Bartelson- The Social Construction of Globality

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Jens Bartelson 2008Please do not quote or circulate

The Social Construction of Globality

The concept of globality is today commonly used to denote a condition characterized

by the presence of a single socio-political space on a planetary scale. Such a global

space is believed to have resulted from the dissolution of boundaries brought about by

intensified exchange and increased interdependence between territorially bounded and

distinct societies. But beyond such simple points of definition, this global realm has

proven difficult to make theoretical sense of within the social sciences. While there is a

broad agreement to the effect that it is necessary to posit a distinct global level of

analysis in order to be able to explain and understand a wide range of phenomena

which appear to transcend the boundaries of individual states, the social ontology of

this purportedly new domain remains largely unexplored, philosophically as well as

historically. What makes the global domain different from the international domain,

and how should we understand their relationship, ontologically as well as historically?

Unless such basic questions about the conditions of its existence can be answered in a

satisfactory way, the very notion of globality and all that goes with it will be of little

but metaphorical value to the social sciences.1

The inability to make sense of globality has been especially evident within academic

international relations. Most theories of international relations still habitually assume

that their field of inquiry is delimited to the interaction between bounded political

communities in a context defined by the absence of centralized authority. Given this

1 See for example Justin Rosenberg, Globalization Theory: A Post Mortem,

International Politics, vol. 42, 2005, pp. 2-74; Mathias Albert, Globalization Theory:

Yesterdays Fad or More Lively than Ever? International Political Sociology, vol. 1,

no. 2, 2007, pp 165-182.

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basic understanding of the topic of international relations, a distinct global realm

becomes hard to envisage other than perhaps as an epiphenomenon to interstate

interaction and interdependence. As Beck has remarked, the cosmopolitanization of

reality appears as the enemy of international theory, for it seems to undermine the

authority of the theory of the state, to abolish the political monopoly of the national

state and international relations.2 To the extent that globality has been taken seriously

within international relations theory, it has been conceptualized as an end state of a

process which originates in the international system, rather than as a sui generis

condition of sociopolitical life.

While much international relations theory view what goes on in the global realm as

epiphenomena to interstate intercourse, many sociologists assume that this global

realm lacks the essential characteristics of a society. In both instances, therefore,

globality becomes little but a conceptual umbrella under which all phenomena that

cannot be understood by means of the traditional categories of the social sciences

safely can be subsumed. This far, very few scholars are able to understand the global

realm as existing independently of those entities which it is supposed to transcend or

replace. Simply put, what we need in order to make coherent sense of the global is to

show that it has a distinct empirical content that cannot be reduced to what goes on

between states in the international system. But this is only possible to the extent we

succeed in conceptualizing the global realm as wholly ontologically distinct from the

international system of states.

2 Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitical realism: on the distinction between cosmopolitanism in

philosophy and the social sciences, Global Networks, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 131-156, at

148.

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As I shall argue in this paper, if we want to make coherent sense of the concept of

globality as a distinct analytical category, we must first account for how the social fact

of globality has been constructed historically. In order to build such an account, we

must inquire into the conditions that have made it possible to speak and act as if a

single universal socio-political space exists on a planetary scale in the past as well as in

the present. In this paper, I shall suggest that these antecedent conditions largely are to

be found in cosmological beliefs about the makeup of the terrestrial surface, as well as

in corollary beliefs about the inhabitability of the terrestrial surface and the conditions

of dispersion and intercourse by different peoples across this terrestrial surface.

Digging into these antecedent conditions, we are bound to discover that the social fact

of globality not only antedates but also conditions the differentiation of global political

space into territorially bounded political communities, and that it is intimately

connected to corresponding ideas of the cultural division of mankind into distinct and

unique peoples. This implies that the order of analytical priority between the

international system of states and the global realm ought to be reversed, and hence that

a sui generis account of globality must be built on the recognition that the world was

global well before it became international in any recognizably modern sense of this

latter term. In my view, globality constituted the default setting of political thought and

action before our core political concepts were nationalized and had their range of

meaningful reference confined to territorially demarcated communities. Thus, in

contrast to current attempts to understand the emergence of the global as the outcome

of processes taking place within the international system, our attempts to understand

the emergence of the international system of states must be able to explain how the

global domain was differentiated into bounded spaces populated by distinct peoples. In

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the next section, I shall dwell briefly on the reasons why contemporary international

relations theory and sociological theory have been unable to account for globality in

sui generis terms. I shall then go on to suggest a way to understand the historical

construction of globality in terms of the cosmological conditions of emergence. In the

final section, I shall offer a brief account of how the social fact of globality conditioned

the emergence of distinct and bounded political communities in Europe.

I

One obvious reason why contemporary international relations theory has been

unable to conceptualize the global is its ontological statism. Yet accusing the study of

international relations for being statist is a bit like accusing the devil for being evil.

