around for an alternative site, he made contact with the nayak
at Madras and began a campaign to establish a settlement where he could
make some decent money before returning home. In doing so, he probably did
not blatantly lie to his superiors. The nayak, who had every reason to believe
that attracting the English and establishing good relations was more impor-
tant than the terms of the agreement, may have intimated commitments he
was not prepared to fulfil. Clearly, in this respect, he was successful, though it
is not clear whether he rested on the gullibility of the factors or knowledge
that they could adeptly side-step London’s sanction. Day then gave a favour-
able interpretation to the nayak’s promises. Day knew how to set the admin-
istrative wheels in motion, both with Ivy and then Cogan, who were also
based at a moribund trading settlement. Both were astute observers of the
successes of their Dutch and Portuguese competitors and were keen to but-
tress the Company’s position. As men who were higher up in the Company
and set on more promising careers, it is likely that they had Company
 A corrupt international society 113
interests in mind. However, they were also capable of manipulating commu-
nication with their superiors, by raising the spectre of European competition
and local threat. As regional experts, and traders in their own right, they felt
completely assured of their decisions and resentful of the interference of
London bureaucrats who knew next to nothing about India.
Similar dynamics influenced the Surat presidents, but their main aim was to
ensure that expansion continued while keeping their hands clean of the dirty
work on the coast. This explains their judicious management of information
flow between Coromandel and London. Meanwhile, the London adminis-
trators, who ultimately had to explain this acquisition to the shareholders,
were deeply concerned with the expenditure but less in the sense of having to
discipline those responsible for the outlay and thereby setting a precedent for
future attempts of this sort. They were more concerned that their share-
holders would see them as being active in reigning-in reckless expenditure in
the East.
The mock trial of Cogan is the denouement for this buck-passing fiasco.
Importantly, all of these actors recognized that ultimately the building of the
fort in Madras was in their collective interests and that of the Company, and
none of them questioned whether they had a right to take this possession, to
transform the Company into a landed military force, or begin to acquire a set
of sovereign prerogatives. Almost certainly, none were concerned with the
question of whether the Indians were fit to govern themselves, as this would
have been anathema to the very nature of exchange of prerogatives implicit in
the negotiations. Finally, the Crown did not so much as raise an eyebrow as
the Company took the first of what would turn out to be many little bites out
of the sub-continent over the next century. The Coromandel acquisitions
outlined in this section were never authorized by English sovereigns, but were
subsequently sanctioned in Cromwell’s Charter of 1661.28

Analysis and summary

Although limited to a small snapshot of early British settlement in India,
the preceding account has significant implications for our understanding of the
constitution of international society in the pluralist period and beyond. While
this account does not cast doubt on the notion that many European powers
may have shared a set of cultural understandings about the nature and pur-
pose of political authority, territoriality and their attendant prerogatives, it
shows that these understandings tell us relatively little about British expansion
in India in the seventeenth century, a process not built on Manichean con-
tinental dichotomies but negotiated on a shared understanding that European
and non-European jurisdictions could substantially overlap. What mattered
was that the agents of sovereign powers on both sides could more or less
invent the templates for mercantile outposts, attaching significant ruling
powers to these entities as they went along. They were given this latitude in
part because their superiors were directly interested in profits.
114 Darshan Vigneswaran
However, the fit between the interests of the British Crown and Indian
counterparts is not the whole story. More significant is the fact that small alli-
ances of well-placed individuals could use constitutional frameworks such as
the Company Charter and the imperial firman to further their own wealth-
generating agendas. The ‘international society’ that determined the course of early
British conquest in India was a transnational network of individuals, not a
European society of states. Yet, it demonstrated that actors from different
cultural backgrounds were more than capable of negotiating common frameworks
for interaction in the absence of outright European imposition – even though this
may have been primarily motivated by desire for personal gain. Throughout
history, the regulation of economic exchanges (be it in the form of ‘tribute’ in
East Asia, or for the purposes of subsistence) have proven to be powerful
motivational forces for the establishment of social relations between different
polities (Buzan 2004; also see Schouenborg 2013), and this indeed seems to be
the case between the British and their Indian counterparts, even though the
‘depth’ of these ‘shared norms’ during this time could be open to debate.
This explains why when Cogan returned to London, he did so in a spirit of
indignation. He had been a faithful servant and helped to enlarge the Com-
pany coffers, so what was all the fuss about Fort St George? Of course, in
later years, returning servants could not adopt such haughtiness. Take, for
example, Warren Hastings, who was subjected to a trial after returning from
India as its first governor-general in 1792 – mostly on the grounds that he had
expanded British power in an inappropriate way. The more vociferous attack
on Hastings is explained by the fact that a new understanding of British
sovereignty had taken hold in the capital. However, again, this had little to do
with broader principles established as part of a ‘European international
society’, or even a British or English cultural norm. As Cain and Hopkins’s
(1980, 1986, 1987, 2001) analyses point out, the main changes taking place in
how imperial acquisitions were evaluated and governed had to do with a
cultural change taking place in London, resulting from the simultaneous rise
of a financial and services class and the alliance established between these
groups in the City. The definitive principle of public power to which this
coalition held was of financial probity (not sovereignty or any other English
School trope), and it is for this reason that reckless expansionists like Hastings
could now be viewed negatively as ‘corrupt’.
We do not have the space to explain this more rigorous approach to con-
quest here, but suffice it to say that it involved the subjugation of the Com-
pany to Parliament, the professionalization of the Indian bureaucracy and the
insertion into government of the idea that the Crown’s responsibilities on the
sub-continent should be exercised with a ‘public good’ in mind, which, albeit
partially, included the interests both of the English nation and that of her
subjects abroad.
By widening our scope even further, we can begin to address the more
contemporary aims of this collection to understand the implications of a
hypothesized return to a pluralist international society. To be more specific,
 A corrupt international society 115
this study can help us to refine the types of question we ask and where we
look for answers. This study suggests that we need to consider norms covering
geo-political expansion as a fundamental question of any international
society rather than, as has been commonly presented in the English School
literature, a process that only takes place after questions of whether non-
European actors are legitimate territorial sovereigns have been resolved.
Clearly, the question of whether there was a legitimate sovereign in India
mattered little to European decisions about expansion, and these events can
only be seen in this light if we impose our own contemporary understanding
of international relations on the past.
So, for India and China, the question may be less about what sort of stan-
dards of international society they may produce and whether their under-
standing of political expansion will differ substantially from the anti-colonial
consensus that has bound the expansion of European, but more importantly
North American power since 1945. Answering this question then requires a
different approach to that suggested by the culturally (or at best, geo-
graphically) defined concept of international society that dominates English
School thought. According to the account above, culture matters in deciding
how expansion proceeds, but less in the sense of the underlying civilizational
principles determining who is allowed to be a sovereign and who gets con-
quered, and more in the sense of: a) a deeper social consensus about the
nature and purpose of the public institutions that exercise political authority;
and b) a practical assessment of whether central actors are in charge of the
processes of expansion that occur within their broad jurisdictional ambit.
From this perspective, our forecasts of what a future pluralist international
society might look like should not look to what we may perceive as the
‘classical models’ of international relations in China and India, in the hope
that these will provide us with some essential secrets as to how these powers
will act in the present. Instead, we should be looking to how these con-
temporary ‘societies’ understand the role of the state and particularly its
responsibilities to motivate for their interests abroad. By looking for key dif-
ferences between each society, and between both societies and international
standards, we could gain a sense of how attitudes and approaches towards
international expansion, and particularly neo-colonialism, might change in
the future.

Notes
1 For some examples of works that attempt to capture the indigenous perspective
see: Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and Making of
the Colonial Marketplace (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1998); Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Arms and the Merchant: The Making of the Bania
Raj in Late Eighteenth-Century India’, South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies
24(2) (2001): 1–27; ‘Banias and the British – the Role of Indigenous Credit in the
Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the 2nd-Half of the 18th-Century’,
Modern Asian Studies 21 (1987): 473–510.
116 Darshan Vigneswaran
2 Between 1600 and 1650 factories were established in places as far apart as Basra
(Iraq) in the West and Hirado (Japan) in the East. See the map in Lawson (1993:
180).
3 For the argument that the shareholders showed blind faith in the value of their
stock as a long-term investment that paid reasonable dividends see Marshall (1968:
27). Laxity with regard to India may be contrasted with the shareholders’ regular
contestation of issues pertaining to the management of East India House in
London (Bowen 1989: 192; Chaudhuri 1986: 100). Elections were on a yearly basis
and frequently subject to manipulation on behalf of the principal shareowners. For
the argument that the Board’s authority was further consolidated in the hands of the
chairman, see Marshall (1968: 26–27). For the argument that most parliamentarians
knew little as well, see Bowen (1988: 160).
4 These charters were regularly renewed, with some important exceptions, at 20-year
intervals.
5 This struggle between individual and corporate interest came into play in many
decisions about the use of Company resources. One example was the question of
what portion of homeward cargo would be devoted to personal vs. company goods.
6 A good example here is the victory over Portuguese forces at sea on the west coast,
which played some role in acquiring the Mughal permission to establish a factory
at Surat.
7 OC – Factory Records Miscellaneous 9, Document A ‘Firman granted by Damela
Vintutedro Naiqe to Francis Day’ – Chief of Armagon factory on behalf of the East
India Company’. Importantly, this acquisition did not signal a quantitative shift in
the Company’s activities from an organization primarily concerned with trade, to
one that was mostly occupied by governance issues (taxation, security, justice, etc.),
a tag that is still rightly attached to Clive’s acquisitions.
8 OC – Factory Records Miscellaneous 9, Document F ‘Firman to Thomas Ivy’.
9 This clarification, which has been commonly neglected in the literature, has been
stressed by an anonymous transcriber of the OC from the founding of Fort St
George: ‘Armagon, and not Fort St. George – must be considered the first fortress
possessed by the British on the Coromandel Coast’, OC – Factory Records Mis-
cellaneous 9, ‘Anonymous prefatory Remarks’ (and to that we may add, the first
British fortress in India). Much of what follows is deeply indebted to William
Foster’s account and his efforts to preserve and catalogue the OC (1902).
10 This instruction would almost certainly have been based on intelligence received
from Bantam or Surat.
11 OC – Factory Records, Masulipatam, ‘Letter to the King of Golconda: signed
George Brewen, Thomas Johnson and Lawrence Henley’ [attached to a consultation
of 16 September 1628]. In their communication of these grievances to the nayak,
the traders opined their lack of status in the region vis-à-vis other more established
powers, questioning the nayak provocatively whether he thought only one nation
(the Portuguese) could control the seas of the coast.
12 OC – Factory Records, Masulipatam, ‘Letter from Armagon to Batavia: Signed
Thomas Johnson and Beaverly’, 19 April 1626.
13 No original document has survived.
14 OC – Factory Records, Masulipatam, ‘Letter from Armagon to Batavia: Signed
Thomas Johnson and Thomas Mille’, 26 January 1626, p.48.
15 OC – Factory Records, Masulipatam, ‘Letter from Armagon to Batavia: Signed
Thomas Johnson and Beaverly’, 19 April 1626.
16 OC – Factory Records, Masulipatam, ‘Letter from Masulipatam to Batavia: Signed
Thomas Mille’, 3 June 1626 [transcriber’s notes say this letter was actually written
by Thomas Johnson].
17 Ibid.
 A corrupt international society 117
18 OC – Factory Records Miscellaneous 9, ‘Letter to East India Company in England:
Signed W. Fremlen, Fra. Breton, Ben Robinson, Jn. Wylde’, 29 December 1640.
19 Cited in E. OC – Factory Records Miscellaneous 9, ‘Letter to Bantam: Signed
Thomas Cogan, Henry Greenhill and John Browne’, 20 September 1642.
20 It is perhaps for this reason, and the lasting significance of the Fort itself, that
documentation of this tale of conquest has been more faithfully preserved.
21 OC – Factory Records Miscellaneous 9, Document A ‘Firman granted by Damela
Vintutedro Naiqe to Francis Day – Chief of Armagon factory on behalf of the East
India Company’.
22 OC – Factory Records Miscellaneous 9, Document C, ‘Letter from Masulipatam to
Company in England’.
23 Cited in E. OC – Factory Records Miscellaneous 9, Document E ‘Letter to Bantam:
Signed Thomas Cogan, Henry Greenhill and John Browne’, 20 September 1642.
24 OC – Factory Records Miscellaneous 9, ‘Letter to East India Company in England:
Signed W. Fremlen, Fra. Breton, Ben Robinson, Jn. Wylde’, 29 December 1640.
25 OC – Factory Records Miscellaneous 9, Document E ‘Letter to Bantam: Signed
Thomas Cogan, Henry Greenhill and John Browne’, 20 September 1642.
26 Ibid.
27 OC – Factory Records Miscellaneous 9, Document K. ‘Report of a Committee
appointed to hear Cogan’s case: Wm Methwold Deputy; Ashwell; Mr Massingberd
Treasurer; Mr Holloway; Mr Wilson’, 13 May 1645.
28 The East-India Companies Charter, Granted by the Kings Most Excellent Majesty
Charles the Second, under the Great Seal of England, 3 April 1661.
6 International relations in the Americas
during the long eighteenth century,
1663–1820
Charles Jones

Introduction
Early sixteenth-century Spanish conquests were so spectacular and created
such an extensive new empire for the Habsburg dynasty that it is easy to forget
that most of the western hemisphere continental land mass remained beyond the
reach of Europeans until the eighteenth century. Erase the coastlines, and
the map of European settlement in the Americas looks more like Indonesia or the
Philippines than a solid continental territory. Meanwhile resistance continued
along several frontiers into the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries,
punctuated by periods of truce regulated by treaties that implicitly or explicitly
recognized the continuing sovereignty of indigenous polities.
Also easily forgotten by those unfamiliar with the history of modern states in
the Americas are the tensions that developed from the start between imperial
authorities based in Europe and growing creole colonial populations, and
which led finally to independence.1 Yet limits can be set, both in space and
time, to the theatre in which some possibility still remained that First Nations
might secure enduring political survival in the face of inchoate creole states
struggling to break out of their imperial cocoons. Accordingly the first section
of this chapter is devoted to identifying some exemplary cases and establish-
ing a tipping point in the late seventeenth century after which the outcome
was hardly in question. This bracketing exercise forms a prologue to narra-
tives of the long eighteenth century which occupy the three remaining sections,
each of which examines one set of conventions for the coexistence of dis-
parate polities across uneasy and ultimately unsustainable American frontiers,
starting with the far south of what is today Chile, moving next to the south-west of
Brazil, and concluding with the northern plains and forests of trans-Appalachian
North America.
The first generation of the English School scholars worked with a clearly
diffusionist model of modernity in which international relations were governed by
a single set of norms and institutions that could be seen to develop over time
within a steadily expanding European world (Bull 1995; Bull and Watson 1984a).
The principal normative function of this approach was to help legitimize the
transfer of power from Britain and other European powers to their African,
 The Americas during the long eighteenth century 119
Caribbean and Asian dependencies that had recently taken place. Achieving
such a clear vision was not without cost. It is mildly ironic that Herbert
Butterfield, many years later convenor of the British Committee on the
Theory of International Relations and ex officio doyen of the English School,
should have established his reputation with a critique of what he called Whig
history, the kind of narrative designed to justify the present state of things
(Butterfield 1931). For the English School was established on the basis of a
thoroughly whiggish account which marginalized institutions (such as poli-
tical exile and dynasticism) that were bound up with, yet analytically distin-
guishable from, diplomacy and the balance of power in early modern Europe.
It also required the exclusion from international society of polities outside the
emerging European system that did not adopt European practices. Turkey or
Japan might join international society, but their interactions with existing
members were not regarded as properly social until there had been sufficient
symbolic acts of cultural submission and practical mimicry.
An alternative view of international society, informing this volume, is
grounded in the theses of varieties of modernity or multiple modernities
(Schmidt 2006; see also Eisenstadt 2002; Bayly 2004). This cluster of inter-
pretations accepts that polities beyond the European state system found their
own paths into modernity, often unwittingly aided by the spread of European
technologies and practices along trade routes, but sometimes by much more
deliberate observation and emulation. The premise of this chapter is that
relations between such polities and expanding settler states in the Americas
constituted an international society worthy of the name even when these
processes of modernization and normalization were still inchoate. Up to a
point it was functional for modern states and their publicists to regard the
Westphalian system as more than an ideal type (Krasner 1995–96; Osiander
2001) and as a unique form of political modernity, since insistence helped
make it so.
However, the tipping point at which such aspirations became delusory was
passed some time ago. To adopt the wider definition of international society
advanced here has positive value in a contemporary world where modern
states have constantly to deal with non-state coercive organizations that
cannot easily be brought within their established institutions and do not share
their values. The question posed by experience along the frontiers of creole
expansion in the eighteenth century was how international society functions
when the norms and institutions that guide relations between polities are
merely convergent, and far from agreed. It is once again a pressing question
in the twenty-first century.

Establishing the frontiers

Surviving indigenous polities within easy reach of the Spanish did not last
long. Cosijopi, the Zapotec ruler of Tehuantapec, who had formally sub-
mitted to the Spanish on learning of the fall of Tenochtitlan, retained effective
120 Charles Jones
government of his realm by becoming a vassal of Charles V. However, fol-
lowing his death in 1563 the area came under crown control (Zeitlin 1989:
34). Also in Mesoamerica, the Mixtec states that had resisted Aztec over-
lordship up to the arrival of Cortés soon regretted their submission to the
Spanish, but their rebellions, in 1528 and 1548, were defeated (Hamnett 1999:
72). By contrast, in those parts of New Spain that were relatively remote from
creole settlement, indigenous states persisted ‘long into the postconquest
period, with their territories and many of their internal mechanisms essen-
tially intact’ (Lockhart 1992, citing Gibson 1962). However, the emphasis
here is firmly on ‘internal’. Any attempt to throw their weight around would
almost surely have been promptly suppressed.
In the Andes, Manco Inca had been installed by Pizarro following the
defeat of Atahualpa. As soon as he realized that he was not in fact sovereign,
he set about organizing military resistance, coming close to success in 1536–37.
Forced to lift their siege of Cuzco, Manco’s forces withdrew and established
an independent state some 200 km distant, around Vilcabamba, from which
they continued to harass the Spanish for a generation, until their final defeat
by Spanish forces in 1572 (D’Altroy 2002: 319–20). Further south, peoples of
the Araucanian language group who had resisted Inca hegemony were con-
quered for a time by Spaniards hungry for labour with which to exploit
nearby placer mines. Sustained resistance left virtually no Spanish presence
south of the Bío-Bío river by the second quarter of the seventeenth century
and obliged the Spanish to concede the independence of indigenous polities
by a treaty of 1641, confirmed in 1655.
With these exceptions, the story throughout much of the hemisphere was
one of steady encroachment by European and creole slave-raiders, mis-
sionaries, ranchers, officials and settlers into a political space already radically
transformed by the indirect effects of European contacts. The Zapotecs, the
Mixtecs, Manco Inca’s followers and the Araucanians all represent lingering sur-
vivals of older political orders. The indigenous polities with which Creoles would
struggle throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, including
the Plains Indians of North America, the emergent Mapuche state in the far
south-west of the continent, and many of the seemingly untouched Brazilian
tribes may initially give this impression, but were in a fundamental sense
modern polities: the outcome of direct or indirect contact with European
culture rather than stalwart resistance to it. Indeed, Boccara (1999) resists any
use of the term ‘Mapuche’ before 1760 and describes a process of ethnogen-
esis in which the Mapuche emerge only gradually from military cooperation
between a congeries of culturally related, semi-nomadic bands over a period
of more than two centuries.
So 1572 in the Spanish empire, and notional dates roughly a century later
in the North American and Brazilian interiors, may be taken as the points at
which a modern international society in the Americas, embracing both indi-
genous and creole polities, can plausibly be said to have formed. While
embracing the whole land mass, this society, with its distinctive forms of
 The Americas during the long eighteenth century 121
interaction, was shaped and energized by advancing frontiers as Creole
societies, their populations increasingly reinforced by migration and mis-
cegenation, began to spill out from coastal enclaves and attempt permanent
settlement in the continental interior.
By the second half of the seventeenth century, more than 150 years after
the initial Spanish incursions, European dominion in the western hemisphere
was still very far from complete, but the frontiers across which creoles and
Europeans confronted indigenous peoples had been clearly established (Bar-
raclough 1999: 179, 181; Hemming 1978: xii; Lombardi and Lombardi 1983:
28; Salisbury 1996: 417). French settlement had been established in the St
Lawrence valley, extending inland as far as Fort Niagara by 1679. There was
also a tentative French presence in the middle reaches of the Mississippi and
in the Ohio valley, as well as on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, where their
eastward expansion toward Florida had been checked, in 1696, by the Span-
ish establishment of Pensacola, a military settlement designed to guard the
flank of their tenuous settlements in northern Florida. British settlements
stretched along the eastern seaboard in a not yet continuous strip from present-
day South Carolina to Newfoundland, while in the far north trading posts
had been established by the British Hudson’s Bay Company at Rupert’s
House (1668) and Fort Albany (1679). British, French and Spanish traders
and exploratory expeditions had ranged further, but by far the greater part of
the North American land mass remained beyond European or creole rule,
and such permanent settlement as there was may best be regarded as a land-
locked archipelago. Though the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region had
already been profoundly affected by the nearby European presence, and hos-
tilities between French and British imperial forces were intermittent in this corner
of the New World from as early as 1620, it would be only in the eighteenth
century that Anglophone settlers crossed the Appalachians in any great
number. Up to the 1680s it is reasonable to say that international relations in
North America were ‘dominated by the interactions of Amerindians with one
another and with the invading Europeans, rather than by European imperial
or inter-colonial rivalries’ (Steele 1994: 23).
The position in Meso-America and further south was very different. Here
the Spanish had been able to form extensive successor states following their
conquests of the Aztecs and the Inca. Yet relatively little expansion of the
territories of the indigenous empires had been accomplished. The northern-
most limits of Spanish authority in the mid-seventeenth century still fell short
of the Rio Grande in the west, though a finger of effective control reached
northward, along the river’s upper valley. To the south, Spanish control was
largely limited to the uplands or altiplano everywhere north of present-day
Bolivia, though the Paraguay-Paraná river system, down to the strategic out-
post of Buenos Aires on the Atlantic coast, together with parts of the plains
to the west and north of Buenos Aires, were lightly settled, while to the west
of the Andes, the Bío-Bío provided a frontier, policed from the marcher city
of Concepción, founded in 1550.
122 Charles Jones
The Portuguese, for their part, had settled several enclaves along the
Atlantic coast but had yet to penetrate the interior in any substantial or per-
manent manner. Bandeirantes had reached out into the southern interior from
São Paulo from as early as the sixteenth century, hoping to repeat the spec-
tacular 1545 Spanish discovery of silver mines at Potosí. Failing in this
objective they made a business of enslaving indigenous people for sale to
plantation owners on the coast, including those settled at the growing
number of Jesuit missions in the interior. The bandeirantes reached what
would soon become the captaincy of Minas Gerais, to the north of São Paulo,
in the 1670s, but the first rumours of gold, which would lead to rapid settle-
ment in the eighteenth century, only reached the coast in 1693. The very
success of mining in the interior soon afterwards led the Portuguese Crown to
prohibit further exploration, in the hope of preventing a drain of illegally
mined gold down the Paraná valley with consequent loss of revenues. How-
ever, this official policy was unsustainable, and by the mid-eighteenth century
bandeiras had reached deep into the central highlands, to Goiás and Mato
Grosso, close to the headwaters of the southern tributaries of the Amazon
river system.
Between Spaniard and Portuguese, a rash of autonomous Jesuit settlements
ran northwards from the upper Paraguay and Paraná valleys during the first
third of the sixteenth century, later spreading into Mato Grosso and western
Amazonia, and as far north as the interior of New Granada in present-day
Venezuela (Hemming 1978: maps 3–4). The eighteenth-century expansion of
both Spanish and Portuguese settlement spelt the end for these extensive
polities, which were attacked by Spanish and Portuguese forces from as early
as 1756, culminating in the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal, France and
the Spanish Empire in 1767, and the suppression of the order by Pope
Clement XIV in 1773.2 Whatever may have been the European causes of this
development, its effect in the western hemisphere was to weaken barriers to
further creole settlement by removing what had been, in effect, buffer states.
Yet if permanent settlement remained limited and tenuous up to the eight-
eenth century, the effects of European invasion were very evident far beyond
the advancing frontiers, and from an early date. The spread of European
species changed patterns of agricultural and pastoral activity throughout the
continent. The military implications of the horse for warfare between indi-
genous polities may have been exaggerated, but horses also made more
extensive agriculture possible while the effects of European cereals and of
sheep, goats and cattle as supplements to diet and foundations for craft
manufacturing were everywhere profound, often altering the relative status of
distinct social groups within indigenous communities. Disease took a dreadful
toll, altering the balance of advantage in favour of the encroaching Eur-
opeans. One estimate suggests that the indigenous population of the Americas
fell from 50 million on the eve of first contact at the end of the fifteenth cen-
tury, to as few as 5 million by 1650 (Barraclough 1999). Nor can disease be
dismissed as a continuing factor after the initial shock. The disproportionate
 The Americas during the long eighteenth century 123
effects of epidemics of cholera, smallpox and other communicable diseases
upon indigenous populations were felt right through to the end of the nineteenth
century, if not beyond.
So much for the course, extent and general implications of European set-
tlement. Effective imperial control was another matter. Established quite soon
after first contact by the monarchs of Spain and Portugal, direct responsibility
for the exploits of subjects in America was not assumed by the French Crown
until 1663, while the English continued to operate through an indirect system
of sub-contraction to chartered companies, such as the Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany (1620) or the Massachusetts Bay Company (1628), to which state-like
powers were delegated.

