First Global Age, 1400-1800

MA Thesis in Maritime History (Faculty of Letters, Lisbon University FLUL, 2014) - revised version

The present thesis Shipwrecks of the “Carreira da Índia” (1595-1623) – Sources
for the Study in Portuguese Maritime History deals with factors which caused losses of
ships of the Carreira da Índia which linked the European metropolis Lisbon with its
Goa based Estado da Índia between 1595 and 1623. Although Portuguese-Asiatic
shipping was formally separated from the Habsburg Empire during the Union of the
Two Iberian Crowns (1580-1640), the European policies of the Spanish Kings,
especially towards the United Provinces and the Netherlands had its influence and
effects on the Portuguese side.
Shipwrecks, either on the outward bound or homeward bound voyages had
occurred for various reasons since the early days of the Carreira da Índia yet the
emergence of the two private European Companies, the Dutch United East India
Company (founded in 1602) and the British East India Company (founded in 1600)
were a new momentum by which’s characteristics of concurrence and struggle for
supremacy of the European-Asiatic spice trade, losses of Portuguese ships were caused
by planned and executed military operations as well.
Focusing on the geographical region of the Mozambique Channel in which the
losses have taken place, the thesis combines a historiographical approach with records
of underwater archaeology analyzing questions related to the political environment and
planed military operations in which shipwrecks have occurred as well as causes of
shipwrecks observing ship building and design modifications and effects related to
economic patterns such as the monetary flows of the Portuguese outward bound
shipping during the period of observation.

Naufragios da Careira da Índia (1595-1623)

The capital function of Seville as the center of the transatlantic economy of the Early Modern Age left in the background the study of its relations with the rest of the Crown of Castile. In this paper we aim to establish the role of Seville in the Castilian urban network from the outputs of the precious metals it arrived. Analysis of the receptor places, as well as senders and receivers reveals the character of intercity ties.

This article examines the progress of a series of ambassadorial visits to Rome by emissaries from the Kongo, Japan, and Safavid Persia as they unfolded over the reign of Pope Paul V. Close attention is paid to the visual representation of the ambassadors, and of their actions, in engravings and in the decoration of the Quirinal Palace. The author argues that the public aspects of diplomacy, and of the visual representations based on it, played a significant role in articulating the Papacy's missionary ambitions and sense of its global position. Furthermore, it is argued that the diplomatic and courtly practices of the papal court played a significant role in mediating the representation of "other " cultures in early modern Europe.

This book chapter presents the Geographically-Integrated History paradigm for research on cooperation of one of the projects of the TECT ("The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading") of the EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research) Scheme of the European Science Foundation.

Berbicara tentang Jember, utamanya munculnya Jember menjadi sebuah daerah yang produktif secara ekonomi dari perkebunan dan pertanian memang tidak tercipta dalam satu kebas perjalanan sejarah pendudukan kolonial Nusantara oleh Pemerintahan Hindia Belanda kala itu. Menyitir Alm. KH. Abdurahman Wahid atau yang dikenal dengan Gus Dur, saat beberapa kali bertandang ke Jember, sekitar tahun 2003, bertemu dengan ribuan petani tembakau di alun-alun Ambulu kala itu, sempat berkelakar "Jember ini memang jauh, jauhnya seperti kalau jin buang anak," kelakar Alm. Gus Dur 1 yang disambut gelak tawa para petani tembakau di Alun-Alun Ambulu Jember tersebut.

This article analyses the presence in Manila of Armenian merchants from New Julfa, and aims to bring together Spanish primary sources and the rich historiography on the Julfan trade diaspora. Attracted by the silver arriving from Acapulco, Armenians played an important commercial role in the Philippines. We address their complicated relationship with the Spanish authorities, their participation in both inter-Asiatic and trans-Pacific exchanges, and their life experiences as told in their own words before the court of the Spanish Inquisition in Manila.
KEYWORDS: Armenian merchants; foreigners in Manila; trade diaspora; cross-cultural trade; respondentia bonds; Spanish colonial trade.

This chapter presents space-time representations to improve our understanding of human interactions within geographical space. Using the paradigm of Geographically-Integrated History, we focus particularly on the First Global Age, 1400-1800. For this purpose, we make use of ideas drawn from the work of Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945).