That the identity of this discipline has been strongly conditioned by the concept of the

state is very true but also very trivial. But contrary to what is widely believed, this

focus on the state has never been unchallenged or left unqualified, not even within the

realist tradition frequently held responsible for its invention and uncritical

dissemination. While later theorists certainly took the presence of states for granted,

and had a quite simplistic understanding if any at all of what they contained, there

is an equally long tradition of dissecting the state concept within the discipline of

international relations.3

Arguably none of this dissecting has made it any easier to understand political

orders characterized by boundless forms of community and decentralized forms of

3 See for example Erik Ringmar, On the Ontological Status of the State European

Journal of International Relations, vol. 2, no. 4, 1996, pp. 439-66.

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authority. One corollary of this has been a denial of the existence of anything

genuinely global within mainstream international relations theory. Many of those who

deny the existence of anything distinctively global do so by insisting that allegedly

global phenomena can be explained with reference to what goes on between states in

the international system. They thereby assume that what looks global is reducible to

what is going on in the international sphere, and hence that there is no need to posit the

existence of a global domain for explanatory or other purposes. Sometimes this

assumption is explicitly stated, but more often it is simply implicit in the understanding

of disciplinary identity and its limits. But quite irrespective of whether the permanence

of sovereign state is explicitly defended or merely taken for granted, the possibility of a

sociopolitical space outside or beyond the domain constituted by the international

system and the sum total of relations within it is ruled out.4 On those relatively rare

occasions when this presupposition has been subjected to critical analysis, it has

largely been a matter of exposing its ideological implications for theory and practice of

international relations.5 Even later constructivist efforts to deal critically with the state

have ended up claiming that while essential attributes like identity and interest are

4 See for example Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty. Organized Hypocrisy, (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1999); Stephen D. Krasner, Problematic Sovereignty, in

Stephed D. Krasner ed. Problematic Sovereignty. Contested Rules and Political

Possibilities. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 1-23, Robert Jackson,

Sovereignty in World Politics: a Glance at the Conceptual and Historical Landscape,

in Robert Jackson ed., Sovereignty at the Millennium, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp.

9-34; Alan James, The Practice of Sovereign Statehood in Contemporary International

Society, in Robert Jackson ed., Sovereignty at the Millennium, (Oxford: Blackwell,

1999), pp. 35-51.

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socially constructed all the way down, the existence and self-identity of the sovereign

state has remained an indispensable starting point for these arguments. So despite or

rather because these critical endeavors, the state appears to be very alive and well

within international relations theory, the outcome of the above kind of questioning

having been to underwrite the necessity of the state concept for the study of

international relations.6 When viewed from this perspective of mainstream international

relations theory, processes of globalization have brought little but intensified exchange

and increased interdependence between what in essence remain basically self-identical

units coexisting within basically stable international system. This granted, we are

obliged to supplement our understanding of this basic structure of world politics with

hypotheses that might help us explain those transnational phenomena and processes

which otherwise would remain enigmatic. So while these theories might differ widely

about the extent to which exchange and interdependence actually affect the interests

and identities of particular states, none of them have any clear conception of global

5 See for example Richard K. Ashley, The Geopolitics of Geopolitical Space: Toward a

Critical Social Theory of International Politics, Alternatives, vol. 12, 1987, pp.

403-434.

6 See Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 193-245; Alexander Wendt, The state as

person in international theory, Review of International Studies, vol. 30, 2004, pp.

289-316. For discussions of this issue, see Jens Bartelson, Second Natures: Is the State

Identical with Itself, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 4, no. 3, 1998,

pp. 295-326; Hannes Lacher, Putting the State in its Place: the Critique of State-

Centrism and Its Limits, Review of International Studies, vol. 29, no. 4, 2003, pp.

521-41.

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level of analysis distinct from that of the international system. On this account,

concepts of a global society or community have little explanatory purchase, since they

become hard to make analytical sense of in the absence of boundaries.7

Other theorists believe that what goes on in the contemporary world cannot easily

be reduced to what goes on within an international system of states. Instead they have

struggled to conceptualize the global domain either in terms of transcendence of the

international system, or as epiphenomenal in relation to that system. In the former case,

the global is conceptualized as an end state in which the international system

eventually is replaced by a brand new sociopolitical global order the contours of which

remains to be known. In the latter case, the global is conceptualized as being fully

capable of coexisting with the international system out of which it has risen, and thus

also fully intelligible in terms of its relationship to the latter. To these authors,

transnational flows of people, goods, information and capital across borders have

brought about a massive transition from what once was a system of distinct and

bounded political communities into a new world characterized by more fluid forms of

political identity as well as de-territorialized forms of political authority.8But in order

7 For an interesting treatment of this problem, see Barry Buzan, From International to

World Society. English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalization,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

8 For some early versions of this argument, see for example Stephen Gill, Reflections

on Global Order and Sociohistorical Time, Alternatives, vol. 16, no. 3, 1991, pp.