The (relative) autonomy of the settler state and the emergence of an

American international society
International society in the Americas by the eighteenth century comprised
three broad classes of political actor: imperial sovereign states, more or less
organized colonial communities, and indigenous polities. Reverberations of
European conflicts brought imperial forces into closer and often less than
harmonious relations with colonial communities from as early as the mid-
seventeenth century, though the heyday of imperial rivalries in the Americas
came roughly a century later. The unavoidable conclusion is that European
dominion in much of the western hemisphere remained tentative up to the eve
of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century the posi-
tion had been transformed. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the admission of
Texas into the Union in 1845, and the British and Mexican cessions of 1846
and 1848 had produced something close to today’s United States of America.
To the south, Chilean, Argentine and Brazilian formal nineteenth-century
territorial claims entirely excluded indigenous polities. However, even after
the decisive southern conquests of 1878–82, the effective frontiers of Chile
and Argentina ran from Puerto Montt on the Pacific, across the Andes, and
along the Rio Negro to Bahia Blanca, the only substantial settlement beyond
this line being the Welsh nationalist enclave of Chubut.
In part, all this was legal and cartographic prestidigitation. Not all indi-
genous peoples felt bound by creole maps, let alone law; nor were they even
aware of their implications, any more than they fully understood the treaties
they had signed. A faux-antique map of early nineteenth-century North
America in an historical atlas published in the USA as recently as 2004 blithely
designates a great swath of the Mid-West, from today’s Montana and the
Dakotas in the north to Oklahoma in the south, as ‘unorganized territories’
(National Geographic 2004: 70). The same publication traces ‘the spread of reli-
gion’ (ibid.: 72), as though there had been none before the arrival of Chris-
tians, Jews and Hindus. The Lombardis’ otherwise excellent atlas of Latin
American history acknowledges no surviving indigenous zone in the southern
cone by as early as 1830, nor any survival of indigenous peoples as a distinct
124 Charles Jones
element in the population or in its analysis of contemporary economy and
society (Lombardi and Lombardi 1983: 49, 86–91, 92–104). First Nations are
just not there.
It is clear that the creation of present-day Canada, the USA, Mexico, Brazil,
Argentina and Chile all depended substantially on the conquest of persistently
autonomous indigenous polities over a period of close to 400 years, starting
with first contacts and effectively terminating (except in Amazonia) in the
final defeat of the Mapuche by Chile in the early 1880s, Julio Roca’s ‘desert
campaign’ of 1878–79 in Argentina, and the December 1890 massacre at
Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Yet these later events were not the curtain-
raisers for an American international society. They resembled rather more the
change of state of an existing society from the liquid interaction of a plurality
of types of polity to the more uniform relations of a group of modern states.
Not for nothing did Arie Kacowicz, an Argentine scholar working in the
tradition of Hedley Bull, commence his English School study of South
American international society in 1881 (Kacowicz 2005). An American
international society was in operation throughout this period, in the sense
that relations between polities were governed by norms and institutions.
However, a leading purpose of this section has been to establish that there
was a decisive phase in this very extended historical process, from the start of
which the final outcome was clear, and the sustainability of a society com-
prising heterogeneous political forms progressively called into doubt. This
coincided roughly with a long eighteenth century stretching from the near-
contemporaneous Bourbon assumption of responsibility for New France, the
British seizure of New York in 1664, and the revived independence of Portu-
gal under the Braganzas, through to the early nineteenth-century indepen-
dence of much of Spanish America and the migration of the Portuguese court. It
was after 1660 that a determined and demographically driven creole break-
out from the original European bridgeheads of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries got under way. It is therefore to the period from 1660 to 1820 that
the remainder of this chapter is devoted, and to a comparison of three contested
zones: the far south, the south-west Brazilian interior, and the north-east
forests of trans-Appalachian North America.

The far south

Spain inherited an Inca tribute empire that petered out somewhere between
the present-day Chilean capital of Santiago, founded in 1540, and the Bío-Bío
valley, some 400 km further south, in the area that became known as Araucania.
The native Picunche in this border region were effectively subdued by 1541,
though Spanish demands for foodstuffs and labour prompted some continued
resistance and southward flight, which the Spanish hastened to cut off after their
pioneering expedition had been reinforced from Peru. Thereafter, a regime of
crop levies and labour drafts operated initially within this zone. Following a
major revolt in 1598 in which thousands of Spanish men and women were
 The Americas during the long eighteenth century 125
taken captive, the Spanish distinguished between the more biddable Picunche
and those peoples living to the south of the Maule and Bío-Bío rivers, who
were finally to coalesce into the Mapuche nation but might better be referred
to for now as Araucanians or by Boccara’s term, derived from the documents:
‘los reche’ or ‘true men’, ‘sin Rey, sin fe, sin ley’ (without king, faith or law)
(Jones 1999: 148; Boccara 1999: 426). In referring to them collectively as
Araucanians, no more is intended than to indicate the mutual intelligibility of
a multiplicity of culturally related but politically distinct groups.
By a treaty of 1641, confirmed in 1655, the Spanish formally accepted the
continuing political independence of those living beyond the Bío-Bío. By this
time a more or less stable frontier ran westward from Buenos Aires through
San Luis and Mendoza toward Santiago, the only exception being the lands
stretching southwards to Concepción to the west of the Andes constituting an
exceptional salient. Cross-frontier raids in both directions were common over
the next 150 years: indigenous groups riding north and east for women and
booty; the Spanish, south, for labour and to administer punishment for
northward incursions. General Araucanian uprisings took place in 1723 and
1766. However, the first of these led to the institution, by the Spanish, of a
system of parlamentos, or regular meetings for the purpose of negotiation, in
which thousands of indigenous people might take part, the costs being borne
largely by the Spanish. This innovative form of diplomacy facilitated a long,
if uneasy, peace on the western side of the mountains from 1773 to 1859,
punctuated only by Mapuche support for the Spanish royalists against rebel-
lious creoles during the War of Independence (Brand 1941: 19). However, it also
allowed the Mapuche to direct their attention to raiding on the eastern slopes of the
Andes, sometimes in concert with the Tehuelche, who predominated in
southern Argentina (Jones 1999: 157–59).
The dénouement of this process falls beyond the strict time span of this
volume. Though much of the world was finding itself ever more obliged to
play by European rules from the end of the eighteenth century, no one had
told the Mapuche. Araucanian independence continued to be formally
recognized by republican Chile until the mid-nineteenth century. At that point
southward pressure from land-hungry German immigrants began to cause
friction over land. This was aggravated by the support and subsequent refuge
provided by the denizens of Araucania for dissident Chilean liberals following
the civil wars of 1851 and 1859 (Brand 1941: 22; Jones 1999: 176). The Chi-
leans responded by imposing a reservation policy. This provoked a further
revolt between 1868 and 1870, which in turn prompted the Chilean state to
move its formal frontier south to the Río Malleco. The end came when the
Araucanians took advantage of the transfer of Chilean troops to the north
during the War of the Pacific (1879–83). Victory achieved, seasoned troops
were sent south where they inflicted a final and irrevocable defeat upon the
rebels (1881–84). A cholera epidemic in 1886 finished the job. Formal incor-
poration of the Araucanian lands into the Chilean state followed speedily, in
1887 (Brand 1941: 23).
126 Charles Jones
Four general features of general relevance to International Relations emerge
from the historical literature on Araucania. These are the mobility and strategic
flexibility of the Araucanian bands, their conduct of diplomacy, their military
transformation, and the political consolidation that arose from resistance.
The first is already familiar from sub-Saharan Africa and other areas of
European dominion and settlement. Boundaries imposed by the Europeans
and adopted by their creole successors were an inconsistent reflection of pre-
conquest society and politics. The Spanish reached the far south by two distinct
routes, one to the west and the other to the east of the Andes. This was reflected
in administrative divisions, with Chile organized as a military captaincy-general
and presidencia within the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1606, while present-day
Argentina was also part of the Viceroyalty of Peru at first, but became a
separate Viceroyalty in 1776. Retrospectively, the much-disputed border between
independent Chile and Argentina, following the cordillera, came to be regarded
as a barely surmountable natural barrier to trade, but trade and migration
across the mountains was not uncommon before the Spanish conquest.
Kristine L. Jones counsels her readers that ‘[t]he first task inherent in
understanding interethnic reorganization and re-adaptation at the margins of
Spanish rule is to challenge [the] north–south perspective’ (Jones 1999: 139).
Indeed, archaeological evidence suggests that there was a good deal of east–
west movement of goods and economies, based on exploitation of resources
deriving from a portfolio of ecologies defined by altitude rather than latitude.
However, intensification of trade and migration across the Andes in the six-
teenth century, resulting in a measure of political consolidation among the
Pehuenche people, who were later to form the core of the emergent Mapuche
nation, may have originated as a defensive strategy in response to earlier Inca
encroachment. Further pressure, as we have already seen, led Araucanians to
reach accommodations with the Spanish on the western side of the cordillera,
while raiding into the easier plains to the east, where their allies and captives
included members of Tehuelche bands, many of which lived in relative peace
with the Spanish, engaging in a substantial trade (Jones 1999: 154–59; Brand
1941: 24). In sum, flexible movement across the Andes materially assisted
resistance against the Spanish.
Diplomacy and negotiation, formalized in the parlamento system only after
1723, had been employed by the Spanish in tandem with coercion from the
outset. However, the Araucanian peoples and the Spanish both seem to have
felt that binding agreements existed to be flouted by the more powerful party.
Padden (1957: 110) noted that the early colonial period saw a repeated
sequence of indigenous submission followed by well-planned rebellion.

The Indians were so skilled that the Spanish were never able to tell whe-
ther they really meant to keep the peace or not. Either way, there was
nothing the Spanish could do but accept, driven as they were by the
economic imperative of their way of life. The Indians seem to have
understood this perfectly. The granting of supposedly permanent peace
 The Americas during the long eighteenth century 127
terms in critical areas as a part of wider strategy became common.
Revolts were well planned: the chiefs had the white women divided
among themselves in advance …

The confidence underlying what appeared, to the Spanish, to be contemptible

duplicity must have been reinforced not only by an ability to retreat into the
mountains and beyond them, out of Spanish reach, but also by growing
military competence. Araucanians did not initially fight on horseback, and
the initial impact of the horse was probably to assist trans-Andean trade and
migration, and facilitate alliance formation and the concentration of forces
(Gregson 1969: 36–37). Beyond the cordillera, the Tehuelche did not exploit
the wild herds roaming the pampa much before 1700 (Gregson 1969: 34).
Initially, the Araucanians carefully chose battle sites that gave them an
advantage by nullifying the Spanish use of horses (Padden 1957: 112). Yet, by
the late sixteenth century they had developed a light cavalry more mobile and
effective than that of the Spanish (Padden 1957: 113; Gregson 1969: 37).
Military competence was transformed not only by the spread of horses but
by a more general and profound cultural transformation of the Araucanian
economy prompted by the adoption of European livestock species. This led to
a change in gender relations, with women taking exclusive responsibility for
horticulture and textile crafts while men engaged in commerce and raiding
across a wider territory than before. Spatial extension of external trade, espe-
cially in hand-woven ponchos (capes), provided the basis for the Araucanian
war economy in the shape of metal weapons, better-quality mounts and surplus
males (Boccara 1999).
East–west strategic flexibility, the judicious alternation of diplomacy and
force, and military transformation would probably not have sufficed to pro-
long Araucanian resistance had it not been for political consolidation. A
scrupulous economy in use of the term ‘Mapuche’ has been observed thus far,
because there was no self-conscious Mapuche nation or ethne much before the
late eighteenth century. The term first appears in the written record in 1760
and began to be used for self-description around the same time. Padden,
writing of the seventeenth century, found that resistance to the Spanish was
organized in three, later four, north-south alliances of Araucanian peoples,
called butanmapos (Padden) or futamapus (Boccara), with specialist officials
fulfilling the functions of general command, field command, and envoy or
religious leader (Padden 1957: 118–19; Boccara 1999: 426ff). The literal
meaning of this term was ‘great land’ and it appears to have emerged in the
early seventeenth century as the coming together or supersession of an earlier
social form, the ayllarehue or ‘new true place’, a temporary alliance or non-
aggression pact with no unified command. Both the ayllarehue and the more
general futamapu bound together many lebos or bands, and the effect of pro-
longed hostilities against the Spanish together with participation through a
futamapu leader in the parlamentos, led to the consolidation into a collective
political identity of forms originally adopted for ad hoc military purposes.
128 Charles Jones
South-west Brazil
In Brazil, as elsewhere in the Americas, the eighteenth century was pivotal.
This was largely because of the vicissitudes of dynastic rivalries in Iberia itself.
There, extinction of the ruling house of Aviz by the death of King Sebastian of
Portugal in 1578 at the Battle of Alcazarquivir led to a succession crisis that
provided an opportunity for Philip II of Spain to seize control, declaring himself
Philip III of Portugal. Under its new Habsburg overlord, Portugal retained
internal autonomy but lost control of foreign policy and saw its overseas
possessions relatively neglected. The ongoing struggle between Spain and its
rebellious subjects in the Netherlands spread to the New World, where many
parts of the Brazilian coast were occupied by the Dutch during the second
quarter of the seventeenth century. Elsewhere, the French also encroached.
The overbearing posture adopted toward his Portuguese subjects by Philip III
of Spain led to a successful revolt following the installation of the Duke of
Braganza as king of Portugal in 1640. The Spanish did not readily accept defeat,
and a war of independence continued into the 1660s. Only as the threat in
Iberia was overcome were the Portuguese able to retrieve the position in the
Americas, ousting the Dutch from Brazil in 1654 and creating conditions that
would allow the long move into the interior to begin in earnest.
In the south, where the Dutch had been held off, Portuguese slave-raiders
had already begun to operate out of São Paulo, but it was not until 1693
(Minas Gerais) and 1718–23 (Goiás) that mineral discoveries sparked a rush
of Portuguese with their African slaves, encouraged by construction of the
estrada real (royal highway) connecting Rio to mining centres in the interior.
This speedily put paid to the political autonomy of the Goiases in their traditional
homeland (Karasch 2005: 466), but many Goiases and Crixá fled into the
surrounding forests and continued to resist from their relative safety. The
Crown was anxious to close the frontier yet at the same time feared a leakage of
bullion down the Paraná valley to the Río de la Plata. To this end, slaving
expeditions (bandeiras) into the region east of the new mines were forbidden.
However, bandeiras, albeit on a smaller scale, continued to press east, now less
for slaves than in the hope of further lucky strikes, and were active throughout
the eighteenth century across the Portuguese realm (Langfur 2005: 460).
Mary Karasch (2005) questions Portuguese claims to have conquered indi-
genous peoples and closed the frontier. Concentrating on the province of
Gioá, she notes at least one group – the Avá-Canoeiro – that was not sub-
jugated until the twentieth century, but devotes most of her attention to three
peoples whom the Portuguese did claim to have conquered: the Karajá (1775),
the Kayapó (1780), and the Xavante (1788). The first of the three suffered the
depredations of several bandeiras during the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, culminating in a 1755 raid that killed many and enslaved others. In
an attempt to subdue them, an officially sanctioned expedition, more properly
referred to as an entrada than a bandeira, was sent in 1774 with instructions
to avoid violence. The Karajá submitted to Portuguese authority voluntarily
 The Americas during the long eighteenth century 129
after extended negotiations, but their subsequent experience of unfair
exchange, missionary life and epidemics led to a revolt in 1813 (Karasch
2005: 480). Like the Karajá, the Kayapó were raided by bandeiras, notably in
1741 and 1742. They retaliated, and a pattern of reciprocal violence was
established, ending only when the Portuguese decided to buy them off. Once
again, the decision to submit turned out badly as the Kayapó found them-
selves forced to labour for the Portuguese and were stricken by disease. Those
who survived fled into the Araguaia valley in the early nineteenth century and
continued an intermittent guerrilla war against incoming creole and European
settlers right up to the 1880s, even though their numbers were decimated by
an official punitive expedition in 1824. A third group, the Xavante, reached a
negotiated settlement with the Portuguese in 1788 and were resettled on lands
in Carretão that had been promised them by the governor of the province.
There – weakened by epidemics and suffering further losses in reprisals fol-
lowing the 1813 revolt – their numbers had dwindled to 227 by 1819 (Karasch
2005: 484). Here, as elsewhere, the process represented by Europeans as con-
quest extended over many decades and had rather more the character of an
international society, albeit asymmetric and unsustainable in the long run.
Similar contrasts may be drawn, throughout the sertão, between confident
declarations of Portuguese victory and persistent indigenous resistance.
Langfur notes that the Bororo of Mato Grosso, regarded as a serious military
threat to Cuiabá, the state capital, as late as the 1880s, were first said to have
been subjugated more than 150 years before, in 1730 (Langfur 1999: 881).
Always, however, the tendency was in the same direction, toward progressive
marginalization of the indigenous peoples of the interior.
Standing back from the band-by-band narrative of resistance and accom-
modation to the creole invasion, it is possible to see some similarities with
experience in the far south. Once again the mobility of indigenous peoples is
striking, and reminiscent of the hordes that dominated Central Asia from the
thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries of the common era, or the militarized
states of the nineteenth-century southern African Mfecane (Omer-Cooper
1966). Sometimes as refugees, sometimes seeking the protection of Jesuit or
other mission settlements, sometimes by voluntary agreement with the state,
bands moved to new areas. The readiness with which they sometimes did this
may reflect a sense that the lands from which they were being removed did
not constitute a traditional homeland; it may even indicate a more funda-
mental difference between European and indigenous attitudes to territoriality.
From the sixteenth century onwards bandeirantes plunged into the sertão like
so many cue balls, cannoning the reds in every direction in their urgent and
careless desire to pocket the colours. This is not only a sharp reminder to
beware the ethnographers’ lust for virgin peoples but also helps to explain a
recurrent and important feature of American international society, namely a
complex mixing of populations on both sides of the advancing frontier that
permitted quite distinct cultural and political divisions to continue even when
a supposedly colonial bandeira might consist largely of free blacks and
130 Charles Jones
Indians while its victims comprised a mélange of creole renegades, escaped
slaves and aboriginals. The question this poses to traditional English School
accounts is very like E.H. Carr’s question to the status quo powers of the
1920s. Did not their readiness to assume that homogeneity of political form
was an essential precondition of international order rather too conveniently
suit their still imperialist retrospective gaze? Were they not deceived in much
the same way as Britain, France and the USA had been when they convinced
themselves that peace was in the general interest? The length of time in which
a heterogeneous international society endured in the Americas in spite of
technological asymmetry and demographic imbalance may be thought testi-
mony to the possibility that such systems may not in themselves be unstable.
In the long run, homogeneity may be no more essential for the orderly
operation of an international society than balance is for a stable state system
(Wohlforth et al. 2007a; Wohlforth et al. 2007b).
The process of miscegenation between peoples within this society must have
been accompanied by some transfer of technology, including military tech-
nology, but there is scant evidence of this in the Brazilian expansion, a pro-
cess generally characterized by smaller raiding parties and indigenous polities
than in either the far south or the North American Great Lakes region. One
hint is that within a secular demographic collapse, periods of relative peace
and trade with the creoles, as sometimes under Jesuit protection (Reeve 1994:
126), allowed populations to recover and become wealthier, an essential pre-
condition for renewed resistance. However, miscegenation also facilitated
styles of diplomacy in which gifts, feigned submission, and the employment of
bilingual and mixed-race former captives were common. This may be one
place to look for the antecedents of green-on-blue attacks.

The northern plains and forests

A history of population decline and radical social disruption even prior to
direct contact with Europeans, evident in South America, was if anything
more pronounced, and of earlier inception in trans-Appalachian North
America. A populous and extensive pre-Columbian Mississippi culture had
flourished for half a millennium, up to 1400. Prior to European contact, for
obscure reasons, the northern heartland of this culture – based in that stretch
of the Mississippi valley between its confluences with the Missouri and the
Ohio – had collapsed. Some 200 years later, across a large expanse of the
north-central plains, indigenous bands racked by newly introduced infectious
diseases were attempting to rebuild their lives while simultaneously dealing
with the consequences of a complex triple frontier of advancing French,
English and Spanish settlement.
On a distant periphery of this ancient culture, in a great triangle of forested
lands several hundred miles to the north-east, bounded by the modern cities
of Cleveland, New York and Montreal, a third story of the long eighteenth
century unfolded as the British and the French began to break out from their
 The Americas during the long eighteenth century 131
initial tentative bridgeheads in the valleys of the St Lawrence, the Potomac,
the Hudson and the Connecticut and James Rivers after English displacement
of the Dutch in 1664.
In the eye of the storm stood the Iroquois. Certainly not a consolidated
polity, the union achieved by the so-called Five Nations – Mohawks, Oneidas,
Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas – is more accurately described as a non-
aggression pact than a confederation and bears some family resemblance to
the inchoate Mapuche polity of the same era. They had already fought a
succession of wars against the French and their Huron allies, which used to
be regarded as having been motivated primarily by competition for pelts for
sale to the Europeans (Hunt 1940). Naroll (1969) wrote specifically about the
fourth of these (1657–67), arguing that it was not just about the fur trade but
stemmed from a mutual lack of understanding between very different cultures.
The war started from a relatively small incident, but by 1660 the Iroquois had
cut off the fur trade and besieged Villemarie (Montreal). These initial suc-
cesses were reversed as a coalition of indigenous peoples formed against the
Iroquois. The strain of a war on two fronts, coinciding with an epidemic, put
them on the back foot. Then, in 1663, the French government in Paris for-
mally adopted the Canadian settlements and sent a regiment of 1,000 regulars
who mounted a punitive expedition that killed few, but destroyed Iroquois
crops and villages. In 1667 the Iroquois sued for peace, accepting all French
conditions.
The year 1675 saw peace between the Mohawk and Mohicans, to their
north, and between others of the Five Nations and the Susquehannock, to the
south. With their northern and southern frontiers secure, the Iroquois attacked
groups to their west. At the same time, the British and French began to clash
over the lucrative North American fur trade. The British had acquired New
Amsterdam in 1664. Ten years later a new governor set about enlisting the
Five Nations as his auxiliaries in a general pacification of indigenous peoples
(Richter 1983: 545) and a challenge to French suzerainty.
To counter the British threat, the French started to build forts in the Illinois
country. Finding so many furs being taken to Albany by the Iroquois, the
French decided to crush them and mounted repeated invasions, spoiling crops
and villages, from 1684 onwards. French expeditionary forces of up to 2,000
took part in these operations. British responses to French incursions were
largely ineffective and poorly coordinated with the Iroquois during the War of
the League of Augsburg (1688–97), generally known in Anglophone North
America as King William’s War. After the Treaty of Ryswick had brought
hostilities to an end in Europe, an unresolved dispute between the French and
the British in North America led to continued fighting there, the former
demanding a separate peace with the Iroquois while the latter insisted on their
right to negotiate on behalf of their allies. Not until 1701 was a settlement
agreed that included a general peace between the indigenous polities formerly
allied to both European empires. This did not bring peace to the Great Lakes
area. The Iroquois reverted to the traditional form of mourning war, in which
132 Charles Jones
men were encouraged to replace individuals in their community who had died
by raiding, so that killing the enemy was close to counterproductive. From the
1720s, avoiding any breach of the 1701 treaty by avoiding war with its signa-
tories, the Iroquois continued raiding Flathead groups on the western fron-
tiers of Virginia and the Carolinas for the remainder of the eighteenth
century.
As in the far south and the Brazilian sertão, so in the forests and lakes of
trans-Appalachia, the long eighteenth century witnessed the terminal strug-
gles of indigenous peoples, already transformed socially by their direct and
indirect contacts with Europeans and creoles, as they deployed negotiation
and force, by turns, in their attempt to preserve autonomous political
forms which, by the end, had become anything but traditional. A profusion of
treaties between Eastern seaboard colonies and native polities raises the ques-
tion of whether their legal status was appreciated in equal manner and
measure by creole and native signatories. Similar ambiguities surround the
despatch of envoys by the Cherokees to the Spanish and French, and the
conferral of European titles by colonists and imperial plenipotentiaries on
native leaders. May one justly speak here of diplomacy, balancing and mutual
recognition?
It would be wrong to say that the fur trade was the sole or chief cause of
war between the Iroquois and their neighbours. Naroll finds that they had
access to enough beaver pelts for their needs without having to fight for them;
possession of material goods did not confer status as it did for Europeans;
there was no mention of the trade in the 1655 treaty with the French (Naroll
1969: 59–61). However, at this point, the comparative method adopted here
poses questions. The nature of war in the north changed markedly in the
course of the sustained conflicts of the eighteenth century, from an institution
primarily concerned with blood feuding and the replenishment of population,
to a much bloodier contest over territory.
Naroll’s view of the matter is exposed as too static by subsequent scholar-
ship, and Schlesier (1975) offers a more dynamic view. The French found it
puzzling that their local allies were satisfied to break off engagements after
inflicting light casualties and taking a few, carefully chosen prisoners. They
did not readily grasp the concept of a mourning war, in which capture, not
killing, was the primary objective of battle.
What happened toward the end of the seventeenth century was that popu-
lation decline made replacement a more urgent and larger-scale enterprise,
while the supply of more deadly weapons and the involvement of European
troops raised the level of casualties, and the consequent demand for replace-
ments, to the point where the ritualistic form of mourning warfare collapsed
(Richter 1983: 544–51). ‘French attempts to apply European ideas of mass
destruction in their dealings with their recklessly chosen enemy, the Iroquois’,
so Schlesier claims, ‘were exactly what created the power and the “menace” of
the Iroquois about which French colonials later lamented very bitterly’
(Schlesier 1975: 131–32). In the course of this transformation of the nature of
 The Americas during the long eighteenth century 133
warfare, North American Indians came to think of themselves as one people,
a change of political identity reminiscent of the contemporaneous ethnogen-
esis of the Mapuche, far to the south, fostered in this instance by prophets
whose words soared across tribal divisions during the second half of the
eighteenth century (Dowd 1991). It is hard to imagine that such transforma-
tions can have taken place without changes in gender roles and the sig-
nificance of material goods of the sort that are seen elsewhere. In short, the
insistence of Naroll on the persistence of an egalitarian attitude to material
possessions gives grounds for suspicion.
In respect of negotiated agreements, the pattern is very much the same as in
the far south and the Brazilian sertão. Indigenous groups often made solemn
compacts only to break them without warning soon afterwards. Sometimes
this was because they did not feel bound by contracts concluded under duress;
sometimes the problem was more fundamental, and stemmed from European
failure to understand the nature of their negotiating partner. The Iroquois
confederacy was a pact designed to regulate blood-feuding between its mem-
bers. The French at times regarded it as a true federation, able to control the
foreign policy of all its component peoples. They therefore felt aggrieved
when one or other of the Five Nations took independent action. The
Mohawks, as one of those component groups, saw no inconsistency in nego-
tiating with the French while simultaneously attacking their indigenous allies.
The French, by contrast, thought this deceitful and, by and by, each side
became convinced of the bad faith of the other (Naroll 1969: 60, 69, 71). For
all this, the confederation represented one step in a process of political inte-
gration and the prophecy movement described by Dowd another, each of
which must surely owe something to sustained struggle with culturally discrete
enemies.