"Historians lack an adequate research infrastructure to support collaborative research, which is becoming more common in the discipline. Moreover, in the broad area of Digital History, historians are collaborating more often with those in other disciplines. To avoid misunderstandings, which can destroy collaboration, historians require adequate guidelines about key areas, such as joint publication and data sharing. As a basis for discussion by professional history associations, I propose such standards.
"

This file contains the PowerPoint slides I used for my presentation of my paper, "A Complex Systems Landscape: Recognizing What's Important in World History," which I presented at the recent World History Association Conference in Bilbao, Spain (24 June 2022). In order to understand the slides, you must also have a copy of the paper, which tracks the slides. The paper is also available on my Academia page.

Paper for the World History Association conference, Bilbao, Spain, 23-25 June 2022, as part of session D1, Databases for World Historical Information about Distance, Mobility, and Migration (Friday, 24 June, 16.30-18.00). This paper introduces a metaphor/model for a world history greater than the sum of its parts. The metaphor guides us to the necessary historical information and suggests the sort of database required for its representation.
I base this metaphor on a pair of linked visualizations created by theoretical biologist C. H. Waddington (1905-1975) to model the morphogenesis of tissues and organs from a fertilized egg. The first illustration displays the landscape, a surface with hills and valleys through which a ball rolls, representing the process. The second illustration reveals from below that the landscape’s features are the expression of genes, which are linked together by strings.
I use the first illustration to represent a complex, nonlinear, human system in which the various features respond to variables with which the ball (some historical process) interacts as it rolls in time through the space. From below, Waddington’s genes are now system variables, still connected by strings so that perturbations in a variable will be communicated to other variables, altering the landscape and the ball’s path. A few of the variables, called “control variables,” are always near instability, and if one or more of them becomes unstable, the entire system enters a “phase transition” out of which a new human system emerges. To understand the historical processes, we require narrative knowledge, with which, for clarity, the paper will tie the metaphor to historical examples drawn from the First Global Age, 1400-1800. The PowerPoint and reading version of the paper will be uploaded after the session.

" Historians and Human Geographers deal with human systems or subsystems of considerable complexity. This situation presents a dilemma to those who use computational technologies, which demand a high level of precision to organize, analyze, and visualize information: the more complex the system is, the greater the imprecision of the available data. Historians and geographers often feel that their imprecise, ambiguous, contradictory, messy, largely qualitative information does not “fit” well in the available software categories, and they have trouble discussing the results produced when they work within computational environments because category assignment seems so arbitrary. This dilemma appears dramatically with the use of Geographically-Integrated History (GIH) as a research strategy. In this paper, we introduce fuzzy set theory (or fuzzy logic) as a proven solution for dealing with imprecision in complex systems.
"

Report on the TECT Conference at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria, 15-18 September 2009. Conference title: “Evolution of Cooperation: Models and Theories”; prepared especially for the nineteen core researchers of the TECT project “Dynamic complexity of self-organizing, cooperation-based commercial networks in the first global age”, who were excluded from participation by the collapse of TECT networking funds. The DynCoopNet Project within TECT focuses on cooperation within the networks linking the global domains of Iberian Monarchies during the First Global Age, 1400-1800.

THE “CARRERAS DE INDIAS”. INSTITUTIONAL PLURALISM IN THE EARLY MODERN SPANISH ATLANTIC. A PROPOSAL: The “Carrera de Indias” is acknowledged as the only institutional space formally sanctioned at underpinning and shaping the trades between Spain and the Americas during the Early Modern period. The “Carrera de Indias” was based on the norms and regulations promoted by the “Casa de la Contratación”. Different to classic approaches and as part of a wider research agenda, this paper contends the need for a reevaluation of the institutional configuration of the Spanish Atlantic as a plural and composite arena. A comprehensive examination of the sphere of slave trade between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth centuries will offer insight into those questions.

Slave trade’s jurisdictions run parallel to the ones of the “Casa de la Contratación” and entailed the formation of specific economic fields, concrete commercial practices, and different relational spheres to the ones of the “Carrera de Indias”. The coexistence of both institutional spaces was, however, highly controversial. By focusing on the systemic illegal trades conducted within the slave trade’s sphere in detriment of the “Carrera de Indias” interests, and the agents that led them, this paper will offer a more insightful, deeper, and complex image of the political economy of the Spanish empire during the Early Modern period and the mercantile praxis it brought about in the Atlantic world.