275-314; John Gerard Ruggie, Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in

International Relations, International Organization, vol. 47, no. 1, 1993, pp. 139-174;

Timothy W. Luke, Discourses of Disintegration, Texts of Transformation: Re-Reading

Realism in the New World Order, Alternatives, vol. 18, no. 2, 1993, pp. 229-258;

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to make sense of what goes on in this brave new world, or so these authors argue,

conventional and state-centric accounts of international relations must be abandoned in

favor of a theoretical framework that takes transnational phenomena into consideration

without attempting to reduce them to what goes on within or between states. For this

purpose, the global level must be regarded as categorically distinct from the

international level. From this contention it follows that global politics only can be

properly understood from within of a global realm existing independently of the

international system of states. Such global society cannot be properly understood

unless we posit the existence of a larger social whole beyond that of a territorially

differentiated system of states. Responding to this theoretical challenge, several

authors have tried to conceptualize the global realm as ontologically independent of the

state and the states system.

But in order to make empirical sense of the global, most of these authors have

viewed its emergence as the outcome of processes which effectively have transcended

Philip Cerny, Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action,

International Organization, vol. 49, no. 4, 1995, pp. 595-625; Saskia Sassen, Losing

Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1996), pp. 1-30; Yale H. Ferguson & Richard W. Mansbach, Polities. Authority,

Identities, and Change, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 3-31;

Michael Mann, Has Globalization Ended the Rise and Rise of the Nation-State?,

Review of International Political Economy, vol. 4, no. 3, 1997, pp. 472-96; Ian Clark,

Beyond the Great Divide: Globalization and the Theory of International Relations,

Review of International Studies, vol. 24, no. 4, 1998, pp. 479-498; John Agnew,

Mapping Political Power Beyond the State Boundaries: Territory, Identity, and

Movement in World Politics, Millenium, vol. 28, no. 3, 1999, pp. 499-521.

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the limitations of the international system, and its rigid separation between domestic

and international spheres. According to a widespread view, intensified interaction and

growing interdependence within the international system have brought about a

denationalization of authority and identity within domestic societies, thus profoundly

affecting the nature of both units and system.9 To some authors denationalization is

likely to lead to the transcendence and ultimate replacement of the international

system. As Scholte has argued, globality describes circumstances where territorial

space is substantially transcended.10 To him, the rise of supra-territorial relations has

made geographical concepts like territoriality, boundaries and distance increasingly

irrelevant if we want to understand the seamlessness nature of global sociopolitical

relations. To others, globalization is more likely to bring a a predicament in which

sovereign states and new constellations of authority and community coexist and

condition each other on a global scale. Thus, according to Ruggie, we have witnessed

the emergence of a new global public domain that is no longer co-terminus with the

system of states, but which exists in transnational non-territorial spatial formations,

and is anchored in norms and expectations as well as institutional networks and circuits

within, across, and beyond states.11 While the international system of states still exist

and account for a fair share of what goes on in the global political sector, this system

9 For a clear statement, see Saskia Sassen, Globalization or Denationalization? Review

of International Political Economy, vol. 10, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1-22.

10 Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction, (Houndmills: MacMillan,

2000), p. 48.

11 John Gerard Ruggie, Reconstituting the Global Public Domain Issues, Actors and

Practices, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 10, no. 4, 2004, pp.

499-531, at 519.

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must be understood as fundamentally embedded within a broader institutional arena

concerned with the production of global public goods. This analysis implies that the

global realm at least partly is constituted by the presence of some political authorities

of a global scope. As Agnew has argued, when assumptions about the fixed and

universal nature of territoriality no longer work to locate sovereignty in place, we

begin to see, for better and for worse, that there is political authority beyond the

sovereign construction of territorial space.12 As Sassen recently has argued, the

current phase of globalization consists at least partly of global systems evolving out of

the capabilities that constituted territorial sovereign states and the interstate system. 13

But as Justin Rosenberg has asked rhetorically, how could the very thing which

supposedly is to be contradicted by transnational relations actually be their

precondition? But maybe this transformation only looks dramatic when viewed from

the perspective of the international system. In his view, if one starts with a model of

the international system defined by the political interaction of territorially defined

entitiesthen the enormous volume of transnational flows and interconnections today

is bound to appear little short of revolutionary.14

But what when viewed from outside international relations theory? At first glance,

sociologists seem to be better equipped to conceptualize the global. Sociological

concepts seem to have been less burdened with nationalist baggage than that of the12 John Agnew, Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in

Contemporary World Politics, Annals of the Association of American Geographers,

vol. 95, no. 2, 2005, pp. 437-461, at 456.

13 Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2006), p. 21

14Rosenberg, Globalization Theory: A Post Mortem, International Politics, p. 17 & 19.