Conclusion
It is tempting to try to gather together observations from this too brief survey
of American ethno-historical literature and generalize from it using standard
categories of a modernist international society approach to international
relations: diplomacy, law, international organization, war, balancing and
hegemony, and trade. An approach of this kind would rapidly encounter two
great obstacles. The first is that the range of experience, even from a selective
sample of the literature, is such as to defy easy generalization, so that the
most that can be hoped for is to identify an agenda. The second is that the
categories of European and creole experience cannot readily be applied trans-
culturally, as the first generation of English School scholars were inclined to
do. To attempt this is to deny the lived experience of many of the participants
in the process under investigation.
There are two reasons for this. The first is that understandings of particular
forms of engagement differed. It is evident from all the cases considered here
that war and diplomacy were very differently practised and understood by
134 Charles Jones
indigenous and creole peoples. However, a second and more fundamental
problem is that even this way of stating the problem imposes alien categories
on indigenous experience. Trade, for example, can hardly be separated from
diplomacy, or indeed from warfare, in a world of semi-nomadic peoples where
gift-giving and exchange remained – as they had once been in Eurasia (Allsen
1997) – a central expression of relative power and status, while warfare often
took the form of raiding for captives and livestock, and long-distance trading
expeditions might at any point have to take up arms. The period dealt with
here is precisely that in which the foundations of the Euro-American liberal
world view were laid. One of its pillars was the naturalization of a very par-
ticular form of social analysis in which the economic and the political were
positively separated and normatively divorced. To examine the ethno-history
of this epoch is to be made aware of the strangeness and specificity of this
worldview, and its ideological force.
Just as trade defies any easy separation from diplomacy or warfare, so
group identities – the ontological basis of International Relations – resist easy
identification or classification. From the vantage point of the present day it is
customary to tell a story of demographic collapse, imperial competition, the
progressive emergence of creole nations, a long period of subjugation of
indigenous peoples, and their recent resurgence. Yet, examples of indigenous
ethnogenesis and state formation are observable throughout the hemisphere
during the long eighteenth century. It was not only the Iroquois and the
Mapuche who consolidated concurrently with their creole neighbours, but
also the Catawbas and the Cherokee (Salisbury 1996: 432–33). Self-identification
as Mapuche, Aymara or Sioux in the early twenty-first century is a cultural
gesture lacking secure genetic certification. Its strategic function is to enable
marginalized groups to aspire to legal and political parity with their oppres-
sors in a contemporary world, where orderly international society is believed
to be premised on homogeneity of its members. Polities were not firmly rooted
in specific territories in Brazil or the northern forests, where disruption arising
from multiple European frontiers was already underway by the seventeenth
century. Perhaps they never had been. Even in the far south, where the
attachment to territory was more stable, trans-Andean raiding and migration
were stimulated by war against the Spanish and led to growing genetic het-
erogeneity of the population at the very time when it was becoming more
united politically.
If it is mistaken to attach too much importance to primordial territories, it
is also quite wrong to imagine that indigenous polities were genetically
homogeneous. How could this be the case in a world where raiding was so
common, creating cultures that were primed by custom, even before first
contact, to receive and integrate European captives and renegades? Nor did
the forces they faced consist of pure-blood creoles, still less Europeans. Bra-
zilian bandeirantes were more often black or Indian than creole, though gen-
erally led by a Portuguese. Mixed-race forces were the rule rather than the
exception in the North American wars of the eighteenth century, while the
 The Americas during the long eighteenth century 135
Argentine forces deployed by Rosas and Roca against the southern nomads
included many Afro-American and mixed-race soldiers.
In a world where war was conducted between racially mixed forces, diplo-
macy would have been close to impossible without Janus-like figures such as
the French coureurs du bois, English frontiersmen and returning captives.
‘One explanation for the success of … bandeiras in negotiating peace via gift
giving’, Karasch (2005: 491) explains, was that ‘each “conquest” utilized
indigenous “ambassadors” as interpreters, warriors, and informants in
subsequent “conquests”’.
In short, the history that has been reviewed here is one in which certain cultures
and political forms proved unsustainable, in spite of fierce resistance, but
where the identification of these cultures and polities with specific nations is a
far harder trick to pull off, and the safest course may be to resist the easy view,
of progressive invasion and annihilation, and think instead of a prolonged
and norm-governed continental civil war out of which emerged discrete Amer-
ican nations based on miscegenation and its denial, characteristic American
polities defined by creole foundational myths, and a distinctive style of inter-
national relations based on delusions of escape from the superstitious, corrupt
and hereditary systems of the Old World. Above all, the American eighteenth
century offers a salutary warning against the synchronic vision of Bull,
Watson and their contemporaries, in which the past converges on an idealized
set of modern norms and institutions that provides the paradigm of interna-
tional society. The international society described here was one of constant
change, in which norms and institutions were always provisional and subject
to the play of power. The outcome was not a new Europe, but a distinctively
American international society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
marked off from Europe by distinctive practice and ideas in the fields of
international law, international economic relations, public violence and political
exile (Jones 2007b; Snajder and Roniger 2009; Roniger et al. 2012).
Experience varied widely, but it is possible to put forward a few hypotheses
about the ways in which international society in the Americas during the long
eighteenth century prefigured its later forms of institutionalization following
the final military triumph of independent creole states over their European
and indigenous competitors. One point of departure, following the demo-
graphic catastrophe that befell the American nations as a consequence of first
contact with Europeans, is to be found in the dichotomy between imperial
benevolence and creole ruthlessness. Whether it be Italian Jesuits providing
havens in the sertão and the Amazon, British officials vainly holding back the
westward drift of creole settlement after the Seven Years War, or the Portu-
guese Crown restricting the range of operations of the bandeiras and urging
diplomacy on the leaders of their pacification expeditions or entradas, an
almost universal tension is evident between the posture of European elites
and creoles fully committed to the New World. When the latter came to
power, following wars of independence, they rapidly jettisoned the tolerance
of constitutional variety and historic rights to which the composite
136 Charles Jones
monarchies of early modern Europe has, albeit imperfectly, aspired. In only
the baldest of such statements, soon after assuming responsibility for the
French colonies in North America in 1663, a French official advised that ‘it is
[the king’s] intention that the officers, soldiers and all his other subjects treat
the Indians with kindness, justice and equity, without doing them any injury
or violence, and that no one encroach upon the lands that they occupy under
the pretext that they are better or more convenient to the French’ (quoted in
Naroll 1969: 65). It became increasingly evident as time went by that creoles
would win out against their imperial overlords, and the alignment of indi-
genous peoples with royalists in many parts of the continent during the wars
of independence was a doomed strategy. ‘The news that Britain had conceded
defeat and was leaving them to deal with the Americans on their own’, Neal
Salisbury (1996: 453) reports, ‘was met with disbelief and then concern and
resentment by Indians everywhere’. With the British went the 1763 Procla-
mation Line reserving for the Crown the right to alienate land between the
Appalachians and the Mississippi.
Because of the genetic mêlée surrounding the frontier, maintenance of strict
cultural and military distinctions required creoles to deny the extent of mis-
cegenation through a combination of ethnic cleansing, statistical manipula-
tion, promotion of European immigration and resolute self-denial. Much the
same was true of military culture, where a reality of genocidal attrition was
transformed by the deployment of uplifting narratives of the armed forces as
desarollista nation builders, blazing trails, building real and figurative bridges,
and generally making a world safe for settlement, or else as guardians of a
constitution that could often be preserved only in the breach (Nunn 1983;
Larrain 2006). Alternatively, as in the USA and Canada, traditions of high-
intensity expeditionary conflict or benevolent peace keeping and humanitar-
ian intervention could be substituted for the less attractive reality of petite
guerre (Grenier 2005).
Add to this a tradition of diplomacy in which force is never very far from
the negotiating table. The long history of pacts made under duress by all
parties and unashamedly broken by each at the first sign of opportunity
makes it easier to understand the seeming contradiction of prevalent sabre
rattling and infrequent warfare that has distinguished Latin America from
other regions over the last two centuries (Kacowicz 1998; Mares 2001); easier,
too, to understand how necessary it has been for states throughout the con-
tinent to engage in a Nietzschean forgetting of history and embrace quasi-
disciplines of International Law and International Relations that promise to
occlude their own formative experience. Were it not for this plugging-up of every
cultural orifice, it would have been impossible for creole self-images of
American liberalism, toleration, constitutionality, racial tolerance and love of
peace to have been maintained even as unattainable ideals. It is hardly to be
wondered that this episode of ideological flatulence should have ended with a
monumental historiographic fart, ripping through the hemisphere, as self-
defined First Nations have set about retrieving invented pasts for present
 The Americas during the long eighteenth century 137
purposes (Harris 1995). What is interesting, though hardly unsurprising, is
that it should have taken so long for International Relations, a field ostensibly
concerned to whisper truth to power, to detect the stench and realize its own
complicity.

Notes
1 The term creole is used throughout as an anglicized form of the Spanish ‘criollo’ to
denote people of predominantly European descent born in the western hemisphere.
2 The tenacity of the Jesuit missions provides a complement to the powerful
reminder provided by Janice Thomson, that the modern European state was not
without rival organizational forms even in its European heartland. See Thomson, J.E.
(1994) Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
7 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic
world, 1450–1850
Joel Quirk and David Richardson

Introduction
Cross-cultural exchanges have historically taken many different forms, yet
International Relations (IR) scholars have tended to focus narrowly upon a
specific subset of cases associated with the history and theory of European
imperialism and colonialism (e.g. Doyle 1986; Barkawi and Laffey 2002). The
priority attached to European imperialism has meant that the history of
cross-cultural exchange has been most commonly approached in terms of the
forcible imposition of European preferences and agendas, with European
actors taking advantage of their dominant ideological and material resources
in order to manipulate and coerce their weaker counterparts in other parts of
the globe (notwithstanding various manifestations of defensive negotiation and
contestation). While some historical examples undoubtedly fit within this
familiar template – especially from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries –
there are also no shortage of historical examples where this default presump-
tion of European dominance has proven misguided and misleading (Hobson
2004: 134–57; Darwin 2008: 93–97, 186–201). As other chapters in this volume
can further attest, patterns of cross-cultural exchange between Europeans and
peoples in other parts of the globe have been regularly defined by forms of
negotiation, limitation and adaptation, rather than unilateral European impo-
sition. In many settings Europeans found it difficult to consistently impose
their preferences upon their counterparts elsewhere, and were obliged to
develop alternative means of transferring items and ideas across cultural and
political divides. These cross-cultural exchanges were not always equally ben-
eficial to all of the parties involved, but they would not have taken place at all
if those involved had not expected to benefit in the first place.
This last point is crucial to understanding the history of European incursions
into (what became) Atlantic Africa in the early modern era. During the roughly
four centuries that preceded the ‘Scramble’ for Africa in the late nineteenth
century, European traders and officials of many nationalities developed long-
standing relationships with many of their coastal counterparts in Western Africa.
As we shall see, a large portion of these links were based upon slave trading,
especially from the mid-seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Cross-cultural
slave trading was not only defined by tremendous levels of suffering and
 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world 139
death – both in Africa and the Americas – but has also been widely identified
as a key contributing factor when it comes to continuing problems facing
many contemporary African states and their citizens. Under these circum-
stances, it is very tempting to explain African involvement in slave trading as
a (by)product of European coercion and manipulation, yet this formula ulti-
mately runs against the grain of a now significant body of research which
suggests that the slave trade was often not so much imposed as negotiated.
This chapter aims both to describe and explain some of the defining character-
istics of patterns of early modern cross-cultural exchange between Europeans and
Africans. In pursuit of this goal, we have divided the chapter into five sections. In
the first section, we briefly reflect upon the relative neglect of pre-colonial
Atlantic Africa within existing IR scholarship. The second section then goes
on to consider other approaches to our chosen topic within the social sciences more
broadly. Our main argument in these two sections is that many of the distinctive
features of pre-colonial exchanges in Atlantic Africa have regularly been
overlooked, either through a lack of interest or expertise, and/or as a consequence
of a widespread tendency to define the last five centuries in terms of a lasting
pattern of European domination and African dependency. In section three, we
review some of the main cultural, political and economic attributes of Atlantic
Africa in the early modern era. In addition to offering a brief introduction to the
region, this section explores the link between slavery and larger social formations.
In section four, we look at the early history of cross-cultural exchanges
between Europeans and Atlantic Africans. We pay particular attention to the
history of the Portuguese in Angola, which was the one area where a major colonial
footprint emerged before the nineteenth century. This history is important,
because it offers insights into the capacity of Europeans to impose their pre-
ferences upon their African counterparts. One of the key themes to emerge here
is the disjunction between the individual gains that accrued to both European and
African slave traders and the larger collective costs of slave trading for peoples
in Africa. Finally, we review a number of cross-cultural institutions and influences
that characterized European dealings in Atlantic Africa more broadly.
Transatlantic slavery would not have persisted for such a long period of time, or
reached so many parts of the Atlantic coast, without a series of cross-cultural
institutional arrangements that helped to standardize how trade took place, what
units of exchange were used, and how contracts and credits were enforced. As
we shall see, this regularly involved the repurposing of existing institutions
and expectations to a variety of new ends, with Europeans commonly adhering
to protocols and preferences established by their African counterparts.

Africa and IR
International Relations scholars have rarely given sustained or significant
attention to African experiences or perspectives, either historical or contemporary
(Smith 2009; Nkiwane 2001; Dunn and Shaw 2001). This situation can be
partly attributed to the longstanding Eurocentrism which has largely defined
140 Joel Quirk and David Richardson
historical research in IR circles, and partly attributed to the marginal status
generally accorded contemporary Africa within IR. The most influential the-
orists and analysts of the actions and outlooks of states in Africa have not
been IR scholars, but instead hail from other disciplines (e.g. Mamdani 1996;
Mbembe 2001; Bayart 2009; Young 1994; Comaroff and Comaroff 2007). To the
extent that Africa has been considered within IR circles, the focus has almost
entirely been on fairly recent developments, such as colonial rule and the
causes of decolonization (Crawford 2002; Philpott 2001; Jackson 1990) or more
recent post-colonial global and regional relationships (Taylor and Williams
2004; Taylor 2010; Cornelissen et al. 2011).
As a consequence of this contemporary focus, the pre-colonial period of
Euro-African exchanges has generally been treated as a ‘backstory’, which
receives (at most) cursory consideration before moving on to the main event:
colonialism and/or post-colonial politics. A good example of this dynamic is
Christopher Clapham’s influential book Africa and the International System
(1996: 28–30), which allocates three pages to Africa prior to the imposition of
the ‘colonial grid’, and then quickly moves on to more pressing colonial and
post-colonial concerns. On the rare occasions where historical developments
prior to the late nineteenth century do receive sustained consideration, such
as the work of Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui (1996), they nonetheless tend to be
coupled with the later history of conquest and colonization, which has the
indirect effect of framing the early modern as a benchmark, or precursor,
the main narrative purpose of which is to help better understand the causes,
characteristics and consequences of colonialism and its more recent legacies.
There have been, however, a number of occasions where Euro-African
relations have been touched upon within larger historical discussions. Inter-
national Relations scholars have long used historical analysis as a platform
for advancing various theoretical arguments and agendas (Quirk 2008). The
main focus here has been developments within Europe, with particular atten-
tion being paid to relations between Great Powers and transformations in the
foundations of political authority (e.g. Gilpin 1981; Teschke 2003). Develop-
ments outside Europe have sometimes featured in these larger historical dis-
cussions, but they tend to be parochially assessed in terms of their impact
upon ‘core’ European actions, outlooks and institutions (e.g. Philpott 2001;
Reus-Smit 1999; Krasner 1999). One prominent example of this larger dynamic
comes from Adam Watson (1992: 265), whose book on The Evolution of
International Society includes several chapters on European expansion, but
only briefly touches on Africa as part of a larger survey of how nineteenth-
century Europeans ‘brought the whole world for the first time into a single
net of economic and strategic relations’. A comparable lack of presence can
also be found in Barry Buzan and Richard Little’s International Systems in
World History (2000: 263), wherein Africa receives a handful of cursory
references, nearly all of which relate to nineteenth-century expansion.
One of the more sustained examinations of Euro–African relations comes
from Hedley Bull (1984b) in his chapter on ‘European States and African
 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world 141
Political Communities’, in The Expansion of International Society. Drawing a
sharp divide between pre- and post-1880, this chapter offers a brief sketch of
the main political communities found in Africa during the early modern era,
followed by a similar overview of trading relationships and diplomatic
engagements. While Bull’s chapter pays much closer attention to the dis-
tinctive features of the early modern period than most, his analysis still suffers
from the Eurocentrism that has long plagued IR scholarship.
A good example of Bull’s (1984b: 111) perspective is found in the following
passage:

How far did European states and African political communities conduct
‘normal’ relations with one another before the latter were absorbed by the
former? In the long period of contact before the final scramble European
states displayed a considerable disposition to acknowledge that African
political communities had rights of independent existence. There cannot have
been anything ‘normal’ in the experience of European states, or compar-
able to their relationships within Christendom or Europe, about contacts
with societies that were pre-literate, pagan, and in some cases stateless.

When the final outcome – colonial conquest – is known, it is difficult to avoid

the temptation to treat everything that came prior to conflict as inevitably
leading to this European-dominated endpoint. Taken to its logical conclusion,
this approach essentially suggests that Europeans could have colonized Africa
earlier, but instead exercised ‘restraint’, or a ‘lack of interest’, thereby framing
the terms and timing of colonization in terms of inclination, rather than
capacity. This is reflected in Bull’s reference to a ‘disposition to acknowledge’,
which treats the question of the ‘independent existence’ of African rulers as
something that Europeans had within their discretionary power to grant. As
we shall see below, Europeans typically lacked the capacity to threaten the
independence of most of their counterparts in Africa during the early modern
period, so whether or not their independence was formally acknowledged was
not a key priority from an African perspective.
Bull also casts his analysis in terms of a series of binary oppositions –
Christian versus pagan, state versus political community or even ‘stateless’,
normal versus ‘cannot be anything normal’ – which ultimately cast the Afri-
can side of the ledger as a deviant exception. There are numerous problems
with this framing. One of the main issues is that Bull presumes that relations
between states ‘normally’ take place within the context of a shared religion,
culture and civilization, when the more common historical scenario instead
revolves around states and their agents interacting with regional or even
global counterparts who have different cultures, institutions, forms of political
legitimation and/or religion. The ‘Indian Ocean World’, of which eastern
Africa was part, offers a useful counterexample here, with longstanding net-
works spanning the Indian sub-continent, South-East Asia, Arabia and East
Africa operating in the absence of a shared ‘civilization’ (Chaudhuri 1985;
142 Joel Quirk and David Richardson
Frank 1998). Rulers in the Middle East, East Asia, Central Asia and many other
regions were also familiar with this dynamic, as they were routinely obliged to
engage with a multiplicity of political institutions and cultural forms (Darwin
2008; Cooper and Burbank 2011; Göl, this volume). Framed in these terms,
Euro–African relations can be viewed as a representative example of a much
larger pattern, rather than an exception to the ‘norm’ of Europe/Christendom.
Like their counterparts elsewhere on the globe, European and Africans
developed a variety of institutions and arrangements that helped to facilitate
and standardize long-term exchanges across cultural and political lines.
While violence was by no means absent from the equation (and when is it?), the
absence of a shared culture or civilization did not prove a fundamental impe-
diment during the roughly four centuries of contact that preceded the
Scramble for Africa. As we shall see, overlapping economic interests amongst
various Africans and Europeans contributed to the emergence of a limited, but
still identifiable international order, or more precisely, a series of overlapping
international orders; however, these orders were mostly confined to protocols
and mechanisms for regulating and regularizing cross-cultural trade.

Europeans and Africans: from chains to bonds?

In the absence of a significant IR literature on our chosen topic, it is neces-
sary to expand our horizons to the social sciences more broadly. It is here that
it becomes necessary to engage with an influential strand of thought which
links numerous contemporary problems in Africa to a long-term historical
pattern of dependency, exploitation and underdevelopment. From this stand-
point, there is not necessarily a substantive difference between the pre-colonial,
colonial and post-colonial periods, since European domination and exploitation
has been a constant and enduring feature of Euro–African relations through-
out. Three main claims tend to be associated with this strand of thought.
First, we have the idea that many problems facing Africa can be primarily
attributed to the adverse impact of external actors and influences, most
notably European and later Western imperialism and colonialism. Second, we
have the idea that these external actors have exercised dominance over African
affairs for an extended time period, thereby establishing an underlying con-
tinuity of negative influence that binds together centuries of history under a
common rubric of dependency. This negative influence is most commonly
understood in terms of political manipulation and economic exploitation, but
some accounts also include a cultural component, with ‘corrupted’ or
‘immoral’ behaviours within Africa being traced to European intrusions.
Finally, we have the idea that this continuous process of external exploitation
has produced various forms of unjust enrichment, which helps to explain why
Europe (or the West in general) has become rich while Africa remains (or has
become) poor.
Our particular concern in this section is to assess the extent to which pre-
colonial history – or at least the pre-colonial history of transatlantic slavery in
 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world 143
Atlantic Africa – can be comfortably situated within this model of dependency.
This question extends to both transatlantic as a specific period, and to the
place of transatlantic slavery within a larger history genealogy. In the case of
the former, historians such as Walter Rodney (1972) and Joseph Inikori (1977,
2002) have argued that Europeans dominated and duped their African coun-
terparts during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, thereby enriching
themselves at the cost of African lives and African development. More gen-
erally, slave trading has been further depicted as the first phase in an enduring
pattern of exploitation and marginalization that has extended through colonial
rule to the later neo-imperialism that followed decolonization (e.g. Howard-
Hassmann 2008; Nunn 2007, 2010; Diène 2001). Transatlantic slavery occu-
pies a pivotal role within this larger historical genealogy, as it establishes an
extended timeline which suggests that African dependency began centuries
prior to colonization. The vast majority of Africa – Atlantic or otherwise – was not
colonized by Europeans until the late nineteenth century. Adding transatlantic
slavery pushes dependency back as far as the mid-fifteenth century.
The fundamental problem with this historical genealogy is that it places too
much emphasis on continuity and not enough emphasis on change. Important
differences between the early modern period and subsequent events have
consequentially been overlooked or sidestepped. However much slave trading
raises difficult moral and political issues, this does not negate the basic point
that buying slaves should not ‘be equated (in terms of power) with ruling the
country where they were bought’ (Austen 2008: 1004). As we shall see, Eur-
opeans generally found it difficult to dictate terms easily or consistently to
their Atlantic African counterparts prior to the mid-nineteenth century, so
their relationships with their Africa counterparts displayed a number of dif-
ferent attributes to the comparatively more one-sided affairs commonly asso-
ciated with the Scramble of the 1880s and beyond. These differences have
frequently been overlooked due to a recurring tendency to project European
dominance backwards through time. Additionally, the presumption of 500
years of constant European dominance tends to have the effect of minimizing
African agency and autonomy by relegating Africans to the role of pawns and
passive victims at the hands of more dynamic and sophisticated Europeans.
This image can make it difficult to imagine futures and relationships that take
place outside the context of Western domination, since external domination is
presumed to be an historical constant, rather than a relatively recent and
historically exceptional development.
Our favoured approach adheres to a now substantial literature (e.g. Northrup
2008: 55; Morgan 2009: 225).1 In the African context, one key early example
comes from Philip Curtin (1964: 8–9), who argued that:

relations between African political authorities and Europeans trading on the

Coast were generally those of equal partners in a commercial transaction …
political sovereignty was seldom raised in the technical sense of European
usage. There were some trading forts on shore, but the relative power of
144 Joel Quirk and David Richardson
the European traders and the African states was roughly in balance. A
trading fort did not necessarily imply a sphere of European influence over
its hinterland. In most places, the forts were allowed by Africans as a
mutual convenience for African and European merchants alike.