LAS "CARRERAS DE INDIAS". PLURALIDAD INSTITUCIONAL EN EL ATLÁNTICO ESPAÑOL DURANTE LA EDAD MODERNA. UNA PROPUESTA DE ESTUDIO: La “Carrera de Indias”, organizada a partir de las normas y reglas promocionadas por la Casa de la Contratación, es frecuentemente entendida como el único espacio institucional operativo y formalmente sancionado en la articulación de las relaciones comerciales entre España y América durante la Edad Moderna. Frente a la anterior interpretación, y como parte de una agenda de investigación más amplia, nuestro trabajo avanza diferentes argumentos que abogan por una relectura de la configuración del espacio institucional del atlántico hispano como un sistema plural y de carácter compuesto. Una mirada a la esfera del comercio de esclavos con América entre los siglos XVI y XVIII nos permitirá arrojar luz sobre tales aspectos.

Las jurisdicciones vinculadas a la trata de esclavos corrieron como un espacio institucional paralelo respecto a los entornos mercantiles promocionados por la Casa de la Contratación, dando pie de este modo al establecimiento de ámbitos económicos, prácticas comerciales y marcos relacionales de carácter específico. La coexistencia de ambos espacios institucionales estuvo jalonada de numerosas y constantes fricciones. Una mirada a los tráficos ilegales conducidos de manera sistemática desde la esfera de la trata de esclavos en detrimento de los intereses de la “Carrera de Indias”, así como a sus protagonistas, nos permitirá ofrecer una imagen más amplia, profunda y compleja sobre la economía política del imperio español durante la Edad Moderna y el tipo de prácticas mercantiles a las que se dieron pie en el mundo atlántico.

The contribution of the Genoese and the role of the city Genoa were crucial in the exploration and settlement of the Europeans in the Atlantic archipelagos and the Americas. The Genoese presence was not limited to the first stages of those historical processes, making it possible to trace them throughout centuries. However, different historiographical traditions and approaches seem to have obscured this subject.

This paper primarily aims at restoring into a single narrative the experiences led by the Genoese in the Atlantic during the Early Modern period. In addition, by placing this case in broader historiographical contexts, it will contribute to our understanding of the European presence abroad and how it has been grasped by historians.

Series: Northern Lights
Publisher: Lund Humphries

Always recognised as a master print from the moment of its appearance around 1649, the Hundred Guilder Print is one of Rembrandt's most compositionally complex and visually beautiful works.

This book gives a full overview of the fascinating story surrounding this print, from its genesis and market value to attitudes towards it in the present day. Focusing on the tradition of printmaking as well as the reception of the print in Rembrandt's time, Golahny explores the ways the artist made visual references to the work of such masters as Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, while uniquely combining aspects of Christ's ministry.

Placing the work within its wider cultural and historical context, Rembrandt's Hundred Guilder Print offers an original and engaging approach to current Rembrandt scholarship and is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of one of the most famous artists of the Dutch Global Age.

For more info, visit https://www.lundhumphries.com/products/rembrandts-hundred-guilder-print

Review of J. B. Owens, 'By My Absolute Royal Authority': Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age, written by Rila Mukherjee (U. of Hyderabad, India), in which she does an excellent job of explaining the book and suggesting future research.

Com base em documentação judicial, de natureza senhorial, este artigo identifica as primeiras referências conhecidas ao cultivo da batata em Portugal, na primeira metade do séc. XVII, e apresenta a difusão do tubérculo por todo o distrito de Coimbra no século XIX.

This project constitutes a multidisciplinary research agenda of a virtual organization of historians, geographers, computer scientists, and mathematicians to share historical social science data and develop geographically integrated frameworks to address complex, dynamic, nonlinear systems and social networks.

This brief paper explains in Spanish the collaborative multidisciplinary and multinational research project "Dynamic Complexity of Cooperation-Based Self-Organizing Commercial Networks in the First Global Age" (DynCoopNet), which is one of five projects in the European Science Foundation's EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research) Scheme program "The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading" (TECT). This explanation was provided as part of the preparation for a meeting of the DynCoopNet Portuguese and Spanish teams that was held in Madrid on 30 May 2008.

""By My Absolute Royal Authority": Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age is a study of judicial administration. From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, the kingdom of Castile experienced a remarkable proliferation of judicial institutions, which historians have generally seen as part of a metanarrative of "state-building." Yet, Castile's frontiers were extremely porous, and a crown government that could not control the kingdom's borders exhibited neither the ability to obtain information and shape affairs, nor the centrality of court politics that many historians claim in an effort to craft a tidy narrative of this period.