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state, and hence easier to stretch to fit a condition in which social and political life is

believed to be increasingly unbounded.15 This is evident from many contemporary

efforts to apply basic categories of sociological analysis to the global realm, while

making traditional conceptions of society look increasingly incoherent and redundant

in the process.16 Yet simultaneously, sociologists have found it difficult to argue that

the global realm constitutes a society or a community in its own right, since the global

realm seems to lack precisely the traditional defining properties of societies and

communities, such as a firm division of labour, a common culture or a common

historical memory. To the extent that historical sociologists are able to speak of

anything resembling a society on a world scale, it is widely believed to be outcome of

intercourse between territorially bounded and distinct societies.17 Being ultimately

derivative of relocations of authority and community such intercourse has brought

within the international system, globality therefore essentially remains an unfinished

revolution, an end state whose existence depends on a fragile global consciousness. As

15 Peter Wagner, An Entirely New Object of Consciousness, of Volition, of Thought:

The Coming into Being and (Almost) Passing Away of Society as a Scientific Object,

in Lorraine Daston ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects, (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 145-157; David Inglis and Roland Robertson, The

Elementary Forms of Globality. Durkheim and the Emergence and Nature of Global

Life, Journal of Classical Sociology, vol. 8, no, 1, 2008, pp. 5-25.

16 John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies. Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century.

(London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1-20.

17 Justin Rosenberg, Why is There No International Historical Sociology?, European

Journal of International Relations, vol. 12, no. 3, 2006, pp. 307-340.

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Martin Shaw has put it, globality is constituted by a common consciousness of human

society on a world scale.18

The above efforts to make theoretical sense of the global realm assume that this is

necessary in order to make sense of phenomena that cannot be satisfactorily explained

with reference to what goes on within or between bounded political communities like

nation states. Most theoretical efforts in this direction assume that global relations are

qualitatively different from international relations, but find it very difficult to specify

exactly in what way and to what extent. Partly this is due to the semantic baggage

carried by the core categories of modern social and political thought, partly to the fact

that they regard the global as the outcome of a more or less dramatic historical

transition the ultimate causes of which are firmly located within the international

realm. So while the above accounts all emphasize the analytical distinctness of the

global realm from that of the international, that does not automatically entail that the

former is ontologically independent of the latter. Since most of these accounts

converge on the assumption that globality is a condition of fairly recent origin, they

imply that the rise of the global amounts to a partial transcendence of the territorial

state and the state system as the dominant loci of political authority and community in

the modern world. While what goes on in the global realm perhaps cannot be reduced

to what goes on in the international system of states, the global is nevertheless

epiphenomenal to that system in the sense that this condition could not have emerged

without those enabling preconditions being present in the international system of

states. Among those who have tried to come to terms within globality, there is a tacit

agreement that globality denotes an end state of a series of highly complex historical

18 Martin Shaw, Theory of the Global State. Globality as an unfinished revolution,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 11-12, 67-97.

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processes which once originated and gained momentum from within the same set of

circumstances they are destined to transform or transcend. In the final analysis, while

the global realm has been conceptualized in increasingly sharp distinction to the

international realm, the existence of the former nevertheless turns out to be dependent

on the existence of the latter.

But if we want to make coherent sense of the concept of globality and its cognates,

we not only need to rid ourselves of the nationalist baggage carried over from modern

social and political theory and the resulting assumption that the global is but a recent

historical offspring of the international. To my kind, we need to understand how we

ended up with our nationalist baggage as well with the idea that the international realm

should enjoy explanatory and ontological primacy in relation to the global. Doing this

amounts to nothing less than a wholesale reversal of the perspective conveyed by

contemporary international relations theory. Rather than understanding the emergence

of the global realm as the outcome of a gradual denationalization of political authority

and community, we should start asking questions of how political authority and

community were nationalized in the first place, and how we ended up assuming that

the corresponding concepts only make clear theoretical sense in the context of bounded

and distinct societies. But in order for this to be possible, we must first account for how

political authority and community were configured before the process of

nationalization got off the ground in theory and practice like. As I shall argue in the

next section, we are then bound to realize that globality long constituted the default

setting of political thought and action, while being a precondition of the universalistic

aspirations of early-modern imperial projects, and that the international system owes

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its existence to the territorial differentiation of a global political space that resulted

from the clash of imperial claims to global sovereignty.

II

While some existing accounts of the emergence of the international system have

emphasized the importance of cosmological beliefs when explaining the emergence of

sovereign states, none of these accounts have bothered to systematically situate this

process a cosmological context.19 One possible reason for this neglect is the fact that

these stateless parts of our past are intrinsically hard to subject to historical analysis,

since most historiography takes the existence of bounded political communities for

granted. Thus, as Fasolt has noted, the mere existence of that past threatens historical

self-consciousness with dissolution.20 What makes these parts of the past so difficult to

understand is the fact that the meta-historical coordinates necessary to historical writing

themselves are contested during this period: if no clear and agreed senses of before and

after and up and down can be read off from the sources themselves, the historians task

becomes difficult if not impossible. Those parts of the past risk become

incomprehensible if we take the meaning of the concepts of space and time to be given

19 John Gerard Ruggie, Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in

International Relations, International Organization, vol. 47, no. 1, 1993, pp. 139-174;

Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and its Competitors. An analysis of systems change,

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 59-77.

20 Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

2003), pp. 27-28.

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and immutable.21 Hence, if we want to gain a more precise understanding of the

stateless parts of our past, we must attend to the history of these concepts as well, and

explore the connections between their historical trajectories and that of our main topic.