This image also resonates with the findings of other chapters in this volume,
which demonstrate that the early modern rulers in places such as China,
Japan, Turkey and India also interacted with European interlocutors from a
position of superiority or equality.
Nothing in the proceeding remarks should be taken as diminishing or
excusing the catastrophic levels of death and suffering associated with slavery
within Atlantic Africa, during the Atlantic crossing, or within the Americas
(Quirk 2009: 36–38, 56–58). Our goal here is not to minimize the horrors
of enslavement, but instead to help understand how and why transatlantic
slave trading reached such unprecedented dimensions and lasted for such a
protracted historical period. Like numerous other historical atrocities and sys-
tematic abuses, transatlantic slavery was justified and sustained by a combi-
nation of overlapping and competing interests, calculations and ideologies. In
order better to understand the underlying logics and associated tensions that
were at work on this occasion, we need to view the early modern period as
separate and distinct from later periods, rather than projecting more recent
experiences and expectations backwards upon the past. To this end, the
remainder of this chapter focuses on the nature of early modern Euro–African
relations in the context of transatlantic slavery.

Atlantic Africa and slavery

At this juncture, it is important to clarify briefly what we mean by Atlantic
Africa in the context of this chapter. As a geographical referent, Atlantic Africa
refers to coastal regions and associated hinterlands that were integrated into
the Atlantic world at various points from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
onwards (Bailyn 2005; Falola and Roberts 2008). Accordingly, Atlantic
Africa can be said to begin with Senegambia in the north and conclude with
Benguela in southern Angola. As such, it comprises two regions more com-
monly known as West Africa and West Central Africa, which are usually
separated from one another using Cape Lopez as a marker.
Since slavery became central to patterns of cross-cultural exchange, these
boundaries were chiefly determined by which areas consistently participated
in maritime slave trading. Deep-water vessels did not play a major role in
Atlantic Africa prior to European incursions, so the arrival of ships capable
of navigating the Atlantic Ocean initiated all kinds of political, cultural and
economic adjustments (Morgan 2009: 223–24; Northrup 2008: 10–16). While
direct European penetration into most parts of Atlantic Africa rarely went
much beyond coastal sites, European traders had a further indirect impact
upon hinterlands from which slaves, gold, ivory, hides, pepper, tropical gums,
 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world 145
dye woods, palm oil and other goods were sourced in the interior and trans-
ported to the coast (Hopkins 1973: 87–112; Eltis and Jennings 1988; da Silva
2011: 202–11, 247–70). Hinterlands were not static, but dynamic, and were
therefore subject to complex – but frequently difficult to quantify – forms of
expansion and contraction (Harms 1981: 24–30; Miller 1988: 140–53; Haw-
thorn 2010: 61–65, 67–81; Vansina 1990: 200–18; Candido 2006; Nwokeji
2010: 9–10, 45–51, 60–64).
Based upon the evidence currently available, it is clear that Atlantic Africa was
far from being a cohesive or homogenous region when seen from the per-
spective of its diverse inhabitants. According to historian John Thornton (1999:
15), it is possible to ‘name and locate at least 150 sovereign polities’ within
Atlantic Africa around 1600. The incomplete nature of available information
means that this figure is probably an underestimate. Some of these ‘sover-
eign polities’, such as Kongo, Oyo, or Dahomey, covered comparatively large
territories and had substantial populations, but it is estimated that ‘probably
half of the people in Atlantic Africa lived in polities that measured around 50
kilometers across and had only a few thousand inhabitants’ (Thornton 1999: 15).
This profile has been reflected in discussion of differences between centralized
and decentralized governance, and the attendant consequences of these dif-
ferences upon patterns of slave trading (Klein 2001: 49–65; Miller 1976: 1–11,
266–79; Inikori 2003: 176–91; Nwokeji 2010: 11–19).
Unsurprisingly, relationships between various rulers and communities could
take different forms at different times, with trading relationships, tributary
arrangements and political alliances either alternating or overlapping with
organized violence, ranging from occasional raids to protracted wars. Since
direct European penetration was limited, relationships between regional
neighbours within Africa were typically far more important than relations
with Europeans. Instead of Europeans occupying a paramount position, the
most common dynamic involved situations in which European inputs influenced
the way in which relations between neighbours transpired.
This pattern has some resonance with a now-familiar distinction within IR
circles regarding the difference between an international system and an inter-
national society, with European involvement in Africa during this period
having been most commonly framed in terms of the latter. While it is true
that cross-cultural socialization was generally fairly limited during this period
(see below), the language of an international system is not necessarily ideal
here, since what was primarily at issue was the development of institutions
and agreements for regulating and facilitating the movement of ideas and
items across cultural divides. An international system implies that both Eur-
opeans and Africans were substantially integrated into an overarching system
which meant that their military and diplomatic calculations were principally
defined in terms of other actors in the system. Outside Portuguese Angola,
the direct military and diplomatic dimensions of Euro–African exchanges
were relatively muted, as African elites were far more concerned with their regional
rivals within the continent than Europeans, and Europeans were similarly
146 Joel Quirk and David Richardson
unconcerned with the prospect of military invasions or alliance formation
from Africa. The prototype for discussion of system versus society is the role
of the Ottoman Empire within Europe during the early modern period (Göl,
this volume), where the Ottoman presence was central to a cross-cultural
regional balance. Since Euro–African relations were organized along very
different lines, we think it is more useful to think in terms of cross-cultural
institutions and arrangements, rather than international systems or societies.2
Both geographic and demographic considerations also played a substantial
role in structuring patterns of settlement, trade, warfare and social organiza-
tion. While a full consideration of these issues cannot be attempted here, two
brief observations might be offered. First, on the question of geography and
ecology, it is important to underscore the general point that the regional dis-
tribution of navigable rivers, rainforests, savannahs, access to coastal trading
sites, weather conditions and disease environments all played an important
role in shaping relationships both amongst Africans and between Africans
and Europeans (Connah 2001: 108–79; Thornton 1999: 14–15). In keeping
with patterns in other parts of the globe, rivers proved particularly efficient
vehicles for trade, but in their absence overland travel frequently proved
challenging and time consuming, though not impossible. Horses were not
uncommon in parts of Atlantic Africa during the pre-colonial era, but their
overall impact was complicated by disease and inhospitable terrain in many
settings (Law 1980; Elbl 1991: 85–110). According to Jeffrey Herbst (2000:
35–57), these sorts of factors contributed to an environment where it proved
difficult to ‘broadcast’ power owing to the high costs associated with
expanding and maintaining territorial control over large domains.
Herbst’s (2000: 15–16, 37–39) work also provides the basis for a second
observation regarding the complementary role of demographic factors. Many
parts of Atlantic Africa had relatively low population densities compared to
much of China or Europe. This is widely held to have contributed to an
environment where land tended to be abundant while labour remained scarce
(although there are important exceptions to this pattern, such as parts of the
Bight of Biafra). Since land was frequently abundant and agricultural produc-
tion was relatively flexible (the absence of the plough meant that agriculture
required little investment in specific plots), communities faced with external
threats were not always obliged to defend valuable fixed infrastructure or
major urban centres, and could therefore more easily opt to migrate and
rebuild their lives at comparatively manageable costs. Consequently, control
over territory tended to be less important than control over people in many –
but by no means all – cases. Instead of primarily focusing on conquering fixed
territories, many elites regularly focused their efforts upon both controlling
and acquiring people.
Slavery frequently played a prominent role in these efforts. The history of slavery
in what became Atlantic Africa long predated European oceanic contact in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though there continue to be debates
about its geographical extent and density (Nwokeji 2011). While slavery as a
 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world 147
general institution has been reported at most times and places throughout
history, scholars have also documented many variations both within and
between slave systems. This was as true of Africa in general and Atlantic Africa
in particular, as of many other places. It is not possible to do these variations
justice here (see Quirk 2009: 23–33). For the purposes of this discussion it is
sufficient to make two further observations. First, while slave systems in
Atlantic Africa were often organized on quite different terms to the more
familiar plantation slavery of the colonial Americas, there were nonetheless
sufficient similarities in the proprietary claims associated with slave systems in
Africa to facilitate extensive cross-cultural slave trading. Second, slavery in
Atlantic Africa was especially valued for its capacity to incorporate – and
thereby effectively exploit – significant numbers of new members into political
communities which were chiefly organized in terms of social hierarchies, kinship
structures and ‘rights in persons’.
As a general rule, control over people rested upon complex forms of
dependency and patronage, with junior members within a community pro-
viding services, support and material goods for their superiors, while their
superiors in turn offered their qualified patronage and protection. Within this
hierarchy, problematic or uncooperative individuals could be disciplined in
various ways, including violent coercion, enslavement and sale. Concurrently,
raiding and trading for slaves frequently helped political and economic elites
to consolidate and expand their position within prevailing social hierarchies,
and also provided an avenue for more junior members to improve their
standing (Harms 1981: 31–39; Miller 1988: 40–62; Law 1991: 63–69).
One of the main ingredients of slavery in Atlantic Africa (and elsewhere)
during this period was natal alienation, which refers to the status of slaves as
‘kinless’ outsiders, whose lack of socially recognized kinship ties placed them
at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Being ‘socially dead’, slaves – or at least
recently acquired slaves – tended to be extremely vulnerable, and were con-
sequentially routinely exploited and abused (Miers and Kopytoff 1977; Pat-
terson 1982; Smallwood 2007: 59–64). Many enslaved Africans were not traded
to Europeans, but instead ended up in local, regional or trans-Saharan slave
markets. While labour exploitation was ubiquitous, slaves were also forced
into service as soldiers, sacrifices, functionaries, concubines and junior wives.
In many cases, female slaves and children were especially prized, with the
former being valued for both their productive and reproductive capacity, and
the latter being valued as being more amenable to socialization and control
(Campbell et al. 2007, 2009; Roberston and Klein 1988). As we shall see,
European incursions had a profound impact upon patterns of enslavement
both in Atlantic Africa and in the colonial Americas.

Early European incursions and the Portuguese in Angola

Despite reaching many parts of Western Africa before the discovery of the
‘New World’ in 1492, Europeans rarely succeeded in establishing colonial
148 Joel Quirk and David Richardson
settlements on the continent until after 1850. This pattern of interaction with
Atlantic Africa can be contrasted with concurrent developments in the
Americas. By 1550, Spanish and Portuguese invaders had established major
bridgeheads in the Americas, having conquered both the Aztec and Incan
Empires. By 1650, the Atlantic coastline of the Americas was familiar to
many Europeans, and the British, French and Dutch had also begun to
establish colonial footholds by that date. A century later, large portions of the
Americas were firmly under European rule, although native Americas con-
tinued to exercise significant amounts of agency and autonomy in some set-
tings (Jones, this volume). This pattern in the Americas can be contrasted
with settlements in Atlantic Africa in 1750, where Europeans remained con-
fined to a series of modest forts along the Atlantic littoral and a more sub-
stantial Portuguese settlement at Luanda. As we explore further below, most
settlements existed under local sufferance and their primary goal was to
establish local rights to trade against European rivals, rather than to establish
territorial control. By the mid-nineteenth century, peoples of European origin
had mostly completed the colonization of the Americas, yet they knew relatively
little about much of the interior of Africa, despite centuries of trade.
Portuguese agents were the first Europeans to make contact with local
peoples along the Atlantic coast, and they represented the only European
state to establish a major African colonial settlement before the early nineteenth
century. Commercial motives played a central role from the outset, with gold,
ivory and slaves being prominent as trade goods, yet the Portuguese were also
keen to acquire new territories, recruit allies and convert Africans to Chris-
tianity (da Silva 2011: 231–70; Boogaart 1992: 369–85). Starting with the
Canary Islands in the early fourteenth century, Portuguese vessels moved
south along the coast, reaching Sierra Leone in 1460, colonizing the unin-
habited Cape Verde islands during the 1460s, and established forts along the
Gold Coast (Elmina in 1482, Axim in 1515, and Shama in 1523), sugar-
producing colonies on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, and later a
major presence in what became known as Angola. Some of these initial
encounters were violent, with Portuguese sailors seeking to enslave local Afri-
cans, but these efforts provoked strong resistance, and the focus shifted from
raiding to trading, with thousands of slaves being taken to Portugal prior to
and even after the ‘discovery’ of the Americas (Thornton 2007: 138–44).
In addition, the Portuguese both sent and received a significant number of
diplomatic envoys. From the 1480s onwards, a series of envoys from Atlantic
Africa travelled to Portugal: ‘The first, in 1484, came from the kingdom of
Kongo on the lower Congo River. The king of Benin sent an embassy to
Portugal in 1486. Delegations from the Jolof kingdom on the lower Senegal
river came to Portugal in 1487 and 1488 … [There was a] new Kongolese
embassy in 1488–90’ (Northrup 2008: 5). These diplomatic exchanges had
both a political and religious component, with the Portuguese making efforts
to convert elites from Africa to their faith. Significantly, a number of rulers
and other elites were baptized during these early encounters. These
 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world 149
conversions were influenced by efforts to secure military and supernatural
support. In the decades following initial contact, small numbers of Portuguese
troops fought alongside local allies in Senegal, Benin, Sierra Leone and
Kongo, but it was only in the final example that a major and sustained pre-
sence emerged, since in most cases both diplomacy and conversion had a
limited long-term impact.
During this period, the rulers of Kongo are estimated to have governed
‘something in the order of 100,000 [square] kilometers with as many as
350,000 people paying taxes and accepting justice from the kings at Mbanza
Kongo’, the capital city (Heywood and Thornton 2007: 53). Contact between
Kongo and Portugal began in 1483, with the arrival of a small fleet led by
Diogo Cão, which prompted a series of exchanges that saw a steady stream of
envoys travel to Portugal (and later Rome), while Portuguese agents in turn
established themselves in Kongo. Starting in 1491, successive rulers of Kongo
were baptized into the Catholic faith, with the long reign of Afonso I
Mvemba a Nzinga (1509–42) proving particularly consequential in establish-
ing churches and schools, and also paving the way for missionaries and other
settlers. The uptake of Portuguese ideas and influences tended to be most
pronounced amongst elites and within urban centres, but even within elite
circles local traditions often retained legitimacy and support, making it
necessary to think in terms of both varying degrees and varying combinations
of local and European influences.
For Linda Heywood and John Thornton (2007: 67), these exchanges resulted
in the emergence of ‘Atlantic Creoles’, a new cultural form that was:

best represented by the profession of Christianity but also by knowledge

of European languages (and some literacy) and political ideas, adopting
mixed European and African names … the adaptation of imported cloth
and clothing items from both Europe and West Africa, some mixing of
musical styles, and the absorption of American food groups and preparation
techniques.

While there is no question that these cross-cultural exchanges resulted in the

emergence of novel identities and social formations, the precise terms on
which they should be conceptualized continues to be debated. One of the
issues at stake is the extent to which classifying those involved as African
‘Christians’ unduly privileges European referents, and thereby overlooks the
centrality of local forms of community and cosmology. Particularly significant
in this context is the work of James Sweet (2003: 113), who maintains that:

Christianity and indigenous Kongolese religion operated in parallel fash-

ion, with the broader Central African cosmology still being the dominant
religious paradigm for most Kongolese … [who were] likely using Chris-
tian symbols to represent their own deities, and they continued to worship
them as they always had.
150 Joel Quirk and David Richardson
This is not to say that religious convictions were not always genuine, but it
also appears that the terms on which Christian doctrines were conceptualized and
operationalized owed a large debt to local models. It is likely that Europeans
frequently saw more of themselves in Africans than was actually the case.
It is also clear these new cultural influences were mediated by larger poli-
tical and economic considerations, both in terms of relations between the
Portuguese and the Kongolese, and between Kongolese elites and their sub-
jects and neighbours. Slave trading proved to be especially important in this
context, since gold and spices found in other parts of Atlantic Africa were not
locally available in Angola. Initial demand for Angolan slaves chiefly came
from São Tomé, but this market was overshadowed by the emergence of a
rapidly growing Brazilian market by the mid-sixteenth century. From the
outset, warfare and slave trading were inextricably linked, with Portuguese
soldiers fighting on the side of Kongolese armies, and sometimes taking part of
their payment in slaves. Raids and wars against neighbours also accelerated –
sometimes with Portuguese involvement – to help meet the growing export
demand. This marked the beginning of a far-reaching transformation, as
demand for slaves provided a catalyst for increasingly organized violence.
Kongolese rulers at first exercised a high level of control over this trade, both in
terms of regulation and revenue raising, but over the course of the sixteenth
century events gradually began to escape their control, with private traders,
invaders and regional rivals all intruding upon the status quo. This created a
volatile environment which the Portuguese were eventually able to exploit to
their advantage using a complex series of alliances and collaborations.
Portuguese agents first moved towards establishing a colonial settlement at
Luanda in the 1570s, nearly a century after Diogo’s initial arrival. This move
can be traced to a combination of different factors. During the late 1560s,
much of Kongo – including the capital – was overrun from the east by
Imbangala invaders, whose forces were only finally repelled with the help of
600 Portuguese soldiers dispatched from Lisbon. This exposed the weakness
of Kongo and its reliance on Portuguese support, while also revealing the
potential vulnerability of Portuguese traders and settlers in the region (Bir-
mingham 1966: 42–48). Following the invasion, the aggressively minded Por-
tuguese King Sebastião granted a Royal Charter to Paulo Dias de Novais. In
1571, Novais was accorded extensive economic privileges in exchange for an
ambitious effort to ‘subjugate and conquer the Kingdom of Angola’ and
establish a new colony (Heywood and Thornton 2007: 82).
Drawing upon his previous experience in the region, Novais launched his
colonial venture at Luanda, which was to the south of Kongo. Between 1575
and 1592 some 2,340 Portuguese arrived in Luanda, but sickness and warfare
meant that only around 300 still survived in 1594 (Curto 2004: 56). As a
consequence, the viability of the new colony – which was subsequently taken
over by the Crown following Novais’s death – was heavily reliant upon the
capacity of the Portuguese to build alliances with local sobas and other groups
such as the Imbangala (Miller 1976: 176–223).
 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world 151
Despite suffering defeat at the hands of the Ndongo and Matamba in 1590,
the Portuguese were able to retreat, regroup and eventually secure new allies.
Thus, with Luanda serving as their primary base on the continent, the Por-
tuguese expanded both their direct territorial rule and their larger sphere of
political and economic influence over the course of the sixteenth century and
beyond. There were a significant number of hurdles and reversals along the
way, including a disastrous invasion of Kongo in 1622–23 as well as the
occupation of Luanda by the Dutch (then allied with Kongo) between 1641
and 1648, but these ultimately proved to be temporary setbacks that did not
prevent the long-term consolidation of Portuguese control and influence. The
process was facilitated by internal fragmentation in Kongo, Ndongo and
other regional powers, and took place in the context of constant, multi-sided
warfare. In time, the Portuguese were able to establish settlements and forts in
many parts of the interior and at other coastal sites such as Benguela (Miller
1988: 230–31; Miller 1976: 196; da Silva 2011: 188–90). At no stage, however,
were the Portuguese able to do away with their often autonomous local allies
and instead exercise dominance on their own.
The political economy of Atlantic slavery introduced a series of incentives
which played a key role in enabling the Portuguese to recruit allies in Africa.
The slave trade could not have taken place without sustained levels of African
participation/collaboration as trading partners and/or military allies. In the
case of Angola, large numbers of slaves were acquired through wars and raids
that were routinely initiated by the Portuguese, yet were either chiefly or
exclusively fought by their African allies (Miller 1988: 196–97). Both Eur-
opean credit and complex combinations of local and European currencies
helped to facilitate trading from the interior to the coast.
Both the terms of these exchanges and the composition of Atlantic trading
networks are considered in more detail in the following section. As we shall
see, there were a number of areas where cross-cultural exchanges in Angola
displayed features similar to exchanges elsewhere in Atlantic Africa. The
main characteristic that distinguishes Angola from other African regions is
the extent to which the Portuguese penetrated the interior, rather than being
reliant upon coastal enclaves or shipboard trade to sustain their activities. The
extent of this penetration resulted in a distinctive form of international order
which reconfigured established regional models in relation to patterns of
warfare and trade, complex forms of cultural diffusion, and the emergence of
a substantial long-term Euro–African community which synthesized African
and European influences. It would be misleading, however, to approach this
international order as an expression of Portuguese dominance. Their unusual
success first in Kongo and later in Luanda was far from inevitable, but instead
emerged from a contingent and opportunistic process in which the Portuguese
only secured the upper hand centuries after first contact.
In order better to understand this historical trajectory, it is important to
recognize the role played by: a) personal interests and collective identities in
motivating behaviour; and b) the importance of short- and medium-term
152 Joel Quirk and David Richardson
calculations in shaping decision making. It is only by taking into account
these different perspectives – and recognizing distinctions between individual
gains and collective costs – that we can begin to make sense of the char-
acteristics and consequences of transatlantic slavery in Atlantic Africa. When
elites within the region decided to establish links with the Portuguese (or other
European agents), it was because they calculated that this would be to their
immediate personal advantage and/or that of their families and communities.
Not all of these calculations were subsequently borne out by events, but this
does not mean that they were unreasonable at the time they were made. While
slave raiding and trading invariably meant violence and death, for slave sup-
pliers this represented an acceptable cost, not a decisive consideration,
because the carnage associated with slavery was primarily directed towards
enemies and/or outsiders from other communities. The capacity of slave sup-
pliers to externalize (albeit sometimes only partially or temporarily) the social
costs of procuring slaves to sell to Europeans was fundamental to the political
economy of slaving in Africa.
In any discussion of this period, it is important to keep in mind that ‘the
terms “Africa” and “African” and the perception that the continent of Africa
(or at least the sub-Saharan portion of it) comprises a unified cultural and/or
“racial” unit are European in origin’ (Sidbury 2007: 6; see also Diouf 2003:
xiii–xv; Miller 2012: 79). Consequentially, the fact that enslavers and enslaved
shared a common African origin was almost entirely overshadowed by the
fact that they came from different communities and/or ethnic backgrounds.
While slave trading undoubtedly inflicted a heavy human cost on Africa,
these burdens were not distributed evenly. Socially constructed divisions
between insider and outsider were central to an underlying cost-benefit cal-
culus that encouraged slave trading. In this respect, ‘Atlantic Africa’, much
like ‘Africa’ in general, most strongly emerges as a cohesive region from the
perspective of European outsiders and Atlantic trade – or with the benefit of
hindsight – since African participants were more likely to use more localized
referents. There was not one integrated ‘Atlantic African’ international order,
but many overlapping international orders in a region defined by similar
cross-cultural understandings and mechanisms designed to regulate and
regularize trade.