Castilians retained their loyalty to the monarchy not because of the "power" of the institutions of a developing "state," but because they shared an identity as citizens of a commonwealth in which a high value was given to justice as an ultimate purpose of the political community and a conviction that the sovereign possessed "absolute royal authority" to see that justice was done. This expectation served as a foundation for the political identity and loyalty that held together for several centuries the disparate and globally-dispersed domains of the Hispanic Monarchy, but perceptions of how well crown judicial institutions worked were a fundamental determinant of the degree of support a monarch could attract to meet fiscal and military goals.

This book maps part of this unfamiliar terrain through a microhistory of an extended, high profile lawsuit that was carefully watched by generations of Castilian leaders. Justices from the late fifteenth century to the reign of Philip II had difficulty resolving the conflict because the proper exercise of "absolute royal authority" was itself the central legal issue and the dispute pitted against each other members of important groups who demonstrated a tendency to give prominence to different interpretive schemes as they tried to comprehend their world."

Aujourd’hui, dans l’imaginaire collectif, les noms de
« Louvre » et d’« Ermitage » renvoient immanquablement à
des institutions muséales. En 1800, déjà, le Louvre est un
musée public et l’Ermitage une galerie princière, mais leurs
noms sont alors en premier lieu synonymes de palais, les
dénominations de bâtiments abritant – entre autres – des
collections d’art. La transition d’une galerie princière en
musée public ne s’effectue pas au même rythme au Louvre
et à l’Ermitage ; pourtant, loin de tout déterminisme, une
histoire comparée des deux institutions durant le premier
tiers du XIXe siècle révèle qu’il existe alors, contrairement à
ce que voudrait faire croire une littérature sur les musées
bien souvent présentiste, une proximité dans l’organisation
administrative et architecturale entre les deux établissements.
En effet, à partir de 1804, le Louvre connaît, contrairement
à l’Ermitage, des règles d’ouverture au public plus
larges qui légitiment son appellation de musée, mais il est
aussi, et cette fois-ci tout comme l’Ermitage, rattaché à une
administration de la Maison de l’empereur, car abrité dans
un palais impérial. En d’autres termes, sous le Premier
Empire – voire la Restauration et la Monarchie de Juillet –,
le Louvre et l’Ermitage ont un statut plus similaire qu’il n’y
paraît. Après un rapide historique de l’histoire institutionnelle
et architecturale des deux lieux vers 1800, la présente
étude s’attache à tirer avantage d’une telle comparaison
pour mettre en lumière l’histoire d’une partie du Louvre, à
savoir l’étage noble de la cour Carrée dès sa pleine et entière
conquête sous Napoléon (1769-1804-1814/15-1821).

ABSTRACT: This article discusses graduate education in geographically-integrated history as developed by the History
Department of Idaho State University for its M.A. in Historical Resources Management. This Master’s program is based the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and related information technologies. In addition to discussing the rationale and design of the program, the article illustrates what is involved in graduate education of this type through a description of the author’s introductory graduate course “Geographic Information Systems in Historical Studies.”

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3310410.0013.105

Guest lecture at the international research training group program "Baltic Borderlands" für das Sommersemester 2014 "States, Stories, Agents and Perspectives - Bordering Spaces"

Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University, Greifswald, Germany
15.04.2014

"Program of the 2012 annual meeting of the project "Understanding social networks within complex, nonlinear systems: geographically-integrated history and dynamics GIS" [SOCNET], funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation for four years, $1,761,897 (OCI-0941371, Idaho State University, $1,290,704, J. B. Owens lead PI) and (OCI-0941501, University of Oklahoma, May Yuan PI).
"

"This is the scientific report written in Spanish by Dr. Ana Crespo Solana of the Institute of History, Superior Council of Scientific Research, Madrid, Spain. Dr. Crespo Solana is the co-project leader of the research project "Dynamic Complexity of Cooperation-Based Self-Organizing Commercial Networks in the First Global Age" (DynCoopNet), one of five projects of the European Science Foundation's EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research) Scheme program "The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading" (TECT). The report details the results of a joint meeting of DynCoopNet's Portuguese and Spanish teams.
"

Slides, presentation by J.B. Owens, World Economic History Congress, MIT, USA.
J. B. Owens and Vitit Kantabutra, "Using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to simulate, within the context of the Intentionally-Linked Entities (ILE) database management system, missing information: To explain self-organization and emergence in the world's commercial and political networks during the First Global Age, 1400-1800"