Corollary, if we want to gain knowledge of this world as it looked to its inhabitants

before they were divided into different peoples, we cannot take the facts of division and

dispersion for granted. For in order for these facts to make any sense at all, there has to

be another space where division and dispersion can be said to take place. And in order

for the human species to be divided and dispersed, there has to be something there to

divide and disperse in the first place.

Medieval cosmology was based on a variety of sources, most of which distinguished

between a celestial and a terrestrial region. While the former embraced everything from

the moon to the limits of the universe, the latter included everything below the moon to

the centre of the earth.22 Let us start with some of the main assumptions about the

terrestrial region. According to Genesis I, 9, there was a division between the zones

reserved for earth and water respectively. These zones were mutually exclusive, so

where there was water, there could be no earth, and conversely. So certainly, from a

biblical perspective, the ocean was since its beginning literally marked the end of the

known and inhabitable world. The Latin and Greek terms most frequently used to

describe this world was orbis terrarum or oikoumene. The former referred to the three21 See Reinhart Koselleck, Transformations of Experience and Methodological Change:

A Historical-Anthropological Essay, in Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual

History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002),

pp. 45-83.

22 See Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs. The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 11-45.

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interconnected continents Europe, Asia, and Africa which were surrounded by an

impenetrable ocean beyond which life was thought to be unlikely or even impossible.

At the centre of the orbis terrarum was Jerusalem to be found, The Holy City. Ideally,

the borders of the orbis terrarum ought to coincide with those of the oikoumene: even

though primarily a geographical concept, the oikoumene, in its most essential

meaning, can be defined as a region made coherent by the intercommunication of its

inhabitants, such thatno tribe or race is completely cut off from the people beyond

it.23 But beyond the oikoumene no human life was to be found. Both concepts thus

restricted the habitat of humanity to the northern hemisphere, since the southern

hemisphere consisted of a torrid zone, at the end of which the quasi-mythological

Antipodes were to be found.24 The question whether the latter really existed and were

inhabited, and if inhabited, whether by men or by monstrous races, was subject to

considerable debate during the Middle Ages.25 But as Cosgrove has noted, despite

23 James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought. Geography,

Exploration, and Fiction, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 37;

Cosgrove, Apollos Eye, pp. 41-53.

24 Thomas Goldstein, Geography in Fifteenth-Century Florence, in John Parker ed.,

Merchants and Scholars. Essays in the History of Exploration and Trade, (Minneapolis:

The University of Minnesota Press, 1965), pp. 11-32. See also E. H. Bunbury, A

History of Ancient Geography, vol. 2, (New York: Dover, 1959), pp. 546ff.

25 See for example Augustine, City of God, XVI: 8-9. For an account, see John Block

Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 37-58.

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constituting different nations some yet to be redeemed the population of the

oikoumene constituted humanitas.26

In this context it has been argued that the affirmation of a common human descent

simply required that the existence of the Antipodes should be denied, or that the

existence of monsters was required in order to distinguish humanity from its others.27

This problem was further complicated by the fact that it was formulated with reference

to pre-Newtonian notions of up and down. Given these notions, belief in life at

Antipodes was refutable with recourse to a simple reductio, since whether inhabited by

men or monsters, this life must be hard indeed, and for physical reasons alone. Is there

anyone silly enough, asked Lactantius, to believe that there are men whose feet are

higher than their heads? Or that things which lie on earth with us hang downwards with

them, and trees and fruits grow the wrong way up, and rain and snow and hail fall

upwards onto the ground?28

But this worldview was soon to be replaced. As Headley has argued, [t]the

awareness of the accumulated new lands and peoples on a transformed and enlarged

terraqueous globe reinforces the cognitive impact of the accomplishment whereby he

formerly preconceived yet formidable barriers preventing access to other continents and

peoples have been dissolved by a rare combination of reason and experience. The

machine of discovery. had not only produced an immense perceptual challenge and26 Cosgrove, Apollos Eye, pp. 24, 63

27 Valerie I. J. Flint, Monsters and the Antipodes in the Early Middle Ages and

Enlightenment, Viator, vol. 15, 1984, pp. 65-80.

28 Lactantius, Divine Institutiones, 3.24, ed. S. Brandt, L. Caeli Firmiani Lactanti Opera

Omnia 1, (Prague, 1890), pp. 254-55, quoted in Flint, Monsters and the Antipodes, p.

68.

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epistemological problem but also the realization of an almost totally accessible and

inhabitable global arena in which to contend with this problem.29 But as I intend to

show in this section, the cosmological changes that effectively turned the world into

one place conditioned the emergence of the new conceptions of mankind that emerged

largely simultaneously. Gradually, the notion of a relatively uniform mankind is

replaced by assumptions about human diversity, and is accompanied by attempts to

understand this diversity as a consequence of the prior dispersion of the human species

into different corners of the earth.30

The translation of Aristotles De Coelo stimulated new cosmological speculations

among scholars. By the late thirteenth century, Aristotelian cosmology and its

geographical implications had become integrated within Christian doctrine.31According

this theory, the earth was fixed at the centre of the sublunary sphere, and was composed

of the four elements that made up all matter in this region of the universe. Reflecting

their different densities, the four elements were thus neatly arranged in distinct and

concentric spheres. In the absence of external disturbances, these elements could be

29 John M. Headley, The Sixteenth-Century Venetian Celebration of the Earths Total

Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe, p. 24,

Journal of World History, vol. 8, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1-27.