Cross-cultural institutions and arrangements in Atlantic Africa

In this section we are particularly concerned with: a) African agency in
shaping the content and conduct of trade; and b) Euro-African institutions
and arrangements that facilitated movements across cultural and political
lines. While Europeans were unable to replicate the scale of the colonial set-
tlement established by the Portuguese in Angola, they were able to establish
long-term trading relationships in many parts of Atlantic Africa. As the scale
of European trade grew, slave trading acquired a dominant position in many
locations from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. As part
 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world 153
of this process previous trading networks associated with other commodities
such as gold and ivory were gradually superseded. By the second half of the
eighteenth century between 40,000 and 60,000 slaves were being embarked
annually via a regional network of ports (Eltis and Richardson 2008, 2010). It
was not uncommon for coastal rulers and traders to welcome ships from
more than one European country. On the Loango Coast, to take but one
example, Dutch, English and French slavers all plied their trade alongside
each other during the eighteenth century (Sommerdyk and da Silva 2010).
While not all nationalities traded on all parts of the coast, competition
amongst traders nonetheless played a recurring role in relation to prices,
bargaining and trade goods.
Local conventions, politics and preferences all tended to have a major
influence over how trade took place. On many parts of the coast, traders were
obliged to offer tributes and pay taxes to various elites, and/or to adhere to
various protocols, displays of social deference, or other rituals (da Silva 2011:
198–202). The precise content of these conventions usually reflected a com-
bination of geographic and political considerations. In the case of the former,
natural features such as harbours, lagoons and anchorages regularly influ-
enced how European vessels established contact and conducted their business.
In the case of the latter, local rulers often went to significant lengths to con-
fine European traders to designated locations and trading protocols. At some
ports, such as Cape Coast (Gold Coast), Anomabu (Gold Coast) and Ouidah
(Bight of Benin), there emerged small permanent settlements with European
and Euro-African resident populations who brokered trade. This can be con-
trasted with other ports such as Cape LaHou (Windward Coast), Bonny
(Bight of Biafra), Old Calabar (Bight of Biafra) and Loango, Cabinda and
Malemba (West Central Africa), where trade mostly depended on ship-to-
shore interaction, though temporary storehouses were sometimes erected on shore
(Galenson 1986: 22–23). During ship-to-shore trade Europeans were some-
times obliged to return to their ships to sleep while conducting trade, which
offers a compelling illustration of how their movements were circumscribed
and regulated by their African trading partners.
Most permanent settlements operated under varying degrees of local suf-
ferance. Some settlements involved separate fortifications, such as Cape Coast
and Elmina, but these fortifications had limited capacity to project power
inland. Their purpose was instead to guard against encroachment from other
European powers. ‘Despite a fortified presence on the coast stretching back
sixty-five years, a Dutch factor stated in 1702 that “no European nation can
feel safe on this coast unless the surrounding Natives are on its side’ (Eltis
2000: 147). Other settlements took the form of ‘forts’, ‘factories’, or ‘villages’
either within or adjacent to local coastal towns. One prominent example of
this pattern comes from Ouidah, where the French, English and Portu-
guese all established separate quarters and ‘great houses’ within the town
(which was 3 km inland, and thus not a ‘port’ in the conventional sense).3
Significantly:
154 Joel Quirk and David Richardson
there was never any question that the European establishments were in
the final analysis subject to local control, rather than representing inde-
pendent centres of European Power. This was explicitly addressed in the
policy of the Hueda kings of forbidding fighting amongst Europeans in
the kingdom, even when their nations were at war in Europe.
(Law 2004: 36)

While limited cultural exchanges (such as intermarriage and the presence of

African translators) helped to facilitate trade in particular cases, long-term
trade also routinely took place in the absence of shared cultural values. The
European presence was, in any case, usually fairly small. In the early 1700s, the
English fort at Ouidah was ‘manned by only 20 white men, with 100 “gro-
mettoes”, or African slaves’, within a town of perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 (rising
to perhaps between 6,000 and 8,000 by the late eighteenth century, when
Ouidah was ruled by Dahomey) (Law 2004: 39, 73). Despite this modest size,
Ouidah nonetheless functioned as a key site through which more than 1 million
slaves were embarked (Eltis and Richardson 2010: 90).
In a number of cases, slave trading was mostly conducted via trading networks
rather than via local rulers, who preferred instead to focus on taxes and tribute.
Over the course of the transatlantic slave trade many communities of traders
expanded within coastal settlements and/or associated hinterlands. These com-
munities most commonly served as intermediaries or middlemen between inland
suppliers of slaves and African coastal traders and/or European buyers. Traders
were sometimes bound together by a common identity or (fictive) kinship
(notwithstanding a degree of internal diversity), with social outsiders from different
backgrounds frequently being (at least initially) confined to subsidiary or
supporting roles. These kinship ties could play a major role in helping to facil-
itate long-distance trade in situations where authority was relatively decen-
tralized and/or localized. Communities of traders could be found at coastal sites,
such as Bonny, Old Calabar, Lagos and Ouidah, and also within the interior, such
as the Aro and the Duala in parts of the Bight of Biafra and the Bobangi in the
Congo basin (Latham 1973; Harms 1981; Austen and Derrick 1999; Law 2004:
71–122; Lovejoy and Richardson 2004: 363–92; Mann 2007; Nwokeji 2010).
The fortunes of all these communities were closely connected to the growth
of Atlantic trade, as the scale of their operations, populations and networks
expanded significantly in response to demand for slaves and other goods from
Europeans. Here, as elsewhere, slave trading represented a key vehicle for
increasing political power and economic wealth, both personal and commu-
nal. This was not simply a question of the political economy of wartime
enslavement, although this certainly remained a key issue through this period.
It was also a matter of communities that pre-dated European contact under-
going long-term transformations as a consequence of a political economy that
incentivized particular types of trading practices and relations.
These arrangements and institutions not only emerged within Africa, but also
extended to Euro–African relationships. An important ingredient in allowing
 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world 155
local wealth to grow was the trade credit that many African slave dealers
regularly and perhaps increasingly received from European traders (Lovejoy
and Richardson 1999, 2007; Law 1991: 217–19). While the specific content of
these credit arrangements took different forms at different times, the most
common model involved Europeans providing trade goods that would then be
transported into the interior and exchanged for slaves. Once sufficient slaves
had been procured, they were taken back to the coast on caravans or by boat
to be traded with Europeans, with the value of the goods that had been pro-
vided being factored into the exchange. This was effectively a system of
deferred payment, wherein Europeans advanced goods in the expectation of
being appropriately compensated later. These transactions rarely operated on
good faith alone, however, but were instead supported by mechanisms
designed to ensure repayment. Sometimes credit was underwritten by the
authority of a local ruler, as at Bonny in the Bight of Biafra, but the most
common method of underwriting credit was to rely on pawnship as a way of
providing financial collateral. Pawnship was a longstanding and widespread
African mechanism for securing credit which predated the transatlantic slave
trade to the Americas. While bonded, the pawn was expected to labour, but
their exertions would not count towards the repayment of the original debt
(Lovejoy and Falola 2003).
As adopted in trade with Europeans, pawnship typically involved indivi-
duals – often junior dependants – being placed with creditors as collateral for
trade goods. When they later returned with slaves from the interior, the pawns
were redeemed, but if the African traders failed to live up to their side of the
bargain the pawns became slaves. Disputes over contracts involving pawns
were not uncommon, and might be referred to local secret societies, such as
the Ekpe (or the Leopard) Society in the Bight of Biafra and the Poro Society
in Sierra Leone. Hierarchical in structure and male dominated, these also
counted contract enforcement among their functions (Latham 1973: 31–51;
Simmons 1956; Little 1965, 1966). Without cross-cultural mechanisms for the
provision of credit and contracts supported by enforcement mechanisms,
transatlantic slave trading might not have reached the level it did.
Some exchanges of goods for slaves in Africa were based on simple forms
of barter between buyer and seller. In most cases, however, the complexities of
trade negotiations and the varieties of commodities involved required more
sophisticated means of exchange. Consequentially, the vast majority of trans-
actions ultimately came to be negotiated in coastal currencies, such as the
‘bar’ (Gambia, the Windward Coast and Bonny, albeit with different values in
each location), ‘trade ounces’ (Gold Coast and Ouidah), ‘coppers’ (Old
Calabar), and ‘pieces’ or ‘cloths’ (Loango and Angola) (Richardson 1979:
318, 323; Johnson 1966; Northrup 1981: 157–64).
Coastal currencies provided a mutually intelligible framework for cross-
cultural trade, with both Europeans and African traders contributing to new
forms of standardized currencies that were a synthesis of different cultural
understandings and conventions. One of the most interesting goods to be
156 Joel Quirk and David Richardson
exchanged for slaves was cowry shells, which were imported via Europe into
West Africa from the Maldives. Africans may have first become familiar with
cowry shells through imports via East Africa or across the Sahara, but when
first the Portuguese and then later the Dutch and British discovered cowries
being used as currency in West Africa, they also began to import significant
quantities. These cowries had previously entered Europe as imports from the
Indian Ocean before being purchased by slave traders, most often in Amster-
dam, the Maldives and India. Cowries were first transported to Europe and
then re-exported to an expanding ‘cowry zone’ in Africa that centred pri-
marily on ports at the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin. Within this zone,
they featured prominently amongst trade goods exchanged for slaves, and
thereafter were transported inland in large quantities, where they served as
currency (Hogendorn and Johnson 1986).
In addition to adhering to local institutions and arrangements, European
traders also had to satisfy local preferences for imported trade goods. It has
sometimes been argued that Europeans duped Africans by offering poor-
quality goods, particularly in the case of firearms. While inferior goods and
duplicitous trading were not unknown, consumers in Africa were actually
fairly discerning, and their preferences had to be accommodated (Law 1994:
50–64; Thornton 1998: 7, 123–25; Eltis 2000: 137–63). This was reflected in
the ‘bundles’ or ‘assortments’ of goods that Europeans had to supply if they
wanted to compete in buying slaves (Richardson 1979: 66–70; Lovejoy 2000:
106–11). By the height of the transatlantic slave trade during the eighteenth
century, the terms of trade in Atlantic Africa had generally moved against
Europeans and in favour of African slave suppliers, yet Europeans continued
to participate despite the increased costs due to the value of slaves in the
Americas (Gemery et al. 1990: 157–77; Richardson 1991: 21–56).
In addition to currencies such as cowries, the principal goods that were
exchanged for slaves were textiles, alcohol, weapons, and other metal wares,
such as bar iron and copper basins (Alpern 1995). Bundles of trade goods
varied significantly not only between places but also over time. The textiles
used in trade bundles comprised a great variety of fabrics, and included East
India textiles re-exported to Africa via Europe. Indian printed and dyed
cotton textiles were in demand throughout much of Atlantic Africa, but came
to be prominent in Loango and Angola, with (re)imports from India securing
a significant market share by the second half of the eighteenth century. Indian
textiles were only one of a number of trade goods that originated from outside
Europe. In the case of alcohol, large quantities were also exported from
Brazil, with around 1,342,500 litres – the vast majority being cachaça –
imported to Luanda and Benguela between 1782 and 1830 (Curto 2004: 192).
Imported trade goods were widely disseminated in African markets, reflecting
a political economy of slavery that saw goods being dispersed amongst trad-
ing networks and communities. Atlantic imports occasionally displaced local
products, but the most common scenario involved Europeans supplying simi-
lar types of goods to those already available within local markets and interior
 Europeans, Africans and the Atlantic world 157
trading networks, so their impact was mostly a question of increasing con-
sumer choice in relation to volume and variety (see Martin 1972: 158–74;
Northrup 1981: 164–76; Latham 1973: 24–25; Lovejoy 2000: 276–89).
Both the conduct and content of patterns of cross-cultural slave trading
provide further evidence that trade was more often negotiated than imposed.
If traders and elites in Africa had not benefited, or at least not expected to
benefit, then long-term trade simply would not have taken place. Moreover,
when trade did occur, it was conducted on the basis of significant African
input. As we have seen, Europeans rarely penetrated the interior, but instead
found that their movements were limited and regulated, and as a consequence
their direct cultural influence was also relatively muted (although the impact
of goods exchanged for slaves may be another matter). Although there were
some occasions and contexts, particularly in maritime settings, where Eur-
opeans enjoyed advantages, the general picture that emerges is one where
African agency consistently played a central role. If Europeans had enjoyed a
decisive military or political advantage over their African counterparts on
land, then it is likely that things would have played out differently. Instead of
carrying slaves to the Americas, Europeans might have instead moved to
create colonies on the African mainland similar to parallel ventures in the
Americas (Eltis 2000: 139).

Concluding remarks
Europeans have inflicted many horrific abuses upon Africans and peoples of
African descent. These abuses cannot be reduced to isolated incidents or
‘aberrant’ policies or cases, but instead need to be understood in terms of far-
reaching patterns of systematic exploitation and discrimination, severe abuse,
and high levels of premature death. Furthermore, it is important to keep in
mind the additional consequences of European policies and practices based
upon ignorance and arrogance, such as the imposition of alien borders and
the (re-)invention of ‘ethnic’ categories under colonial rule. The legacies of
these abuses remain with us in numerous ways. By any reasonable standard,
Europeans have a great deal for which to apologize. This does not mean,
however, that all historical relations between Europeans and Africans can be
either defined or explained in terms of the dominance of the former over the
latter. As we have seen, cross-cultural relations between Europeans and Afri-
cans during the early modern period – at least as far as the slave trade in the
Atlantic world is concerned – were generally organized on quite different
terms to those of the more recent colonial and post-colonial periods.
The one major colony that did emerge – Angola – was built upon high
levels of local collaboration and cooperation, an unusual window of oppor-
tunity and long-term consolidation. Unlike the numerous colonies that were
rapidly established elsewhere in Africa during the late nineteenth century, the
Portuguese took over a century to establish a colonial foothold once contact
had been established, and their capacity to project their power far beyond the
158 Joel Quirk and David Richardson
coast subsequently proved to be a long-term, piecemeal process that remained
contingent on local alliances and collaborations. Moreover, Angola stands
out as a notable exception within regional patterns, which saw Europeans
otherwise largely confined to coastal enclaves.
When we look more broadly, it becomes clear that the conduct and content
of trade were based upon complex negotiations and adaptations, with Eur-
opeans often finding it necessary to adhere to local conventions and to supply
goods based on local preferences. Throughout this period, slave trading
represented a valuable means of economic and political advancement for
many traders and rulers in Atlantic Africa, Europe and the Americas. Their
overlapping interests contributed to the emergence of cross-cultural institu-
tions and arrangements that imperfectly regulated and regularized Atlantic
slave trading through the provision of credit, the enforcement of contracts, the
expansion of African trading communities, the standardization of cross-
cultural currencies and units of exchange, and the establishment of protocols
governing when and how trade would occur. While Europeans contributed to
the overlapping international orders that were created and sustained by these
arrangements, both their origin and operation frequently owed a debt to the
adaptation of pre-existing models in Africa. It is important to recognize,
moreover, that these institutional arrangements were not unique or excep-
tional, but can instead be better understood as a representative example of a
larger historical pattern of various kinds of long-term international order(s)
operating in the absence of a shared culture or civilization. These may not
amount to international societies, or even systems, but they nonetheless con-
stitute a neglected element of cross-cultural exchange prior to European
expansion in the nineteenth century (Quirk and Richardson 2009).

Notes
1 This does not mean, of course, that there is universal consensus. For alternative
perspectives, see Kaba 2001; Blackburn 2012: 85–87. Moreover, the long-term
consequences of transatlantic slavery for Atlantic Africa have generated consider-
able discussion, with opinion being divided along a spectrum that runs from minor
to major (Benjamin 2009: 366–71).
2 Europeans were also not the first external interlopers to encroach upon Western
Africa. Various incursions and influences – including the southward spread of Islam
from North Africa into Senegambia and other parts of West Africa – long pre-
dated European contact via the Atlantic and continued to strengthen as transatlantic
slavery grew. See Austen 2010; Lydon 2009: 49–106.
3 On the definition of ports, see Eltis et al. 1999: 17–24.
8 Conclusion
Eurocentrism, world history,
meta-narratives and the meeting of
international societies
Richard Little

The overall aim of this book has been to reassess conventional thinking in the
study of international relations about how contemporary international society
and world order has come into existence. It builds on an initial premise that
much of the thinking about world order and international society in the dis-
cipline is inherently Eurocentric and, as a consequence, it is argued, any
assessment of how the prevailing world order came into being, or how con-
temporary international society will evolve in the future explicitly or impli-
citly rest on a whole raft of ideas that can be shown to be profoundly
distorted or mistaken about many of the most fundamental features of inter-
national relations. On the face of it, this may appear to be an extraordinarily
bold, indeed rather rash, claim because the contributors are effectively chal-
lenging the orientation and theoretical posture of most thinkers in the field. It
is important to acknowledge, therefore, that this book is doing nothing more
radical than participate in a very broad movement that is emerging across the
social sciences. In other words, there is now a very widespread and growing
recognition that Eurocentrism has been endemic in all the social sciences and
there are, as a result, very significant debates across these social sciences
about the veracity and consequences of this claim. It obviously follows that it
would be very strange indeed if the accusation of Eurocentrism could not be
made in the field of International Relations. Nevertheless, it is, perhaps, more
than a little odd that more has not been made of this factor in the field given
the importance that is attached to the issue in other social sciences.1
If the charge of Eurocentrism is taken seriously, however, what has hap-
pened in other social sciences is that there has been a rapid upsurge of interest
in world history. It is widely acknowledged that to escape Eurocentrism it is
essential to expand the spatial and temporal reach of the social sciences. In
doing so, however, disciplinary boundaries are almost inevitably breached.
Moreover, to develop an adequate understanding of even a relatively recent
development, it becomes necessary to reach back into the past. One of the
best illustrations of this development is the response to the European miracle
thesis (Jones 1981). According to this longstanding thesis, still often regarded
as uncontroversial, the emergence and then dominance of Europe in the
global arena is explained by reference to a unique set of social and
160 Richard Little
environmental circumstances that were peculiar to the European continent.
The roots of this thesis extend back into the nineteenth century (and even
earlier), when the social sciences began to emerge as formal and distinct dis-
ciplines in the Western world. Unsurprisingly, given the timing, there was a
preoccupation with the concurrent and seemingly inexorable rise of Europe
and the USA at that time. As a consequence, many of the most important
and influential thinkers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
such as Karl Marx and Max Weber, developed very significant and sub-
stantial accounts of the emergence and evolution of modern Europe. These
accounts remain deeply embedded in the way that many social scientists
continue to think about the world. However, just as the rise of Europe had a
powerful effect on social scientists in the last two centuries, so the putative
decline of the West is having an equally important impact on the social sciences
in the twenty-first century. It is certainly one of the factors that has encour-
aged social scientists to challenge or reject the long-established Eurocentric
perspective on global development.
Goody (2010), a social anthropologist, for example, has argued for many
years that the image of Europe, rising above the rest of the globe, is an illu-
sion precipitated by the preoccupation with, and the privileging of, European
developments. By taking a world historical perspective that embraces what hap-
pened across Eurasia back in time to the Bronze Age, a quite different image
begins to emerge. What we then observe is a very long period of cross-cultural
exchange extending over Eurasia among a number of discrete developing areas,
with Europe entering the fray very late in the day. Using this perspective, it
becomes very obvious that other areas have risen to prominence in the past
and will no doubt do so again in the future. Because of the persistent inter-
action amongst these distinct centres of development, it is more appropriate
to identify a process of alternation, with one centre giving way to another,
rather than to see the currently dominant centre as in some way unique.
According to Goody (2010: 56), the potential to identify the continuity that
has existed since the Bronze Age across Eurasia from East to West, has been
‘disastrously fractured by a concentration on the European experience alone’.
Moving to a world historical perspective, however, is not necessarily suffi-
cient to escape from Eurocentrism. McNeill (1991) frankly admitted as much
when he reassessed The Rise of the West (1963), 25 years after his ground-
breaking world history was first written. The bias is apparent in the title,
which clearly reveals that McNeill’s account intends to privilege one parti-
cular area of the globe, as well as some of the terminology used to launch his
ambitious framework. This framework embraces four distinct civilizations
that are contrasted with the nomadic ‘barbarians’ that occupied much of the
territory separating these civilizations. The terminology, of course, does not
even allow for the possibility that there could be a distinctive nomadic civili-
zation, but this line of argument should not be used to diminish McNeill’s
very real achievement. As Hodgson (1993: 92), another distinguished world
historian insisted The Rise of the West was ‘the first genuine world history
 Conclusion 161
ever written’. Nevertheless, McNeill (1991: xvii) subsequently acknowledged
that he had inadvertently looked at history ‘from the point of view of the
winners’, and that he had been influenced unconsciously by the ‘imperial
mood’ that prevailed in the USA after the Second World War. Later, McNeill
(1993: xxiv) revised his original thesis and argued that far from the separate
civilizations being insulated from each other by ‘barbarian zones’, they were,
in practice, linked together by ‘communication nets’ and as he took this factor
into account he began to think in terms of a ‘world system’ rather than
separate civilizations. Indeed, McNeill (1998) came to insist that much more
attention needs to be given to trans-civilization links.
What a world historical perspective can promote, therefore, is a framework
that opens the way to the establishment of a grand or meta-narrative. It can
be argued that the distinctively different grand narratives developed by both
Marx and Weber derived from their world historical perspective. It is, of course,
also possible to agree with Linklater (2009: 3–4) that these meta-narratives
were ‘premature’ because they appeared in an era when knowledge of the
world beyond Europe was still very limited. However, according to Linklater,
there is now ‘a consensus’ across the social sciences that regards any attempt
to develop a meta-narrative as profoundly regressive. Indeed, so much so, that
he asserts that many social scientists now consider that they have ‘a special
responsibility to subvert any attempt to return to progressivist perspectives
that had such damaging consequences for non-European peoples in the age of the
European empires’. Drawing on Elias (1978, 1982), Linklater also insists that
such a position has the effect of negating what can be seen as the essential
task of studying ‘long-term processes of development stretching over millen-
nia that proceeded without any commitments to the notion of progress in
history’. There can be little doubt that the resurgence of interest in world
history in recent years is at least partially in reaction to the post-modern
suspicion, as exemplified in the work of Lyotard (1984), of any kind of meta-
narrative.
It is against this background that the current project needs to be assessed.
In essence, the various authors can be seen to be responding to what they take
to be the inadequacies of the grand narrative in international relations that
dominates thinking in international relations and is, arguably, most closely
associated with the English School. According to this grand narrative, to
understand the essential features of contemporary international relations, it is
necessary to focus on the evolution of international relations in Europe. It is
asserted that an international society of states emerged in Europe across the
course of the second millennium. For many years it was widely assumed that
this society came into existence over a long period of time, although it only
fully crystallized in the aftermath of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. More
recently, the precise point in time when it can be accepted that the modern
international society emerged has become increasingly contested. Some the-
orists push the date back in time, earlier than 1648, while others have pushed
the date beyond 1648, to as late as the start of the nineteenth century.
162 Richard Little
However, there is still across these contested views an assumption that the
contemporary international society finds its origins within a set of processes
that were generated inside Europe. There is an important gloss on this position,
at least amongst some English School scholars, who also acknowledge that
the European international society existed within the context of a much more
extensive international system, which eventually became worldwide before the
eventual establishment of a global international society. It is argued, in other
words, that states that operated in the global international system but that lay
beyond the boundaries of the European international society were eventually
brought into the European society which by the end of this process formed a
global international society. One of the earliest entrants was, for example,
Russia, although there are debates about when the entry took place or the
extent to which it ever became a fully fledged member of the European
international society (Neumann 2011). In any event, the key feature of the
meta-narrative is that states lying outside of Europe were eventually allowed
into the European club until, by the second half of the twentieth century, the
European international society extended across the globe. The framework of
this meta-narrative, therefore, extends over a millennium and it creates the
potential for researchers working within a limited timeframe to relate their
research to a much bigger scenario.
Given that this meta-narrative has been fundamentally critiqued in this
book, it is important to note that the first generation of English School the-
orists did not consider that the meta-narrative was in any way distinctive to
English School thinking. On the contrary, Bull (1984c: 123) views it instead
as the ‘standard European view’ and, more important, he insists that it man-
ifests obvious ‘absurdities’ such as the idea that states like China, Egypt, or
Persia, ‘which existed thousands of years before states came into being in
Europe, achieved rights to full independence only when they came to pass a test
devised by nineteenth-century Europeans’. Unsurprisingly, he acknowledges
that it is now ‘common to question this account’. On the face of it, therefore, there
are some grounds for thinking that Bull was at the very least moving towards
an acceptance of the critique of the ‘standard account’ as unacceptably
Eurocentric. Elsewhere, however, Bull and Watson (1984b: 2) indicate that it
is their aim to examine how Europe ‘dominated, and in so doing, unified the
world’; moreover, they go on to insist that ‘it is not our perspective, but the
historical record itself that can be called Eurocentric’. It does seem, therefore,
that whatever its ‘absurdities’ Bull and Watson continue, in essence, to sub-
scribe to the standard account of how the global international society came
into existence.
What I want to do in the first section of this chapter, however, is to chal-
lenge this assessment and suggest that a close reading of all the contributions
in Bull and Watson’s edited volume The Expansion of the International
Society generates a much more nuanced and complex meta-narrative than has
generally been recognized and certainly one that is more in tune with the
tenor of the chapters in this book than might at first sight seem likely. In the
 Conclusion 163
second section I will then assess to what extent the contributors to this book
either challenge or reinforce the assessments in Bull and Watson (1984a) of
how the contemporary global international society came into being.