30 For a different version of this argument, see Denis Cosgrove, Apollos Eye. A

Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 1-28.

31 Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 50-56; Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican

Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought,

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 108; Cosgrove, Apollos Eye,

pp. 36-38.

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expected to settle into four stable concentric spheres, with the element earth naturally at

the geometric centre of the globe.32 But this theory could not explain why not all land

was covered with water, and thus turned any observation to the contrary into an

anomaly. Provided that the Aristotelian laws of motion were correct, and the

movements of the heavenly bodies sufficiently regular, the world should rather be

completely submerged in water. Even more puzzling was the question why dry land

was found where it was found, and what the existence of a continuous landmass in turn

implied for the problems of habitability and navigation.33 Curiously, Dante was among

those who tried to solve this problem. In his Comedia, he had described the earth and

its lower regions in terms largely consonant with the Aristotelian worldview. But later,

in his Questio de Aqua et Terra (1320), he proposed that the cause of the protrusion of

land above water is the influence of the stars, which attract land upwards, and by

vapours being generated in the bowels of the earth.34

But this problem could not be satisfactorily resolved within an Aristotelian

framework, since the assumption that earth and water were divided into two distinct

spheres was intimately connected to the idea that the centre of the terrestrial globe

coincided with the centre of the universe. This implied that any revision of

32 Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs, pp. 630-635; Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, pp. 81-2;

Cosgrove, Apollos Eye, pp. 72-78.

33 Thomas Goldstein, The Renaissance Concept of the Earth in Its Influence upon

Copernicus, Terr Incognit, vol. 4, 1972, pp. 19-51.

34 Dante Alighieri, A Question of the Water and of the Land, trans. by C. H. Bromby,

(London: David Nutt, 1897), p. 54. The authenticity of this manuscript has been

inconclusively disputed. See Bruno Nardi, La Caduta di Lucifero e LAutenticit della

Quaestio de Aqua et Terra, (Torino, 1958).

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astronomical beliefs about the place of the earth within the universe would necessitate a

revision of geographical assumptions about the composition of the planetary surface, as

well as conversely.35

And since the latter were intimately connected with assumptions

about the essential unity of mankind and the Biblical causes of its geographical

dispersion, any revision of this framework of cosmological beliefs would also call for a

corresponding redefinition of human community and its place within this cosmological

framework.36

Perhaps the most important step towards constructing the global was taken when the

assumption of two distinct spheres of earth and water was abandoned in favour of the

idea that these elements together form a single sphere with one common centre of

gravity. Once this was done, there was no longer any reason to believe that the human

race was confined to one single landmass, or that the ocean constituted an impenetrable

limit beyond which no human life was to be found. Thus chapter three of Copernicus

De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543) is entitled How Earth Together With

Water Forms One Globe. Here Copernicus sets forth some of the prerequisites for

conceiving of the earth as one planet among others, being a solid sphere capable of both

rotation and revolution. The assumption of an orbis terrarum, a single and continuous

protrusion of land is incorrect, writes Copernicus:

35 Kuhn, Copernican Revolution, pp. 99-132.

36 See Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also Clarence J. Glacken, Traces

on the Rhodian Shore. Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to

the End of the Eighteenth Century, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp.

176-253.

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[t]his can be established by the fact that from the ocean inward the

curvature of the land does not mount steadily in a continuous rise. If it

did, it would keep the sea water out completely and in no way permit

the inland seas and such vast gulfs to intrude. Furthermore, the depth

of the abyss would never stop increasing from the shore of the ocean

outward, so that no island or reef or any form of land would be

encountered by sailors on the longer voyages.37

This argument led to the establishment of three related points. First, rather than being

united into one landmass, there is a manifold of different land formations distributed

relatively evenly across the spherical surface of the globe. Second, rather than existing

in separate spheres and having different centres of gravity, the elements of earth and

water share the same centre of gravity. Third, the planet as a whole is best represented

as a solid geological mass whose chasms are filled with water, the totality being one

perfectly shaped sphere, a rotunditate absoluta. Copernicus had thereby managed to

refute view of the earth as consisting of two spheres, being located in a fixed position at

the centre of the universe.38 According to the view set forth in De Revolutionibus, the

ocean is no longer a limit, but rather a transcontinental waterway, connecting different

and discontinuous land formations to each other.

The cosmological changes effected by Copernicus brought a shift of vantage point

from which questions of political community could be formulated and answered. When

the earth no longer constituted the given centre of the universe, these could now be

formulated with reference to an imagined point of view situated above the terraqueous

37 Nikolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, trans. by Edward

Rosen, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), ch. 3.

38 Goldstein, Renaissance Concept of the Earth, p. 40.

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globe, and answered with reference to the intercourse between different people from

what now were interconnected continents. As Juan Vives noted in 1531, [t]he whole

globe is opened up to the human race, so that no one is so ignorant of events as to think

that the wanderings of the ancientsare to be compared with the journeys of these

travellers.39

But the concept of an orbis terrarum had been abandoned in practice before it was

formally refuted by Copernicus, the impetus coming from the cartographical research

being conducted during the fifteenth century. While being greatly facilitated by the new

conceptions of space that emerged at this point in time, cartographical research was to a

large extent motivated by the search for safer and cheaper trade routes to the East

Indies.40 Almost at the same moment as the Lopo Gonalves first crossed the equator in

1473, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli had written a letter to Ferno Martins, canon of the

Lisbon cathedral, on the subject of possible circumnavigation: You must not be

surprisedif I call the parts where the spices are west, when they usually call them

east, because to those sailing west, those parts are found by navigation on the underside

39 Juan Vives, On Education, (Cambridge, 1913), p. 3, quoted in Walter S. Gibson,

Mirror of the Earth. The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting,

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 49-50.

40 See Denis Cosgrove, Mapping New Worlds: Culture and Cartography in Sixteenth-

Century Venice, Imago Mundi, vol. 44, 1992, pp. 65-89; Samuel Y. Edgerton, The

Renaissance Discovery of Linear Perspective, (New York: Basic Books, 1975);

Thomas Goldstein, The Role of the Italian Merchant Class in Renaissance and

Discoveries, Terrae Incognitae, vol. 8, 1976, pp. 19-27; Erwin Panofsky, Perspective

as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1995).

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of the earth. But if by land on the upper side, they will always be found to the east. 41

Written in order to be comprehensible to the layman, the childish simplicity of these

instructions contrasts nicely with the complexity of the task at hand. This task consisted

of convincing the Portuguese elite of the validity of a new worldview which was clearly

at odds with the educated lore of the day, and prompting them to act urgently upon this

new knowledge. But when both Martins and Alfonso V failed to respond, a copy of the

same letter was sent to a more entrepreneurial spirit in Genoa who soon was to take

action.42

There was a short step from claiming that the ocean was navigable and foreign lands

inhabitable in principle, to demonstrating that the whole world was inhabited in fact.

Such demonstrations could take place in many ways, not infrequently by invoking

observations which earlier had been dismissed as false or absurd when interpreted

within the framework of the orbis terrarum. But as Copernicus scornfully remarked,

there was now little reason to marvel at the existence of antipodes.43 Old but

previously discounted geographical observations were supplemented by the enormous

amount of new observations generated by the discoveries, and gradually assimilated

into one and the same pool of geographical knowledge. Thus, in the very same year as

De Revolutionibus was published, the Venetian humanist Giovanni Battista Ramusio

had taken upon himself the no less heroic task of bringing together all existing

41 Letter, June 24, 1474. Quoted in Goldstein, Geography, pp. 13-14.

42 A copy of this letter was sent by Toscanelli to the young Cristobal Clon. See Norbert

Sumien, La Correspondence du Savant Florentin Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli avec

Christophe Colomb, (Paris, 1927), pp. 9ff.

43 Copernicus, Revolutions, ch. 3.

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geographical knowledge into one organized body.44 This resulted in what was to

become a landmark achievement of Renaissance geography, the Navigazioni e Viaggi

(1550-9). In this work, Ramusio presented a series of arguments to the effect that the

entire world indeed was inhabited by human beings:

[t]he sun makes its course with such order that the inhabitants [at the

north pole] live not as moles buried under the earth but as other

creatures who are upon this terrestrial globe, illuminated so that they

are able most profitably to maintain and provide for their livelihood

Now, by the matter stated above I think there can be no longer any

doubt that beneath the equator and below both poles there is the same

multitude of inhabitants that there are in all the other parts of the

world.45

When later prefacing the first volume, the printer Giunti summarized the upshot of this

argument: it is clearly able to be understood that this entire earthly globe is

marvellously inhabited, nor is there any part of it empty, neither by heat nor by cold

deprived of inhabitants.46 In 1570, this new knowledge was synthesized and presented

by Abraham Ortelius in the shape of an atlas which offered the synoptic vision that

44 See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood. The Elizabethan Writing of England,

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 152.

45 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e Viaggi, (Turin, 1978-88), Vol. 5, pp. 6-9,

quoted in Headley, Venetian Celebration, p. 3.

46 Ramusio, Navigazioni e Viaggi, Vol. 1, p. 8, quoted in Headley, Venetian

Celebration, p. 3.