Reassessing The Expansion of the International Society

Hedley Bull and Adam Watson were both chairs of the British Committee on
the Theory of International Politics, a self-selected group of academics and
practitioners who began meeting at the end of the 1950s with the aim of
developing a deeper understanding of international relations. More recently,
the committee has been associated with the establishment of the English
School (Linklater and Suganami 2006). From the start, the committee oper-
ated from a world historical perspective and its members were interested in
developing an approach that would allow them to compare the international
societies that have emerged across the course of world history. The desire to
turn this project into a book never materialized and instead the committee
decided to narrow its focus and produce an edited book that would trace the
evolution of the contemporary global international society. Dunne (1998: xiv)
sees the resulting book as the ‘culmination’ of the committee’s work and
Vigezzi (2005: 86) regards it as the committee’s ‘most organic and coherent
achievement’.2 It is a substantial book, running to over 400 pages, with 24
contributors. Many of these contributors are not in any way directly linked to
the English School and they certainly do not speak with a single voice.
Nevertheless, it is possible to extract from this text a very distinctive frame-
work that generates a complex but coherent meta-narrative that is dis-
tinctively different from the Eurocentric ‘standard account’ identified by Bull.
The Expansion of International Society is divided into four sections. The
first explores ‘European international society and the outside world’; the
second examines ‘The entry of non-European states into the international
society’; the third looks at ‘The challenge to Western Dominance’; and the
fourth investigates ‘The New International Society’. At first sight, it seems
unlikely, given this overarching structure and the specific focus on Europe and
the West, that it will be possible to break free from what looks on the surface
to be a Eurocentric strait-jacket. However, a closer examination quickly
demonstrates that there is more room for manoeuvre than is initially appar-
ent. In the introduction, for example, Bull and Watson (1984b: 8) identify that
an underlying issue for the book is the competing views of admission into the
international society, with the European great powers, on the one hand,
viewing admission in terms of entry into ‘an exclusive club with rigorous
qualifications for membership’, as opposed to the view taken later by many
Third World states that it was not a case of their admission but of ‘re-
admission to a general international society of states and peoples whose
independence had been wrongfully denied’.
In other words, Bull and Watson were fully aware of the argument that the
European international society had at some point distanced itself from a
164 Richard Little
broader international society of which the European states had previously been
members. A comprehensive reading of their text indicates that they broadly
support this assessment of how contemporary international society came into
existence – and why Bull repeatedly makes reference to the ‘absurdities’ of the
‘standard’ view propagated by the European Great Powers themselves.
Indeed, Bull and Watson (1984b: 1) make it very clear from the start that the
rules and institutions of the contemporary international society ‘have been shaped
by North and South Americans of European stock or assimilation and also
by Asians, Africans, and Oceanians, as well as by the European powers in
their period of dominance’. Of course, the general assumption is that the
Europeans laid down the foundations of the society and then others added to
and sometimes substantially modified these foundations later. Without doubt,
this is how Bull and Watson present the story at various points, but this gen-
eralized account does not fully accord with the more detailed narrative laid
down in the text.
Although the origins of the contemporary international society are only
sketched in very lightly by Bull and Watson, they are crystal clear that it is
necessary to start the narrative at a point in time before the European inter-
national society had come into existence. At that juncture, there existed a
number of regional international societies. The most important systems are
identified as Latin Christendom, the Arab-Islamic system, the Indian sub-
continent and its eastern extensions, the Mongol-Tartars on the Eurasian
steppes, and China. All these international systems emerged, it is argued, on
the basis of elaborate and long-standing civilizations. Elsewhere, in the Americas,
sub-Saharan Africa and Australasia, there were less developed cultures and a
geographical awareness that did not extend very far. From this perspective,
then, only Eurasia was home to a number of separate and distinctive regional
international systems.
The societies were also very enduring. By the end of eighteenth century,
although Latin Christendom had been transformed into Europe and the
Mongol-Tartars could no longer maintain their own independent interna-
tional system, Gillard (1984: 87) argues that it is still possible to identify four
main systems of Eurasian states: Chinese, European, Islamic and Indian. He
acknowledges that the three Asian systems need to be distinguished from the
European system, but he insists that they share two main characteristics: first,
the members of the system ‘were primarily concerned with one another and
saw outside threats mainly in terms of how they could affect the internal balance
of power; and second, despite the fact that their ‘mutual hostility was often
greater than their hostility to outside powers’, most of the members of the
system had a sense of being ‘part of a common civilization superior to that of
the other systems’. Nevertheless, by the end of the following century, all three
Asian systems had collapsed and the member states had been co-opted into
the emerging global international society.
From this perspective, the nineteenth century becomes a very crucial phase
in the meta-narrative of how the contemporary international society emerged
 Conclusion 165
(cf. Buzan and Lawson 2012a), and it is certainly the case that the Bull and
Watson text pays most attention to the later phases in the formation of the
global international society. It is still possible, however, to identify a much
longer narrative. Prior to the nineteenth century, as indicated, there were a
number of regional international systems co-existing in Eurasia, although
Bull and Watson are very clear that Europe needs to be distinguished from
the other systems, not only because it was a very late developer, but also
because it evolved along a very distinctive track. The other Eurasian interna-
tional systems in the early phase are all identified, using Wight’s terminology,
as suzerain state systems.3 According to Wight (1977: 23), a suzerain state is
made up of a group of states that are in more or less permanent contact, ‘but
one among them asserts unique claims which the other formally or tacitly
accept’. Throughout Europe’s history as a regional international system, there
were recurrent attempts by various states to establish suzerain status, but none
was ever successful. This phenomenon is traditionally attributed to the emer-
gence of the balance of power as a distinctive international institution, but it has
never been convincingly explained why such an institution only successfully
emerged in Europe.4 Despite the fact that this is a crucial element in the
narrative, it is not addressed in Bull and Watson. Instead, the focus is primarily
on Europe’s relations with the rest of the world.
Bull and Watson (1984b: 6) are very clear that to develop a coherent nar-
rative it is necessary to adopt a global perspective from the start because they
insist that the European international society did not ‘evolve its own rules and
institutions and then export them to the rest of the world’. Instead, the Eur-
opean international society is seen to be the product of two ‘simultaneous
processes, which influenced and affected each other’. One process involved
developments within Europe itself and the other involved Europe’s interac-
tions with actors outside of Europe. So, for example, Gong (1984b: 172) notes
that as relations between China and Europe intensified in the nineteenth
century, there was a clash between ‘fundamentally irreconcilable standards of
“civilization”’, but because both sets of standards were dynamic, the Sino–
European interaction in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth
century, ‘changed both the Chinese and European standards of “civiliza-
tion”’. Gong argues, for instance, that the Chinese standard of civilization,
especially in the areas of trade, diplomacy and legal relations, began to con-
verge with the European standard of civilization, while, on the other hand,
the European standard of civilization, which had in the past only been ‘codi-
fied in treaties with non-European countries’, now began to emerge ‘in
increasingly explicit terms’. As Brownlie (1984: 358) also notes, prior to the
nineteenth century the Europeans had not yet ‘clearly formulated a test of
“civilization”’. However, overall, it has to be said that there is relatively little
detailed discussion in Bull and Watson of how the process of internal devel-
opment within the European international society meshed with the external
interaction process with the outside world. It has been left to subsequent
analysts to look at the way these two processes mesh in more detail. For
166 Richard Little
example, Anghie (2004) has looked very closely at the process of interaction
to show how the development of the contemporary concept of sovereignty
based on recognition was very much the product of nineteenth-century European
colonialism (see also Branch 2012). Nevertheless, it remains the case that the
basic idea that the development of the European international society was
significantly affected by its external interactions is very much foreshadowed in
Bull and Watson.
By the same token, however, it is also true that the overarching framework
used in Bull and Watson to link Europe with the global arena is again only
very lightly sketched. Here, the starting point is that Europe begins the pro-
cess of ‘expansion’ some considerable time before the idea of a European
international society comes into existence. They argue that the development
started in the late fifteenth century, although a case can be made that the
process began at the start of that century, in 1415, when the Portuguese seized
the Moroccan city of Ceuta. However, as Bartlett (1994) shows, Latin Chris-
tendom virtually doubled in size between 930 and 1350 as the consequence of
constant colonization and so the European Christians who sailed to Asia,
Africa and the Americas in later centuries had already had a great deal of
experience in colonization and cultural conquest. From this perspective,
overseas colonization was simply an extension of the internal colonization
that had been going on for centuries. Watson (1984a: 13–14) pursues this line
of argument, noting how Christendom expanded in three directions: first,
outwards from the north and into the non-Christian areas south and east of
the Baltic; second, to areas south and east of the Mediterranean that were
occupied by non-Latin Christians; and finally to the south-west and areas like
Spain and Sicily that had been taken over by the Muslims. However, Watson
also insists that this third area of expansion proved crucial because ‘it did not
stop at the water’s edge, but continued overseas to become the great maritime
expansion’.
Yet, paradoxically, colonization is not an issue that is treated in any depth
in Bull and Watson. Nor is there any attempt to explore the role that the
colonies played in the development of the European international society.
There is no acknowledgement that from the very beginning, the dominant
units in the nascent European international society were empires, engaged in
a process of internal colonization. As a consequence, there is no discussion of
how the formation of empires played a crucial role in the transformation of
the hierarchically structured Christendom through to the anarchically struc-
tured international society (Larkins 2010). This oversight, however, is not
particularly surprising because it is simply a reflection of the hegemonic
dominance of the ‘Westphalian myth’ that prevailed at that time, not only in
the study of international relations, but across the social sciences and huma-
nities. As Armitage (2000: 14) notes, ‘the rise of nationalist historiography in
the nineteenth century had placed the history of the nation-state at the centre
of European historical enquiry and distinguished the state from the territorial
empires that preceded it, and in turn from the extra-European empires strung
 Conclusion 167
across the globe’. Yet there is a vital link between empires and states that has
simply not been observed in International Relations. By contrast, more
recently, Armitage (2000: 15) argues that empires ‘gave birth to states and
states stood at the heart of empires. Accordingly the most precocious nation-
states of early-modern Europe were the great empire-states: the Spanish
monarchy, Portugal, the Dutch Republic, France and England (later Britain).’
Yet, because nation-states and empires are conventionally treated as opposing
political structures, the role of empires in the development of the European
international society of states has been either ignored or left perennially
ambiguous, in truth, in most fields of study. Even so, the failure in Bull and
Watson to interrogate more closely the relationship between states and
empires remains a little odd, because Heeren’s History of the Political System
of Europe and its Colonies, written at the start of the nineteenth century,
places the colonies at the heart of the story and this was a book that both Bull
and Watson greatly admired (Little 2008).
Although there is a failure to interrogate the role of empires in the evolu-
tion of the European international society in Bull and Watson, colonization is
not, of course, ignored. On the contrary, it is a significant thread running
through the entire narrative. Donelan (1984: 79–81) notes the importance of
the papal bulls issued from the middle of the fifteenth century, to legitimize
and support the Portuguese advance down the west coast of Africa, through
to the bull Inter Caetera issued in 1493 that granted Spain the right to con-
quer the territory discovered by Columbus the previous year. The precise
reason for issuing this bull is disputed but Donelan argues that probably its
main purpose was to establish a line of demarcation that would help to keep
the peace between Portugal and Spain. According to Watson (1984a: 17), the
decision was an extension of ‘medieval practice of papally authorized cru-
sades by which the re-conquest of Iberia had been greatly assisted’. This papal
act indicates, moreover, that there was still a presupposition that Christendom
was hierarchically structured at this time. However, the fact that the details of
the demarcation were worked out by Spain and Portugal through bilateral
diplomacy, and were ratified in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, also indicate
that the fundamental structure of Christendom was beginning to change and
give way to what was only identified from the nineteenth century as a society
of states (Anghie 2004: Chapter 2). The treaty, however, did not presage a
peaceful pursuit of colonies in the subsequent centuries, although Watson
(1984a: 30–31) does note that the colonization that took place at the end of
the nineteenth century did largely proceed on a consensual basis and that this
‘consensus achieved by the Europeans over the partition of Africa takes us
back to the orderly spheres of expansion agreed between Spain and Portugal,
with the Concert of Europe playing the part played by the Pope’. He also
observes that at this time, the propagation of Christian civilization acquired a
renewed prominence’, while simultaneously ‘Exploitation of non-Europeans
was intensified’ – a further intimation that the nineteenth century was different
from previous centuries.
168 Richard Little
From the sixteenth century onwards, it is argued in Bull and Watson
(1984a), the Europeans acquired increasing control over the oceans and seas
around the globe, but until the eighteenth century they lacked the ability to
penetrate the landmasses in Africa, Eurasia or the Americas (apart from
Mexico and Peru). Instead they operated largely on the periphery of all these
continents. Howard (1984: 34) argues, for example, that the Europeans
established ‘entrepôts throughout the Indian Ocean and the China seas and, a
little later, small footholds of settlement in North America’. While naval guns
enabled an offshore European warship ‘to defend its anchorage against land
as well as sea attack’, they did not allow the Europeans to project their power
inland. Nevertheless, around the world, the Europeans ‘were accepted by the
indigenous communities on a basis of equality as useful trading partners’. Yet
there were fundamental differences in the ways that the Europeans interacted
with the indigenous populations in the Americas as opposed to Africa and
Asia. Watson (1984a: 18) asserts that from the start, the Americas were
incorporated into the European system of administration and government in
exactly the same way as the Iberian Peninsula and the eastern Baltic lands
had been. As a consequence, the Americas ‘became an extension of Chris-
tendom’, but the relationship between the Europeans and the Africans and
Asians was very different. The difference is encapsulated by Watson’s (1984a:
22) assessment that the:

… activities of competing European traders strengthened Muslim and

Hindu states round the Indian Ocean economically and administratively.
Informed Muslims surveying the scene around the year 1700 would see
that the long Portuguese crusade against Islam in the Indian Ocean had
failed, and that Islam had continued its military and religious expansion
to bring almost all that great area under Muslim influence.

Until the nineteenth century, therefore, despite the growing ability of the
Europeans to regulate the oceans and seas, they had no alternative but to
establish relations with Africans and Asians on terms set by the inhabitants of
these continents. In their introduction, Bull and Watson (1984b: 5) argue,
however, that from 1500 and for the next 300 years, as relations between the
Europeans and Asians persisted and grew, it is possible to identify the emer-
gence of a ‘a loose Eurasian system or quasi-system’ within which the Eur-
opean states ‘sought to deal with Asian states on the basis of moral and legal
equality’. Often, of course, this was not possible. Watson (1984a: 21–22)
notes, for example, that with the establishment of the Mogul Empire in the
middle of the sixteenth century, the Europeans had to find a way of operating
within this suzerain system and they did so, ‘in the same way as the local
Indian rulers, by accepting subordinate positions within the government of
the empire’. The Europeans, therefore, were willing to establish formal agree-
ments with rulers across Eurasia and, in doing so, acknowledged their sover-
eignty. As Brownlie (1984: 361) notes, from an international law perspective,
 Conclusion 169
‘there were no regional or cultural limitations on the recognition of person-
ality in international relations’ throughout this period, until the middle of the
nineteenth century. It follows that the existence or sovereignty of any state
‘did not depend on the recognition of other powers’.
It can be argued, therefore, that there was a nascent global international
society that was slowly but steadily emerging across this period. At the start
of the period, there is no doubt that the Muslims provided the main impetus
behind this development because, as Watson (1984a: 17–18) notes, they were
the heirs of previously highly developed civilizations, and the Turks, in particular,
were ‘in active intercourse with a wider range of foreign people than any other
society of that time’. However, there is no doubt that because of their growing
maritime supremacy from 1500 onwards, the Europeans began to play an
increasingly important role in expanding the range of international contacts
that were being established. Watson (1984a: 25) is equally clear that although
the Europeans wished to apply their rules and institutions to others, they were
willing to deal with them on their terms, but he goes on to suggest that whe-
ther we are talking of the Ottomans, Persians, Moguls or Chinese, their
practices ‘for all their individual peculiarities, bear a family resemblance to
the arrangements that have developed at various times and places to regulate
intermittent relations between different civilizations’.
During the course of the nineteenth century, however, a very dramatic
transformation in the fundamental features of international relations is seen
in Bull and Watson (1984a) to take place. It is argued that the nature of
international economics undergoes a seismic shift as the result of technologi-
cal advances that precipitated an agricultural and industrial revolution and in
tandem with these developments comes an extraordinary expansion in mili-
tary power. Because the USA and some of the European countries are well
positioned to take the maximum advantage of these developments it was
inevitable that the nineteenth century would be a period of spectacular
change. However, the impact of these developments was ratcheted up because
they were accompanied by some equally remarkable changes in the self-image
of the Europeans and Americans. It was this factor more than anything else that
transformed the nature of the international society.
The starting point for O’Brien (1984) in his discussion of the economic
dimension of the expansion story is that to describe the mercantile era (1492–
1789) in terms of an international economy is profoundly mistaken. He insists
that the volume of transoceanic trade as a proportion of overall trade during
this period was tiny and had very little impact on regional economies around the
world. So his analysis represents a fundamental attack on the work of theor-
ists like Wallerstein (1974), who assumes that we can talk about a world
economy from 1500 onwards. O’Brien argues, to the contrary, that if we
identify an international economy in terms of the free movement of goods,
money and labour, then even at the time he was writing, it was quite clear
that we were still a very long way off from having a global economy. His
central point, therefore, is that the take-off of the European economy was
170 Richard Little
essentially unrelated to the existence of transoceanic trade. By the same token,
capital flows were ‘a miniscule percentage of world capital formation’
(O’Brien 1984: 48), but what we do find in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century are pronounced and widespread falls in freight rates and this did ‘begin
to provide really strong stimulus to international trade’, although ‘[q]uantum
and qualitative leaps forward in international economic relations’ did not occur,
argues O’Brien (1984: 48–50), until the second half of the nineteenth century.
Howard (1984: 36–39) traces the growing military superiority of the Eur-
opeans back to the start of the eighteenth century. He argues that the growing
European dominance at that time was as much cultural as military, because it
required well-organized tax systems and efficient bureaucracy as well as highly
developed arsenals. The level of social organization necessary to compete
effectively with the Europeans did not exist in the societies with which the
Europeans were coming into contact at that time. The Russians were the first
of these societies to recognize that the ‘only way to beat the Europeans was to
imitate them, and the necessary military reforms would not be forthcoming
without a huge social upheaval’. On the basis of these reforms, the Russians
in the mid-nineteenth century were able to take control of Turkestan and
Central Asia, and Howard argues that accounts of these Russian campaigns
‘repeat almost precisely those of the British campaigns in India’.
Although the emergence of highly trained professional troops during the
course of the eighteenth century was an essential ingredient of this expansion,
it was the technology and scientific developments that came on stream that
made it possible to open up the interiors of all the continental landmasses of the
world to European and American military forces at this time. Howard focuses,
first, on the development of steam power that made it possible for the Eur-
opeans to penetrate the interior of Africa up the major African rivers, but it
was also possible for the Europeans to penetrate China in the same way.
Where there were no available rivers, the ‘speed of rail construction was aston-
ishing’ (Howard 1984: 39). Alongside these technological advances there was
also the ‘introduction of the quick-firing, long-range firearms made possible
by the development of high explosive’ (Howard 1984: 38). For Howard (1984: 38),
perhaps the most crucial development was the growth in medical knowledge,
because in the past disease was ‘the most important barrier to European
expansion and settlement’. Advances in medical knowledge made it possible
for the Europeans to survive in areas that had in the past proven too inhospitable.
Howard goes on to argue, however, that over and beyond this factor, it was
also the case that ‘European medical techniques were to do perhaps more
than anything else to reconcile colonized populations to their new masters’.
This new wave of colonization in the nineteenth century, it is demonstrated
in Bull and Watson (1984a), was only one aspect of a very much more sub-
stantial shift in the evolution of a global international society. At the heart of
this shift was a transformation in the way that the Europeans conceived of
international society and themselves. At the start of the nineteenth century,
the Europeans still acknowledged that Europe operated in a global arena
 Conclusion 171
where groups of states operated according to their own distinctive norms and
institutions. As a consequence, Bull (1984b: 111) insists, for example, that
prior to the partition of Africa, ‘European states displayed a considerable
disposition to acknowledge that African political communities had rights of
independent states’ and that there is no reason to doubt ‘the genuineness of
treaties concluded between European states and African political commu-
nities’. By the same token, Brownlie (1984: 360) identifies a large number of
extra-European political entities across Asia and Africa with which Britain
signed treaties between 1750 and 1850. He asserts that with each treaty it
‘must be presumed to involve an acceptance of the capacity of the other Party
to enter into such an agreement with Great Britain’. However, during the
course of the nineteenth century, this orientation that had prevailed for several
hundred years began to shift. According to Brownlie (1984: 361–62), the
change was driven by European and American international lawyers. By the
middle of the nineteenth century it was agreed that state personality was
determined by recognition ‘and recognition was not dependent upon any
objective legal criteria’. The fact of recognition was seen to dispense with the
need for any formal definition of statehood because recognition, ‘as the political
stamp of approval, appeared to take care of the problem of definition’. With
this development, statehood ‘became a more important concept’ and, as a
consequence, a large number of political entities that had been treated as
sovereign in the past were not now considered eligible to acquire statehood.
The key move that justified this change in orientation is found in the
increasing reference to ‘modern civilized states’ by nineteenth-century inter-
national lawyers, but in fact this was a rather anodyne justification. Brownlie
(1984: 362) is quite clear that this change, in practice, ‘interacted with an
increase in European cultural chauvinism and racial theories’. Vincent (1984:
250) argues that whereas there was a ‘relative lack of colour consciousness
among Europeans in earlier ages of expansion’, in the nineteenth century,
Europe ‘racialized’ the world. There was a general acceptance in Europe that
in order to acquire statehood and be permitted to enter the European inter-
national society, political entities had to measure up to the European stan-
dard of civilization, despite the fact that, as Bull (1984c: 125) notes, the
European states themselves could not live up to every aspect of the standard.
However, it is also recognized in Bull and Watson that it is important not to
overplay this line of argument because it has the effect of removing any sense
of agency from non-European actors. As Howard notes, the Russians ‘imi-
tated’ the Europeans because they wished to be able to compete more effec-
tively and they then constituted a vanguard that others could follow. States
like the Ottoman Empire, Japan and the Chinese Empire are shown to have
followed the same route during the nineteenth century. Moreover, they also
very quickly began to translate European and American international law
textbooks and this helped them to assert their rights against the Europeans
(Gong 1984b: 180, 181; Suganami 1984: 195; Bull 1984c: 121; Zhang 1991;
Suzuki 2009).
172 Richard Little
Although it remains the case that the Europeans, but now more especially
the Americans, are endeavouring to employ their own cultural norms and
institutions to define the essential features of the global international society,
these endeavours have always been challenged and there is no doubt that the
contemporary structure of the global international institution is essentially
multicultural in orientation. In Bull and Watson, there are two chapters that
explore this phenomenon and they come to diametrically opposed conclu-
sions. Bozeman (1984: 406) argues that the brief historical period when Wes-
tern norms and institutions prevailed has gone, and this poses a fundamental
challenge for European and American diplomacy, with Western diplomats
having to function as they did before the nineteenth century ‘in a world that
has no common culture and no overarching political order, and that is no
longer prepared to abide by western standards of international conduct’. By
contrast, Dore (1984) argues that there is a need to distinguish between uni-
versal and idiosyncratic values and interests and he is convinced that despite
the obvious existence of diversity there are universal values that underpin an
emerging world culture. I shall return briefly to this dispute in the conclusion
after comparing how the chapters in this book affect the argument presented
in Bull and Watson.

A comparison
In the first place, Göl wishes to contest the paradox in Bull and Watson,
presented by Naff (1984: 143), who claims that though a significant portion of
the Ottoman Empire was ‘in Europe, it cannot be said to have been of
Europe’. The central argument developed by Naff is that soon after the forma-
tion of the Ottoman Empire it began to pose a very serious threat to Chris-
tendom and one that persisted for several centuries, and during this initial
phase the relationship with the Europeans was conducted very much on terms set
by the Ottoman Empire. Like all world empires, the Ottomans believed that
they had a duty to defend their civilization and this involved the protection of
the worldwide Muslim community – the Dar al Islam. By the same token,
they depicted the Europeans as inferiors and infidels, and their relationship
with them was based on a state of war – the Dar al Harb. During this early
phase, Naff argues that the empire effectively operated as an offshore bal-
ancer – using the expression coined later by Layne (1997). This role required
the empire to pursue a strategy designed to promote disunity amongst the
Europeans, which proved particularly effective during the Reformation in the
sixteenth century. However, by the end of the century, the Habsburg Empire
had found an effective counter, establishing an alliance with the shah of Iran
and confronting the Ottomans with the possibility of war on two fronts. Over
the next two centuries, the balance of power steadily shifted away from the
Ottoman Empire and towards the Europeans. By the nineteenth century, the
Ottomans had no alternative but to seek alliances with European states to
protect them from the growing power of Russia.
 Conclusion 173
The first crucial argument made by Göl is that Naff fails to acknowledge
that for several centuries the Ottoman Empire lay at the heart of a regional
system of global significance. It follows that Europe not only operated very
much on the periphery of this system, but also that during this period the
Ottoman Empire absorbed a substantial chunk of European territory. This
image then gives rise to a second important argument, which suggests that the
Ottoman Empire lay at the crossroads between the east and west of Eurasia
and that the empire was open to influence from civilizations to the East and
West, as well as from Africa, with the result that it displayed a distinct ‘cul-
tural hybridity’. This line of argument is seen to present the English School
with an insuperable problem because of its assertion that the stability of the
European international order was dependent upon a common European cul-
ture, and Bull, in particular, was doubtful if the cultural pluralism that char-
acterizes contemporary international society can sustain a stable world order.
This is now an issue that is being addressed by the English School (Buzan
2010) and, to be fair, Naff also acknowledges a ‘process of cultural synthesis’
between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. By the same token, Bull and
Watson point specifically to the existence of an ‘Arab Islamic system’, as well
as a more expansive nascent Eurasian international society, but neither of
these insights is explored in any depth.
The failure in Bull and Watson to explore the Indian sub-continent is par-
ticularly surprising because key members of the English School were well
aware of its importance. Watson (2009), for example, devoted a chapter to the
Mauryan Empire illustrating a very early phase in the long process of evolu-
tion of the international society. Moreover, he also wrote a fascinating
account of the complex political relations in India between Hindu and
Muslim states in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Watson 1964). Despite
this interest, when it comes to the modern era, the Indian sub-continent, like
the rest of the European imperial territory, simply drops out of the picture.
Vigneswaran, by contrast, fully appreciates the importance of taking account
of the Indian sub-continent in the broader process whereby the pluralistic
order of distinct international societies began to converge. In his chapter in
this volume he makes a seminal contribution to this literature.
By delving into the archives of the East India Company, Vigneswaran is
able to throw light on the extraordinary way in which the English were able
to insinuate themselves into the extant Indian international society. It was on
the basis of these tentative foundations that the British were eventually able to
establish themselves as the hegemonic actor in the Indian sub-continent
during the course of the nineteenth century. However, his focus is on the
opening phase of this development and his analysis illustrates very clearly the
argument developed in the important study of imperial sovereignty by Benton
(2010: 5), where she suggests that configuring imperial sovereignty involves
‘pragmatic and theoretical questions arising from the entanglements of local
legal politics and the challenges of interimperial contests’. When British traders
first began to make serious efforts to trade with India in the late sixteenth
174 Richard Little
century, maritime trade between Europe and India was already well entren-
ched. The trade had been initiated by the Portuguese but was increasingly
being controlled at the European end by the Dutch and the French. At the
Indian end, local rulers initially had a much better understanding of how
questions of power and privilege operated within the established political
systems that existed on the subcontinent, for example, the Mughal Empire in
the north based on Agra and the kingdom of Golkonda in the south-east.
These local rulers also proved adept at playing the Europeans off against each
other as they sought trading concessions from these rulers through the courts.
What Vigneswaran demonstrates, however, is that over time, local officials of
the East India Company learned to exploit rivalries amongst imperial rivals,
indigenous rulers as well as the local rulers. It was these local officials, often
operating independently, who began to lay the basis for sovereign rights that
were eventually taken over by the British state.
Although both the Ottoman Empire and the Indian sub-continent even-
tually converged with the European international society, albeit via rather
different routes, as Neumann shows in this volume, the convergence with
Russia occurred earlier and followed a different route again. Watson (1984b),
who worked for some time in the British Embassy in Moscow, was well aware
of many of the distinctive features of Russia’s relations with Europe. He
acknowledges, first, the importance of the successful invasion by the nomadic
Tartars in the thirteenth century, although he also stresses that Christianity
helped to preserve the identity of the Russians during the period that they
were under the suzerain control of the Tartars. He also acknowledges the
hostility of the Russian Orthodox Church to Catholicism with the result that
the Russians were never considered part of Latin Christendom, even after the
Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church agreed to reunify
in 1439. Instead, in 1448, the Russian Church established its independence
from Constantinople. Once the Russians recovered their independence and
began to pursue a policy of expansion in the sixteenth century, their dis-
tinctive identity emerged as they came into contact with their Catholic
neighbours to the west, in Poland and Lithuania, as well as the Islamic
Ottoman Empire to the south. Indeed, Watson depicts Russia as a power
reaching out to both East and West. He focuses on the links that Russia
forged with the security system in northern Europe and the importance of the
Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) with Manchu China. However, as the northern
and southern security systems in Europe coalesced in the seventeenth century,
so the Russians evinced substantial interest in exercising influence in the
emerging European international society, and they emulated many of the
developments that were taking place within this society. Nevertheless, Watson
also points to a persistent tension in Russia between traditionalists and the
Westernizers throughout this era.
A major problem with Watson’s analysis, from Neumann’s perspective, is
that it fails to acknowledge the real significance of the connection between the
Russians and the adjacent nomadic polities. For Western Europeans, the
 Conclusion 175
nomads were long perceived as alien and hostile, whereas for the Russians,
they were neighbours with whom they developed an essentially reciprocal
relationship that extended back to the eighth century. Neumann goes further
and argues that when the Russians re-established their independence from the
Tartars, a process of hybridization had taken place.5 Nevertheless, the 250 years
that the Russians operated under Tartar suzerainty are seen to have created a
very distinctive hybrid polity that helps to explain some of the complexity of the
process when Russia began to converge with the other European states. Elsewhere
Neumann and Wigen (n.d., forthcoming) argue that Russia shares this char-
acteristic with other states, such as Turkey, and much more attention needs to
be paid to this phenomenon when endeavouring to understand the emergence
of the contemporary international society and the severe reservations that the
Western Europeans had about both countries.
From Neumann’s perspective, the historical record indicates that Russia has
much more in common with Japan and China than is generally supposed. All
three polities were longstanding members of international societies that were
very different from the international society that evolved in Europe. This
common factor has to be taken into account when endeavouring to under-
stand how the contemporary global international society came into being.
Suganami (1984) certainly acknowledges that Japan was an important
member of a distinctive international society, but also that it had relations
with the European states that made maritime contact with the East in the
sixteenth century. However, he argues that from 1600, in the aftermath of the
warring states era, the Togukawa established a more centralized polity,
although ‘feudal’ lords still effectively governed much of Japan. Indeed, the
Ryu-kyu- Islands, in the south-west of Japan, continued to pay tribute to China
and this situation was formalized in 1655 because the Tokugawa saw this link
as a way of keeping open a trade conduit with China. However, Suganami
argues that the fear that feudal lords might use external contacts to elevate
their position led the Togukawa to favour an overall policy of ‘seclusion’ and
for the next 200 years contact with European states, apart from Holland, was
essentially prohibited.
Although Suganami acknowledges that there was an early initial period
when the Japanese had some contact with the Europeans, followed by an era
when they held the Europeans, even the Dutch, at arm’s length, he devotes
most of his attention to the mid-nineteenth century and after. Suzuki sees this
as a mistake, because it draws our attention away from the earlier periods,
when relations between Japan and Europe were largely established on Japa-
nese terms. The effect, although not the intention, is not only to foster a
Eurocentric interpretation of this specific relationship but also to draw atten-
tion away from the fact that Japan formed an important member of an
international society, the origins of which can be traced back to an era before
there was a European presence in the region. To counter this effect, Suzuki
pays close attention to how the Dutch were required to relate to Japan during
the so-called ‘seclusion’ era, which he also depicts as an era of transition away
176 Richard Little
from the prevailing Sinocentric hierarchical order, with China at the apex of
the hierarchy and the other polities in the international order occupying sub-
ordinate positions. Diplomatic relations among the polities were governed by
elaborate rituals that were designed to maintain and strengthen the overall
hierarchy. The nature of the Asian international order was somewhat differ-
ent, therefore, to the order that was evolving in Europe, where the sense of
hierarchy was slowly but surely giving way to an international order that
embraced a concept of sovereign equality (Larkins 2010). The East Asian
order, however, was also changing at this time, according to Suzuki, as the
Japanese began to challenge its Sinocentric character, and to view itself as
occupying the centre ground. The Europeans were then depicted as ‘outer
barbarians’, but they were nevertheless co-opted in order to help to shore up
and legitimize this Japanese view of the international order. To establish and
maintain a trading connection, therefore, the Dutch had no alternative but to
follow Japanese diplomatic protocol, which was designed to reinforce the
existing hierarchical order, with the Dutch following procedures that identi-
fied the Japanese as occupying the pre-eminent position in the hierarchy, and
the Dutch as ‘outer barbarians’. This assessment, argues Suzuki, indicates the
potential for international order in a multi-cultural world.
A similar conclusion can also be drawn from the Chinese case study. Gong
(1984b) focuses initially on the fact that the encounter between the Chinese
and Europeans from the sixteenth century onwards brought two very different
standards of civilization into potential conflict. One area of dispute became
very apparent in the seventeenth century when a disagreement between Jesuit
and Dominican missionaries opened up about whether the Chinese who
converted to Christianity could continue with their long-established Chinese
rituals. The Jesuits argued that these rituals were social rites and were not in
conflict with Christianity, and they themselves, impressed by aspects of Con-
fucianism, adapted to a Confucian lifestyle – for example, wearing Chinese
gowns. By the same token, the emperor accepted advice from the Jesuits on
diplomacy, astronomy and military technology, with the Jesuits even taking
responsibility for the emperor’s observatory. In 1656, Pope Alexander VII
decreed that Chinese practices were not incompatible with Christianity and in
1692 Emperor Kangxi issued an edict of toleration of Christianity. However,
the Dominicans, and other Catholic orders, were appalled by these develop-
ments and from an early stage resisted them. Their view eventually prevailed
and in 1705 Pope Clement XI prohibited Chinese Christians from practising
Chinese rites, and in 1721 Emperor Kangxi banned Christian missions in
China. Gong also points out that the divergent European responses to Chi-
nese civilization extended to diplomacy and he notes how in 1689 in the
Treaty of Nerchinsk between Russia and China, they agreed to reciprocate
their established diplomatic rituals in their respective countries.
Zhang, in his chapter, explores this issue is much greater depth than Gong
and aims to show, first, that there were sustained and substantial attempts by
the Europeans to penetrate the Sinocentric world from the early sixteenth
 Conclusion 177
century onwards and, second, that the ability of the Europeans to make suc-
cessful contact with the Chinese was highly dependent on their willingness to
adapt to what Gong calls the Chinese standard of civilization. By endea-
vouring to find a Confucian–Christian synthesis, the Jesuits proved remark-
ably successful at promoting a Catholic presence in China, but as soon as the
pope endeavoured to impose a European standard on the Chinese, the links
were immediately severed. Zhang goes onto explore how both the Portuguese
and Dutch offered to use their naval and military strength to support the
emperor in an effort to gain a privileged trade position – although without
much success. Nevertheless, the Europeans did succeed in insinuating them-
selves into the very important South-East Asian trading system, which
extended far beyond the formal tribute system, but only on terms that were
set by the Chinese and the Japanese. Finally, Zhang focuses on the European
attempts to establish diplomatic relations with the Chinese. Again, there was
no attempt to import European diplomatic protocol; instead, the Europeans
displayed a willingness to work within the Sinocentric ceremonial traditions.
Even so, the Europeans are seen to have had remarkably little success in
finding ways to use diplomatic channels to open a conduit that would allow
them to influence the emperor’s views.
The final two case studies move us into very different and largely uncharted
waters. Jones focuses on the Western hemisphere and surveys developments in
North and South America. Although there are two chapters on these regions
in Bull and Watson (1984a), neither touches on the period 1663 to 1820,
which Jones refers to as the ‘long eighteenth century’. He explores the com-
plex interaction between three distinct groups: the indigenous population who
originally populated the Americas; the Europeans who arrived at the end of
the fifteenth century; and finally the creoles who were born in the Americas
but whose forebears, or at least some of them, had been born in Europe. In
essence, Jones provides an account of the ultimate military triumph of the
emergent creole states over their European and indigenous competitors. This
story has essentially been ignored in the International Relations literature,
although clearly it must play a crucial role in any attempt to account for the
emergence of the contemporary international society. It is clearly very differ-
ent from any of the previous case studies: more tragic and more barbaric.
Tragic because vast numbers of the indigenous population died as the result
of diseases brought in from Europe – a process that persisted through to the
twentieth century; and barbaric because the indigenous populations had to
suffer slavery and genocide at the hands of the creoles and Europeans.
Jones can do no more than highlight some of the key features on this
enormous canvas. He starts by noting that it took a long time before the
Europeans and creoles were able to exercise very much control over either
North or South America, and it is only in the latter third of the sixteenth
century that it becomes possible to identify an emerging international society
embracing indigenous and creole polities in Spanish South America, and a
century later before this claim can be extended to North America and
178 Richard Little
Portuguese South America. Moreover, it took close to 400 years before the
stubborn resistance by indigenous polities was finally overcome and the out-
lines of the contemporary states on the two continents began to take shape.
This resistance was undoubtedly facilitated by a good deal of cross-cultural
exchange, although Jones also notes that there was also a good deal of mutual
incomprehension. However, the resistance was also assisted by a process of
ethnogenesis taking place, with the North American Indians, for example,
coming to see themselves as one people. Added to this there were also the
rivalries between the European powers, on the one hand, and the divisions
that opened up between the creoles who wanted independence and those who
wished to maintain links with Europe, on the other. Finally, it is also the case
that the Europeans endeavoured to mediate between the creoles and the
indigenous people. As Hinderaker (1997) argues, this willingness to mediate
partially explains why the Europeans found that their attempts to establish
effective empires in the Americas proved to be so ‘elusive’. By contrast, once
the USA came into being, the federal government was able to establish a
‘successful’ empire by sponsoring the creoles, tacitly denying Indians’ title to
land, legitimizing the claims of settlers, and thereby creating a mechanism to
give dependent territory the status of statehood.
Prior to the nineteenth century, European links with Africa were even more
limited than those that developed in the Americas and they have been almost
completely ignored in the International Relations literature. However, there is
a chapter in Bull and Watson devoted to the topic, where Bull (1984c) draws
a sharp contrast between North Africa, where relations with the Islamic
world were quite strong, and Africa south of the Sahara, where, prior to the
middle of the nineteenth century, with a few significant exceptions, the Eur-
opean contacts were restricted to the coast. On the basis of these coastal links,
the Europeans followed in the footsteps of the Islamic world and established
an even more substantial slave trade. Bull goes on to argue that there was a
very complex and divergent set of polities across Africa, although they did
not constitute a systemic or societal whole. While contacts tended to be very
local, he does acknowledge a rich array of complex customs and institutions
that allowed the African polities to interact with each other as well as with
the Europeans on a sophisticated basis.
Quirk and Richardson provide a very much more detailed and more
nuanced account of the relations that the Europeans had with Africa from the
fifteenth century onwards, and they show how the Atlantic slave trade, in
particular, depended upon the development of this multifaceted relationship
and how it, in turn, had very significant consequences for the relationships
that already existed amongst polities in Atlantic Africa. As in Asia, the Eur-
opeans had to find a way of inserting themselves into long-established insti-
tutions and patterns of behaviour in Africa and they often had no alternative
but to accept that the Africans played the key role in determining the terms of
their relationship. Slavery was a significant institution in Africa before the
arrival of the Europeans, because labour was often a more scarce commodity
 Conclusion 179
than land. As a consequence, a victorious party in war would take people rather
than land from the vanquished. Once the Europeans established a new
demand for slaves, however, established institutions were transformed to satisfy
this demand. It follows that although the Europeans only had a presence on
the coast, with a few exceptions, and although they had to negotiate for slaves
on terms set by the Africans, over time they had a transformative and devas-
tating effect in many quarters of Africa. As Quirk and Richardson note, it is,
therefore, a cruel irony that in the nineteenth century the Europeans went on to
use the existence of slavery in Africa as a justification for colonization.

Conclusion
This chapter has had two main aims. The first was to suggest that the account
of the expansion of the international society in Bull and Watson (1984a) is
much more interesting and radical than is generally acknowledged, even by Bull
and Watson themselves. Although at first sight it might seem that the book is
concerned with the way that states around the globe entered a European-
based international society during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries and, indeed, Bull and Watson appear to associate themselves with
what they depict as the ‘standard’ Eurocentric account, a closer investigation
makes it clear that for Bull and Watson, prior to the nineteenth century the
European international society operated in the context of a global environment
made up of diverse regional international societies, each reflecting its own
distinct cultural base. The second aim was to compare what the authors in
this book have to say about these regionally based international societies with
what the specific authors in Bull and Watson had to say about these societies.
Broadly speaking, the overall message is the same in both sets of chapters.
From the sixteenth century, at the latest, Europe was interacting with all of
the international societies around the globe, but in every case, certainly in the
initial centuries, very much on terms set by the non-European international
societies. What we get in this book, however, is a much more extensive and
nuanced account of this process. The Indian sub-continent and the Americas
are included in the overall story; Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Japan and
China are all depicted as members of non-European international societies
that have all had a very major impact on the course of world history; and
finally Europe’s coastal links with Africa are seen to have spawned an Atlan-
tic system that had enormous consequences across all three continents that
the system brought together.
What both books reveal very clearly is that across four centuries the overall
structure of the global international arena remained broadly unchanged, with
a range of discrete regional international societies that were, albeit loosely,
linked together by the contact made between them by the Europeans. The
transformative change in the global arena occurred only during the course of
the nineteenth century and it was precipitated by the self-conscious move by the
European states to elevate their regional international society above the
180 Richard Little
others – although this assessment needs to be further complicated by the
emergence of the USA, which also played an important role in this develop-
ment (see also Buzan and Lawson 2012a). As discussed in the first section of the
chapter, in Bull and Watson this move is seen to involve a reversal of the way
that the Europeans had been relating to these other regions. Instead of com-
plying with the rules and institutions of these regions, the Europeans began to
develop and impose their own rules and institutions. What this book does is
to help clarify what international relations across the global arena looked like
before the reversal began to take place. It demonstrates that when the Eur-
opeans made contact with other international societies, they were often will-
ing – literally, in the case of China – to kowtow in order to establish contact
with these non-European societies. However, by the same token, when these
international societies wanted to make contact with the European interna-
tional society, they had to make concessions and work within European norms
and institutions. As becomes apparent in this book, prior to the nineteenth
century, this was very much a two-way process, with countries like Russia and
the Ottoman Empire accommodating to evolving European norms and insti-
tutions, but in other parts of the world it was the Europeans who had to make
the accommodations. It is clear, therefore, that the convergence of the regio-
nal international societies was a complex process and it deserves much more
study than it has received so far. Nevertheless, it is clear that whether or not it
is possible to identify global values that are shared by all, the historical record
does not support the unequivocal argument that cultural differences necessarily
stand in the way of the emergence of a stable global political order.

Notes
1 This situation is now being rectified. See, for example, Hobson (2012).
2 The original project, to explore the evolution of international societies across world
history was subsequently taken on and completed by Adam Watson. In an intro-
duction to a reissue of the book, Buzan and Little (2009: ix) argue that the sig-
nificance of this later book has not been fully acknowledged and in many ways it
‘epitomises’ the approach advocated by the British Committee.
3 Martin Wight died in 1972 but he had a major influence on both Bull and Watson.
4 For an attempt to examine the balance of power from a world historical perspective,
see Kaufman, Little and Wohlforth (2007).
5 However, the links between sedentary and nomadic people is a Europe-wide phe-
nomenon, so it is also necessary to acknowledge a degree of hybridization across
Europe.
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Index

Abu-Lughod, Janet 33 139, 142, 145, 152–57, 158, 178; death

Africa 167, 168, 170, 178; African ruler and suffering 144, 179; France 153;
141, 148–49; agency 143–44, 171; goods exchanged for slaves 155–56,
Atlantic Creole 149; Christianity 148– 158; individual gains/collective costs
50; colonial and post-colonial period disjunction 139, 152; natal alienation
140, 141, 143, 148, 157, 170, 179; 147; the Netherlands 153; pawnship
diplomacy 148–49; European abuses 155; protocol 139, 142, 153, 158;
upon Africans 157; European raiding 147, 148, 152; Scramble 143;
domination/African dependency trade credit 155, 158; trading
pattern 139, 142–43; European networks 151, 153, 154, 156–57;
settlement 148, 157–58; exploitation tribute system 145, 153, 154; women
142, 143, 147, 157; geographic and and children 147; see also Africa
demographic considerations 146; agency: Africa 143–44, 171; African
hinterlands 144–45, 154; slave trading 139, 152, 153, 157, 158,
independence 141; International 178–79; China 56; East Asia 56, 72–
Relations 139–42, 178; international 73; Japan 56; non-Western agency 1,
system/international society 3–4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 78, 171, 179;
distinction 145–46; partition of Africa Ottoman Empire 39, 40–41, 51;
157, 167, 171; plural international political agency 3–4; Western agency
order 141–42, 145, 152, 158; the 3, 7
Portuguese in Angola 139, 148–52, alliance: Europe 42; Ottoman Empire
157–58; pre-colonial period 139, 140, 37, 42, 45–46, 47, 172; religion 42;
142–43, 146, 157, 158; sovereignty Russia 17, 23, 24, 28, 30, 32, 33
143, 145; trade 144–45, 146, 148; Allsen, Thomas T. 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 32
violence and war 142, 145, 150–51, the Americas 10, 118–37, 148, 167, 168,
152; see also African slave trading 177–78; 1492, discovery of the ‘New
African slave trading 9, 138–58, 178–79; World’ 1, 4, 8, 147; American
African agency 139, 152, 153, 157, international society, 10, 119, 120–21,
158, 178–79; African norms setting 123–33, 135–37, 178 (pluralism 129–
153, 157, 158, 178, 179; African ruler 30, 134–35); Christianity 168;
9, 141, 150, 152, 153, 155, 158; an conquest of 8–9, 124, 128–29; creole
agreed negotiation, not imposition 137; creole colonial population 118,
139, 151–52, 157, 158, 179; Atlantic 120–21, 122, 129, 132, 134, 135, 136,
Africa 9, 143, 144–47, 150, 158; 177; diplomacy 125, 126, 127, 130,
Britain 153, 154; coastal currency 132–36 passim; independence 118,
155, 158; contract 155, 158; cross- 125, 135; Indian/indigenous
cultural exchange 138–39, 144, 147, population 118–35 passim, 136, 177;
149, 151; cross-cultural institutions indigenous sovereignty 118;
and arrangements in Atlantic Africa International Relations 126–27, 134,
 Index 207
135, 136–37, 177; missionary 120, 129 74 (Amherst, Jeffery, Lord 74;
(Jesuits 122, 129, 130, 135); negative Macartney, George, Lord, 8, 55–56,
impact of European invasion 122–23, 57, 58, 69, 70, 74, 125; Opium War
129, 130, 132, 135, 177; parlamento 56, 57, 63, 68, 74); Cromwell, Oliver
system 125, 126, 127; resistance 118, 113; cultural pluralism 95, 113;
120, 124, 126–27, 129, 130, 134, 135, Elizabeth I, Queen of England 45–46,
148, 178; short-term/ad hoc 97; empire-state 167; Japan 76, 89, 93;
agreements 10, 126, 133, 136; non-Eurocentric international order
tolerance 135, 136; warfare 125, 127, 98–100; Ottoman Empire 45–46, 50;
128, 129, 131–33, 134, 135; see also slave trading 153, 154; trade 50, 68,
the Americas, geopolitics 96–113, 116, 173–74; see also British
the Americas, geopolitics: the Andes expansion into India
120, 126, 134; Argentina 123, 124, British expansion into India 9, 95–96,
125, 126, 135; Brazil 118, 120, 122, 99–114, 170, 173; Armagon 106–9,
123, 124, 128–30, 132, 133, 135; 116; British East India Company 94,
Britain 121, 123, 124, 130, 131, 136, 95–96, 97, 100–113, 114, 116, 174
148; Canada 124, 130–31, 136; Chile (Company Charter 97, 100–102, 113,
118, 123, 124–27; the far south 121, 114, 116; Official Correspondence 96,
123, 124–27, 134, 177 (Araucanians 98, 173); Calcutta 97, 105; Clive,
125–27; Mapuche 120, 124, 125, 127, Robert, Lord 100, 105, 116; common
131, 133); First Nations 118, 134, principles of commerce 100–105;
136–37; France 121, 123, 124, 130–33, corruption 95 (corruption in India
136, 148; the Incas 120, 121, 124, 126, 103–5; ‘old corruption’ 95, 102–3,
148; Mesoamerica 119–20, 121, 148; 105, 116); Fort St George 105, 109–
Mexico 124; Portugal 122, 123, 124, 13, 116, 117 (Cogan, Thomas 109,
128–29, 148, 178 (bandeira/slavery 110–13, 114; Day, Francis 109–11,
122, 128–30, 134, 135, 150); Spain 112–13, 116); Hastings, Warren 114;
118, 119–28 passim, 130, 148, 167, Madras 96, 97, 105, 106, 109–13;
177; trans-Appalachian North mercantile governance 99, 113–14;
America 120, 121, 130–33, 134, 177 negotiating trading rights in
(Iroquois 131–33, 134; trade 131–32); seventeenth-century India 96–98, 174;
United States 123, 124, 130, 136, 178; sovereignty 99, 100, 101, 102, 113,
see also the Americas 114; territorial acquisition 94, 95, 96,
anarchy 5, 7, 31, 35, 52, 76, 77 100–113 passim, 114; treaty 94, 96,
Anghie, Antony 166 98, 99, 102; see also Britain; India
Arano, Yasunori 82, 84 Brownlie, Ian 165, 168–69, 171
Armitage, David 166–67 Bull, Hedley 42, 51, 53, 79, 90, 162, 163,
Asia: Eurasian cross-cultural exchange 180; see also The Expansion of
160; Eurasian system 168; plural International Society
international order 4; see also China; Butterfield, Herbert 119
East Asia; Japan Buzan, Barry 2, 140, 180
Byzantine Empire 25, 30, 54; fall of
Bartlett, Robert 166 Constantinople 27, 38, 39
Benton, Lauren 173
Bitterli, Urs 66, 67 Cain, Peter J. 114
Boccara, Guillaume 120, 125 Canada 124, 130–31, 136
Bozeman, Adda 172 capitalism 50, 98–99
Braudel, Fernand 50, 65 Carr, Edward Hallett 130
Brazil 8, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 128–30, Charlemagne 13, 31
132; bandeira/slavery 122, 128–30, 134, China 9, 10; agency 56; Confucianism
135, 150; sertão 129, 132, 133, 135 58, 59, 60, 62, 75, 81, 176; Japan 81–
Britain 9, 10–11, 94–117, 171; the 82, 83, 93, 175; Kangxi, Emperor 61,
Americas 121, 123, 124, 130, 131, 62, 176; Ming Dynasty 60–66, 69–70,
136, 148; capitalism 98, 99; China 68, 73, 75, 82; Mughal Empire 8, 9; Pax
208 Index
Sinica 55, 57, 71, 73; Qianlong, Pope 32, 47, 62, 167 (Alexander III
Emperor 55, 74; Qing Dynasty 55, 61, 26; Alexander VII 176; Clement XI
62, 64, 65, 71, 73, 75, 82, 88; rise of 3, 60, 176; Clement XIV 122; Innocent
8, 92; Sinocentrism 82, 93, 176; steppe IV 25; papal bulls 167); Russia 13, 25,
empires 14, 31–32; see also China and 27, 31, 49, 174; the Vatican 62, 75; see
the West also Jesuits
China and the West 55–75, 115, 170, civilization: Chinese standard of
176–77; Britain 68, 74 (Macartney, civilization 84, 165, 176, 177; clash of
George, Lord, 8, 55–56, 57, 58, 69, civilizations 2, 3, 53, 92; European
70, 74, 125); Chinese/Europeans standard of civilization 5–6, 9, 56, 74,
peaceful co-existence 10, 57, 73, 75; 78, 81, 98, 165, 171
Chinese Rites Controversy 60, 61, 62, Clapham, Christopher 140
176; Chinese standard of civilization Clark, Ian 6
84, 165, 176, 177; Christianity 58–62, colonization/colonialism 166; Africa
75, 176; dominance/superiority and 140, 141, 143, 148, 157, 170, 179;
norms setting by 55, 56, 57–59, 62, decolonization 7, 140, 143; European
66–68, 70–72, 73, 81–82, 177; international society 74, 166; geo-
embassies and diplomats 57, 68–72, political expansion 115; internal
81, 85, 176, 177; Eurocentrism 56; colonization 166; nineteenth century
European expansion into China 57, 1, 8, 143, 148, 157, 167, 169–70
73; European interlopers 9, 70, 72–73; (medical knowledge 170; military
European standard of civilization 56, power expansion 169, 170;
74; expansion of international society technological/scientific developments
34, 74; Jesuits 57, 58–62, 64, 176, 177 169, 170); post-colonial state,
(accommodation policy 58–59, 62, 75; resentment towards Western
Ricci, Matteo 59–61); kowtowing 8, domination 79; sovereignty 166; see
70, 71, 180; missionaries 56, 61, 176; also conquest
the Netherlands 64–66, 69, 70, 72, 85 Columbus, Christopher 1, 167
(Dutch East India Company 64–66, Confucianism: China 58, 59, 60, 62, 75,
71, 75); Opium War 56, 57, 63, 68, 74; 81, 176; Confucian-Christian
Portugal 55, 56, 57, 62–63, 64, 65, 66– synthesis 60, 177; Japan 81, 82, 83,
68, 69 (Macao 64, 66–68, 71, 75); 84, 87, 90
‘post-Macartney’ period 56, 58; conquest 8–9; the Americas 8–9, 124,
suzerain system 9; trade 56, 57, 62– 128–29; see also colonization/
68, 69, 70–71, 73, 75, 82, 177 (Canton colonialism
system 68, 71, 75, 88); tribute system constructivism 4–5, 6–7; Critical Theory
55, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 82, 6–7; Eurocentrism 7; international
85, 175, 177; Russia 61, 69, 70, 71, 75, norms 5; liberal internationalism 7
176 (Treaty of Nerchinsk 61, 70, 75, cross-cultural interaction 1, 8, 9, 10, 52,
174, 176); warrior 57, 64–68; 138; cross-regional interdependency 1,
Westphalian institutions 10, 58; 7, 11, 75, 91; Eurasian cross-cultural
see also China exchange 160; Europe 138; slave
Christianity 7, 15, 25, 32, 38, 60, 166, trading 138–39, 144, 147, 149, 151
167; Africa 148–50; the Americas 168; (cross-cultural institutions and
Catholic Church 25, 38, 149, 174, arrangements in Atlantic Africa 139,
176, 177; China 58–62, 75, 176 142, 145, 152–57, 158, 178); trans-
(Chinese Rites Controversy 60, 61, 62, civilization links 161; see also
176); international society 90; Latin international order; international
Christendom 164, 166, 174; society; pluralism
missionary 76, 120, 129 (China 56, 61, Curtin, Phillip 143–44
176); Mongol Empire 15, 20, 24, 26
(clergy 20, 25, 32); Nestorian de Rachewiltz, Igor 26, 32
Christianity 15; Orthodox Church 49, democracy 3, 7, 92
174; Ottoman Empire 38–39, 41, 49; development 3, 31, 77
 Index 209
diplomacy 28, 53; Africa 148–49; the expansion 1–2, 11, 34; European
Americas 125, 126, 127, 130, 132, imperialism 5, 7, 20, 78, 138 (high
133, 134, 135, 136; China 57, 68–72, imperialism 8, 34, 74); European
81, 85, 176, 177 (kowtowing 8, 70, 71, interlopers 1, 9, 70, 72–73; European
180); Europe 78–79, 172; Japan 81– miracle thesis 159–60; European
82, 84, 86, 87–88 (diplomatic rituals normative hegemony 10–11, 180;
82, 84–85, 86, 87–88, 89, 91, 176); European standard of civilization 5–6,
nineteenth century 39, 46, 69; 9, 56, 74, 78, 81, 98, 165, 171;
Ottoman Empire 38, 40, 42, 43, 44, hybridization 180; military superiority
45, 46, 47, 48–49, 50, 52; trade 134; 169, 170; racism 171; steppe 30–31;
United States 172 trade 66; weakness 4, 35, 37, 38, 51;
Donelan, Michael 167 see also international society
Dore, Ronald 172 The Expansion of International Society
Dowd, Gregory Evans 133 6, 36, 77, 80, 140–41, 162, 163–79,
Dunne, Timothy 163 180; admission into the international
society 163; colonization 166, 167;
East Asia 3; agency 56, 72–73; East contributors 163; Eurasia 164–65,
Asian international order 4, 58, 77, 173; Eurocentrism 163–64, 179;
81–91 passim, 176 (Confucianism 90); expansion of international society
see also Asia; China; Japan 5–6, 10, 11, 34, 42, 52, 56, 77, 98, 162,
Elias, Norbert 161 166, 169, 179–80 (critique 35–36, 42,
English School 4–6, 53, 118–19; 43, 44, 47, 51, 53, 56, 74, 77–78, 136–
ahistoricity 10; British Committee on 37, 162, 172–73); international society
the Theory of International Relations (external interaction process with the
119, 163, 180; critique of 52, 76–77, outside world 165–66; origins 163–65,
78–80, 90, 91, 92, 94, 115, 119, 130, 169; rules and institutions 165, 169;
133, 161, 173; Eurocentrism 76–77, transformation 169–72, 179–80);
78, 81, 91–92, 98; European nineteenth century 164–65, 169–72,
diplomatic institutions 6; European 179–80; reassessment 162, 163–79;
normative hegemony 10–11; sections of the book 163; see also
international law 5, 6; international Bull, Hedley; English School;
norms 5, 10; non-Western agency 5, international society; Watson, Adam
10; world history 163; se also
international society Fennell, John Lister I. 20, 21
equality 38, 41, 72, 144, 168 Ferguson, Niall 2, 3
Eurocentrism 78–79; constructivism 7; Finkel, Caroline 35, 38
critique of 34; English School 76–77, Foster, William 116
78, 81, 91–92, 98; escaping from 159; France: the Americas 121, 123, 124,
Eurocentric model of the world 34, 130–33, 136, 148; empire-state 167;
92; history 2–3, 4, 6, 34, 56, 77, 160– Ottoman Empire 43, 44–45, 46, 47,
61, 162; international order 5, 42; 50; slave trading 153
International Relations 2, 5, 8, 56, 77,
139–40, 141, 159; international Gillard, David 164
society 34, 42, 51, 52, 74, 76, 78, 159, Göl, Ayla 10, 26, 34–54, 172–73
162; Japan 80, 81, 175; Ottoman Gong, Gerrit W. 6, 165, 176–77
Empire 36, 40, 41, 51; Russia 13; Goodman, Grant K. 89
social sciences 159, 160; subliminal Goody, Jack 160
Eurocentrism 78 Grovogui, Siba N’Zatioula 140
Europe: Chinese/Europeans peaceful
co-existence 10, 57, 73, 75; Concert of Halperin, Charles J. 12, 22–23, 24–25, 27
Europe 52, 167; cross-cultural Hamashita, Takeshi 3
interaction 138; diplomacy 78–79, Heeren, Arnold Hermann Ludwig 167
172; Eurasian cross-cultural exchange Herbst, Jeffrey 146
160; Eurasian system 168; European Hevia, James 55
210 Index
Heywood, Linda 149 West vis-à-vis the rest 2; Westphalian
Hinderaker, Eric 178 myth 2, 77; see also constructivism;
Hindess, Barry 30 diplomacy; English School
Hirono, Miwa 84 international society 5–6, 10, 34, 36–39,
history: English School 163 (ahistoricity 53, 159, 161, 175; American
10); Eurocentrism 2–3, 4, 6, 34, 56, international society, 10, 119, 120–21,
77, 160–61, 162; meta-narrative 161; 123–33, 135–37, 178 (pluralism
non-Western agency 1, 4, 6, 11; world 129–30, 134–35); Christianity 90;
history 7, 11, 160–61, 163 colonization 74, 166; contestation of
Hobson, John M. 78 10, 76, 162; cultural homogeneity 8,
Hodgson, Marshall G. S. 160–61 13, 30, 34, 42, 52, 75, 89–90, 91, 93,
Holland 76, 84, 86–87, 89, 90, 175 94–95, 118, 130, 145; cultural
Hopkins, Antony G. 114 pluralism 42, 51, 52, 80, 119, 130,
Howard, Michael 168, 170, 171 169, 172, 179 (universal/idiosyncratic
Hudson, Geoffrey 62, 66, 68–69, 74 values distinction 172, 180); definition
human rights 7 53, 79; Eurocentrism 34, 42, 51, 52,
Huntington, Samuel: clash of 74, 76, 78, 159, 162; Europeans/non-
civilizations 2, 53, 92 European relations before European
expansion 77–80, 91, 179; expansion
Ikenberry, G. John 3 of international society 5–6, 10, 11,
imperialism: European/Western 34, 42, 52, 56, 77, 98, 162, 166, 169,
imperialism 4, 5, 7, 20, 78, 138; global 179–80 (critique 35–36, 42, 43, 44, 47,
domination of the West 4; high 51, 53, 56, 74, 77–78, 136–37, 162,
imperialism 8, 34, 74; nineteenth 172–73); institutions 42, 53;
century 8, 34, 74 international system/international
India 3, 8, 115, 173; Mauryan Empire society distinction 9, 47, 79, 90, 98,
173; Mughal Empire 8, 9, 100, 102, 145–46 (culture/society distinction
105, 116, 174; the Netherlands 97, 90); nineteenth century (arrival/
106–8, 110–12; plural international expansion of international society 34,
order 4, 173; trade 173–74; see also 35, 36, 79, 81, 158, 164–65, 169;
British expansion into India cultural homogeneity 42; Eurasian
Inikori, Joseph 143 system 168; international society
international law 72, 171; English transformation 169–72, 179–80);
School 5, 6; international lawyer 171 Ottoman Empire, inclusion in
international order: cultural pluralism/ European international society 40, 43,
international order relationship 11, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51–52, 53, 180; Russia
34, 36, 42, 52, 75, 77, 119, 130, 142, 162, 174–75, 180; sovereignty 53, 56,
180; East Asian international order 98, 115; trade 44; United States
58, 77, 81–91 passim, 176; 169–72, 179–80; Westphalian system
Eurocentrism 5, 42; European 56, 98, 161; see also cross-cultural
dominance 2; non-Western agency 5, interaction; English School; The
10; plural international order 4, 34, Expansion of International Society;
75, 114–15, 180 (Africa 141–42, 145, international order; pluralism; state
152, 158; Ottoman Empire 35, 42, 44, Islam 3, 26, 158, 168; Khipchak
45, 47, 52–53, 173); rise of the rest/ Khanate 24, 26; orientalist views of
non-Western 4; tolerance and 35, 52; Ottoman Empire 35, 41, 42,
coexistence 76, 77, 93; Western 52, 53, 169, 172; West/Islam ‘clash of
international norms 5; see also cross- civilizations’ 53
cultural interaction; pluralism
International Relations 159, 161; Africa James, Alan 47
139–42, 178; the Americas 126–27, Japan 9, 76–93, 175–76; agency 56;
134, 135, 136–37, 177; Eurocentrism Britain 76, 89, 93; China 81–82, 83,
2, 5, 8, 56, 77, 139–40, 141, 159; 93, 175 (Sinocentrism 82, 93, 176);
positivism 6–7; scholarship 2, 95; Confucianism 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 90;
 Index 211
diplomacy 81–82, 84, 86, 87–88 liberalism 3, 7; liberal democracy 92;
(diplomatic rituals 82, 84–85, 86, 87– liberal internationalism 5, 7, 91
88, 89, 91, 176); dominance/ Linklater, Andrew 42, 161
superiority and norms setting by 66, Little, Richard 2, 74, 140, 159–80
76, 81, 83, 87–89, 93, 175; East Asian Lombardi, Cathryn L. 123–24
international order 81–91 passim, 176; Lombardi, John V. 123–24
Eurocentrism 80, 81, 175; European Lyotard, Jean-François 161
standard of civilization 56, 81;
expansion of international society 34; Maddison, Angus 3
Francis Xavier, St 58–59, 76; Marx, Karl 160, 161
hierarchical sovereignty 82, 83–84, 85, Marxism 98
87, 93, 176; Holland 76, 84, 86–87, McNeill, William 9, 160–61
89, 90, 175; international order and Middle East 4, 9, 142; Ottoman Empire
European domination 76, 89–91; 35, 41–42, 44, 46, 50, 51
‘Japan threat’ 92; Korea 81, 82, 83, modernity 91–92, 118; hybridization 31;
84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93; modernization modern European state 137
theory 80; the Netherlands 76, 77, 80, Mongol Empire 13–19, 31, 32;
81, 84–91 passim, 93, 175–76 administration 16–17, 18, 19–20, 25,
(audience question of 1627 85–89); 28 (darughachi/basqaq 14, 16, 20;
pluralism 84, 176; Portugal 67, 75, 76, taxes 16, 19, 20, 23); Alans 17, 19, 32;
83, 85, 89; red-haired barbarians 83– Batu 18–19, 21, 32; Chinggis Khan
89, 176; Ryu--kyu- 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 13, 14, 16, 17; Christianity 15, 20, 24,
175; sakoku/isolation 76, 80, 81, 82, 25, 26, 32; dominance and norms
175–76; Spain 76, 83, 84, 85, 93; setting by 13, 17, 26, 27; Golden
Tokugawa shogunate 76, 77, 80–89, Horde 12, 13, 19, 21, 22–23, 28, 30,
91, 93, 175 (Tokugawa Ieyasu 83, 85, 32–33; Jochi 16, 17, 18; Khipchak
88, 93); trade 9, 67, 75, 76, 83; tribute Khanate 12–13, 14, 19, 21–31 passim,
system 77, 82, 83, 84–85, 90; United 32; Khitans 14; kinship 16; legitimacy
States 76 14–15; Möngke 16, 18, 19, 32; Nogay
Jesuits 122, 137; accommodation policy 22, 32–33; nomadism 13, 21, 23, 30–
58–59, 62, 75; the Americas 122, 129, 31, 32; Ögödei 16, 18, 19; political
130, 135; China 57, 58–62, 64, 176, ideology 14–16, 17, 18, 32; Qubilai
177; Francis Xavier, St 58–59, 76; 32; religion 15, 20, 24; ‘Secret
Ricci, Matteo 59–61 History’ 14; steppe 14, 17, 18, 25, 32;
Jones, Charles 10, 26, 118–37, 148, 177–78 succession 16, 18, 30; suzerain system
Jones, Kristine L. 126 12, 18–23 passim, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33,
174; Tatars 14; Tolui 16, 17, 18, 19;
Kagan, Robert 3 trade 25–26, 32, 75; Uigurs 14;
Karasch, Mary 128, 135 warfare and strategy 14, 17, 21–22,
Kato-, Ei’ichi 86, 87 23–24, 25; see also Russia
Kayaoglu, Turan 6–7, 11, 79 moral 7; the Americas, conquest of 8–9;
Keal, Paul 34, 78 Western moral superiority 5, 6, 76, 92
Keene, Edward 6, 78 Mungello, David E. 59, 75
Kops, Henriette Rahusen-de Bruyn 72, 75
Korea 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93 Naff, Thomas 36, 38, 40, 172–73
Krasner, Stephen 98 Nagazumi, Yoko 85, 93
Kupchan, Charles 2, 3 Napoleon 28, 31, 74
Naroll, Raoul 131, 132–33
Lach, Donald 72 natural law 11, 78, 83
Langfur, Hal 129 the Netherlands 97; China 64–66, 69,
Law, Robin 154 70, 72; East India Company 64, 65,
Layne, Christopher 172 71, 75, 84, 87, 89; empire-state 167;
legitimacy 6, 8, 14–15 India 97, 106–8, 110–12; Japan 76, 77,
Lenczowski, George 49 80, 81, 84–91 passim, 93, 175–76
212 Index
(audience question of 1627 85–89; decline 8, 35, 37, 38, 48–51, 52, 172;
Nuyts, Pieter 85–88; Specx, Jacques diplomacy 38, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46,
87); slave trading 153 47, 48–49, 50, 52; dominance/
Neumann, Iver B. 10, 12–33, 36, 174–75 superiority and norms setting by 35,
nineteenth century 77–78, 166; 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43–44, 45–47, 51,
colonization 1, 8, 143, 148, 157, 167, 52, 169, 172, 173; Eurocentrism 36,
169–70; diplomacy 39, 46, 69; 40, 41, 51; international society 34,
Eurasian system 168; high 36–39, 146 (expansion, critique of
imperialism 8, 34, 74; international 35–36, 42, 43, 44, 47, 51, 53, 172–73;
lawyer 171; international society inclusion in 40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50,
(arrival/expansion of 34, 35, 36, 79, 51–52, 53, 180); Islam 35, 41, 42, 52,
81, 158, 164–65, 169; cultural 53, 169, 172; millet system 38–39, 40,
homogeneity 42; international society 41, 44, 47; Murad III, Sultan 45–46;
transformation 169–72, 179–80); Pax Ottomana 35, 36, 38, 39, 41–51;
international trade 169–70; medical plural international order 35, 42, 44,
knowledge 170; military power 45, 47, 52–53, 173; reforms 49, 50–51;
expansion 169, 170; racism 171; rise of 36–39, 42–43, 53–54; a social
sovereignty 168–69; technological/ outsider 36, 40, 42; Sublime Porte 38,
scientific developments 169, 170 40–46, 48, 49, 50, 51; Suleiman the
nomadism 13, 21, 23, 30–31, 32 Magnificent 41, 42, 43, 44, 45;
non-West: agency 1, 3–4, 5, 6, 10, 11, tolerance 39, 44, 47, 52; trade 37, 39,
78, 171, 179; dominance of 4; 40, 41–42, 43–45; Treaty of Karlowitz
dynamic West/passive-static East 1, 4, 48, 49; Treaty of Kutchuk Qainarji 35,
5; problematique of the rise of 4; shift 49; Treaty of Paris 50; warfare 37, 40;
of power and wealth from the West to see also Ottoman Empire, geopolitics
the non-West 2, 3 Ottoman Empire, geopolitics 37, 173;
norms and rules 9; African norms alliance 37, 42, 45–46, 47, 172;
setting in slave trading 153, 157, 158, Anatolia 35, 38, 39, 40–41, 53; the
178, 179; China, dominance and Balkans 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 48, 50,
norms setting 55, 56, 57–59, 62, 51; Britain 45–46, 50; Europe on the
66–68, 70–72, 73, 81–82, 177; margin of the Pax Ottomana 42–45,
cross-cultural norms in contemporary 51, 173; Europe, weakness of 35, 37,
international society 10; English 38, 51; France 43, 44–45, 46, 47, 50;
School 5, 10–11; European normative the Mediterranean 36, 37, 38, 42, 45;
hegemony 10–11, 180; Japan, Middle East 35, 41–42, 44, 46, 50, 51;
dominance and norms setting 66, 76, North Africa 35, 37, 42, 50, 51;
81, 83, 87–89, 93, 175; Mongol Russia, war against 12, 33, 48–49, 50;
dominance and norms setting 13, 17, see also Ottoman Empire
26, 27; Ottoman Empire, dominance
and norms setting 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, Padden, Robert Charles 126–27
41, 43–44, 45–47, 51, 52, 169, 172, Philpott, Daniel 7
173; Western international norms 5 pluralism 7, 8, 36, 75, 173; Africa
141–42, 145, 152, 158; the Americas
O’Brien, Patrick 169–80 129–30, 134–35; Britain 95, 113;
O’Hagan, . Jacinta 77, 92 cultural pluralism 42, 51, 52, 80, 119,
Ortaylı, Ilber 38, 39 130, 169, 172, 179; cultural pluralism/
Ostrowski, Donald 24, 25 international order relationship 4, 11,
Ottoman Empire 32, 34–54, 169, 172– 34, 36, 42, 52, 75, 77, 114–15, 119,
73; agency 39, 40–41, 51; caliphate 130, 142, 180; Japan 84, 176;
period 41, 49, 51; Capitulation system Ottoman Empire 35, 42, 44, 45, 47,
43, 44–45, 46, 50, 51; Christianity 52–53, 173; pluralism in inter-state
38–39, 41, 49; Constantinople/ relationships 141; universal/
Istanbul 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, idiosyncratic values distinction 172,
46, 49, 51, 53 (fall of 35, 38–39); 180; see also cross-cultural interaction
 Index 213
Polanyi, Karl 52 21–22, 23, 24–25, 28, 29, 30; Russian
Portugal 97, 107, 112, 116, 128, 166, identification with Mongols 25, 27–
167, 168; the Americas 122, 123, 124, 28); steppe 13, 18, 25, 28–29, 30–31,
128–29, 148, 178 (bandeira/slavery 32; steppe empires 14, 30, 31–32;
122, 128–30, 134, 135); Angola 139, succession 21, 22; trade 25–26, 75;
148–52, 157–58 (inland activity 151); Tver’ 22, 23, 28, 33; Vsevolodskiys
China 55, 56, 57, 62–63, 64, 65, 20–21; see also Mongol Empire
66–68, 69; empire-state 167; Japan 67,
75, 76, 83, 85, 89; Macao 64, 66–68, Salisbury, Neal 136
71, 75; Manuel, King of Portugal 69; Schlesier, Karl H 132
Sebastian, King of Portugal 128, 150; Sikkink, Kathryn 7
Sino-Portuguese War 63; Treaty of slavery: the Americas 139; Mongol
Tordesillas 167 Empire 25; Portugal, bandeira 122,
post-modernism 161 128–30, 134, 135; see also African
slave trading
Quirk, Joel 1–11, 138–58, 178–79 social sciences 160, 161, 166;
Eurocentrism 159, 160
Rahman, Nor-Afidah Abd 66 sovereignty 5, 7; Africa 143, 145; Britain
realism 5 99, 100, 101, 102, 113, 114; capitalism
religion 12, 77; alliance 42; see also 98; colonialism 166; imperial
Christianity; Islam sovereignty 173; indigenous
Renaissance 38, 59 sovereignty 118; international society
Richardson, David 9, 10, 138–58, 178–79 53, 56, 98, 115; Japan, hierarchical
Risse, Thomas 7 sovereignty 82, 83–84, 85, 87, 93, 176;
Rodney, Walter 143 nineteenth century 168–69; non-
Ropp, Stephen C. 7 Western polity 8; see also state
Russia 10, 12–33, 48, 170, 174; Spain 76, 83, 84, 85, 93; the Americas
Aleksander Nevskiy 21, 25, 33; 118, 119–28 passim, 130, 148, 167,
alliance 17, 23, 24, 28, 30, 32, 33; 177; empire-state 167; Philip III, 128;
China 61, 69, 70, 71, 75, 176 (Treaty Treaty of Tordesillas 167
of Nerchinsk 61, 70, 75, 174, 176); Spence, Jonathan 71
Christianity 13, 25, 27, 31, 49, 174; Spuler, Bertold 15, 24
Cossacks 29; Crimean Khanate 12, state 30; empire/state link 166–67;
23, 25, 29, 33; Eurocentrism 13; European states system 29, 51;
European international society 162, modern system of states 2; nation-
174–75, 180; Golden Horde 21, 22– state 166, 167; pluralism in inter-state
23, 28, 30, 32–33; Il-khan empire 13, relationships 141; statehood 171, 178;
19, 26, 32; Karakorum 13, 18, 19, 21, system of states/society of states
32; Khipchak Khanate 12–13, 14, 19, distinction 53, 79; Westphalian system
21–31 passim, 32; Lithuania 22–23, 2, 6, 119; see also international
26, 29, 30, 33; Mongol dominance society; sovereignty
and norms setting 13, 17, 26, 27 Suganami, Hidemi 42, 78, 80–81, 175
(suzerain system 12, 18–23 passim, 27, suzerain system 22, 165, 168; China 9;
28, 30, 31, 33, 175); Mongols and Mongol Empire 12, 18–23 passim, 27,
Rus’ polities 17–18, 19–25, 32, 174; 28, 30, 31, 33, 174; see also tribute
Mongols and Russian-European system
relations 25–28, 29, 175; Moscow 10, Suzuki, Shogo 1–11, 26, 56, 76–93, 175–76
22–24, 28, 29, 33; Muscovy 23, 24, Sweet, James 149
26–27, 28–30, 31, 33; nomadism
30–31; Ottoman Empire, war against Tanaka, Takeo 82
12, 33, 48–49, 50; rise of Russia 23, 33, Tashiro, Kazui 80, 84
174; Russian/Mongol hybridization Teschke, Benno 98, 99
10, 13, 24, 27–28, 29, 31, 32, 174–75 Thomson, Janice 137
(borrowings from Mongol practice Thornton, John 145, 149
214 Index
Toby, Ronald P. 82–83, 88 war: Africa 142, 145, 150–51, 152; the
tolerance 5, 20, 135, 136; international Americas 125, 127, 128, 129, 131–33,
order 76, 77, 93; Ottoman Empire 39, 134, 135; China, warriors 57, 64–68;
44, 47, 52 Cold War 5; Mongol Empire, warfare
trade 9; Africa 144–45, 146, 148; the and strategy 14, 17, 21–22, 23–24, 25;
Americas 131–32; Britain 50, 68, 96– Opium War 56, 57, 63, 68, 74;
113, 116, 173–74; China 56, 57, 62–68, Ottoman Empire 37, 40; Russia 12, 33,
69, 70–71, 73, 75, 82, 177 (Canton 48–49, 50; Sino-Portuguese War 63
system 68, 71, 75, 88); diplomacy 134; Watson, Adam 36, 38, 42, 53, 77–78, 79,
Egypt 32; India 173–74; international 162, 163, 180; The Evolution of
society 44; Japan 9, 67, 75, 76, 83; International Society 36, 140, 180; see
Mongol Empire 25–26, 32, 75; also The Expansion of International
nineteenth century, international trade Society
169–70; Ottoman Empire 37, 39, 40, Watson, I. Bruce 97
41–42, 43–45 (Capitulation system 43, Weber, Max 100, 160, 161
44–45, 46, 50, 51); Russia 25–26, 75; Welsh, Jennifer M. 36
see also African slave trading; the Wendt, Alexander 90
Netherlands; Portugal the West: decline 8; dynamic West/
tribute system: African slave trading passive-static East 1, 4, 5; global
145, 153, 154; China 55, 63, 64, 66, domination of 4; imperialism 4, 5, 7,
67, 69, 70, 71, 73, 82, 85; Japan 77, 20, 78, 138; rise of the West 1, 2, 9,
82, 83, 84–85, 90; see also suzerain 10, 160–61; shift of power and wealth
system from the West to the non-West 2, 3;
Trotsky, Leo 31 values of 3; West vis-à-vis the rest as a
problematique 1–4; Western
United States 76, 123, 124, 130, 136, domination 79, 80; Western moral
178; diplomacy 172; international superiority 5, 6, 76, 92
society transformation 169–72, 179–80; Westphalian system: China 10, 58;
liberal democracy 92; military critique of 98; international society
superiority 169, 170 56, 98, 161; Treaty of Westphalia 1, 2,
57, 76, 98, 161; Westphalian
Vernadsky, George 33 legitimacy 6; Westphalian myth 2, 77,
Vigezzi, Brunello 163 166; Westphalian peace 2, 98
Vigneswaran, Darshan 9, 10–11, 94–117, Wigen, Einar 175
173–74 Wight, Martin 6, 53, 85, 89–90, 165, 180
Vincent, John 53, 171 Wills, John E. 63, 67, 69, 72, 75
Voegelin, Eric 15
Zhang, Yongjin 1–11, 26, 51, 55–75, 81,
Waley-Cohen, Joanna 62 176–77
Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice 169 Zakaria, Fareed 3
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