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disengages one from local prejudice and promotes a cosmopolitanism based on the

moral wisdom that comes from self-knowledge.47

That parts of the world previously thought to be inhabitable indeed were inhabited led

to an expansion of the oikoumene. In the orbis terrarum, the world known by men had

coincided nicely with the world inhabited by the same men. But the construction of a

rotunditate absoluta and its corroboration by empirical cartography brought an

expansion of the oikoumene far beyond its former and ancient limits. In this new world

the discipline of cosmography could reign as an absolute sovereign over the

terraqueous globe. It manipulated at will the natural frontiers of rivers and mountains;

determined the future of peoples by fixing their migrations and boundaries.48

The unfamiliarity of newly discovered places had a destabilizing impact upon the

foundations of medieval knowledge, as the things and living beings found there were

hard to fit into existing categories and classificatory schemes. As Harrison has

remarked, what had once been a coherent universal language was inundated by an

influx of new and potentially unintelligible symbols.49 Most crucially, however, the

idea of a common human descent made it difficult to account for the geographical

47 Denis Cosgrove, Globalism and Tolerance in Early Modern Geography, p. 866,

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 93, no. 4, 2003, pp. 852-870.

48 Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World. The Geographical Imagination

in the Age of Discovery, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 3.

49 Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, p. 91; Anthony

Pagden, European Encounters with the New World. From Renaissance to Romanticism,

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 17-49; Joan-Pau Rubis, Futility in the

New World: Narratives of Travel in Sixteenth-Century America, in Elsner and Rubis

eds., Voyages & Visions, pp. 74-100.

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dispersion of peoples across the dry surfaces of the globe. If this dispersion were to be

consistent with the idea of a common origin, it was necessary to explain how different

people had ended up in different places, as well as why the existence of these places

had been forgotten.50 As Headley has noted, [t]he growing recognition of the earths

universal habitability could only make more acute the problem of squaring the Adamic

origin of all mankind with the swelling contours and complexity of its membership. 51

And since the newly discovered peoples hardly could be described as faithful

Christians, this excluded them from the community of believers as well. Thus, to the

extent that mankind had been rendered coextensive with the class of believers, such

exclusion was bound to be problematic.52

One common response to this new predicament was to twist visions medieval of

universal community into justifications of empire. As we shall be able to notice in the

next section, this reversal was largely accomplished by grafting the inherited symbols

and values of universal community onto a new and territorially defined context. The

problem confronted by those efforts was how to reconcile the geographical diversity of

peoples with their received notions of a unified mankind. Hence the encounter with

new peoples on new continents led to efforts to broaden the definition of political

community in terms increasingly independent of scriptural authority.53

50 See Joan-Pau Rubis, Hugo Grotiuss Dissertation on the Origin of the American

Peoples and the Use of Comparative Methods, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 52,

no. 2, 1991, pp. 221-24.

51 Headley, Venetian Celebration, p. 10.

52 Cosgrove, Apollos Eye, pp. 135-138.

53 See for example John M. Headley, The Universalizing Principle and Process: On the

Wests Intrinsic Commitment to a Global Context, Journal of World History, vol. 13,

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III

When modern states were created, they were created by means of resources already

available within the global context in which they emerged. In this world, visions of a

community of all mankind blended together with visions of monarchy or empire, both

being based on similar foundations and sharing the same symbols. Both visions were

universalistic in aspiration and inherently boundless in scope. But while this world was

populated by peoples who knew little or nothing of territorial differentiation, it

supposedly had a centre, one embodied in the legal and political institutions of early

Rome. This world constituted the symbolic backdrop of subsequent European state

formation, and provided the ideological impetus behind further imperial expansion by

European powers.54 As Yates has argued, [t]he symbolism of the empire of Charles V,

which seemed able to include the whole world as then known and to hold out the

promise of a return to spiritual unity through a revival of the cementing power of the

Christianized imperial virtues, was a comforting phantom in the chaotic world of the

sixteenth century.55 Campanella provides us with an interesting example of the ease

no. 2, 2002, pp. 291-321.

54 See Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: ideologies of empire in Spain, Britain

and France, c.1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 29-102; David

Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2000), pp. 1-23; David Armitage, The Elizabethan Idea of Empire,

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 14, 2004, pp. 269-277.

55 Frances A. Yates, Astraea. The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, (London:

Routledge, 1975), p. 27.

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with which such phantoms were created in the fluid context of Renaissance political

thought. Written within a cosmological framework similar to that of Copernicus, his

Monarchia di Spagna (c. 1600) contains a plan for the creation of a world community,

if only in order to sustain the successful global expansion of Spanish imperial power.

Thus, the best way to secure lasting domination over foreign lands is through the

gradual hispanization of all peoples, by forcing everyone within the empire to adopt

Spanish laws, language, and customs.56 Another influential attempt to articulate a

universalistic framework for understanding geopolitical relations on a global scale

during this period was made by Giovanni Botero, whose Relationi Universali (1591-6)

sought to account for the geographical distribution of political authorities and different

peoples across the planetary surface.57

Those who tried to justify state building faced the formidable task of reinterpreting

and re-contextualizing the rich world of signs, symbols and metaphors that had been

handed down to them from the ancients and medieval Christianity, and which had been

filtered through Renaissance attempts to appropriate the same sources in support of

56 See Frances A. Yates, Giordani Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, (London:

Routledge, 1964), pp. 360-397; John M. Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the

Transformation of the World, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp.

197-245; Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination. Studies

in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1990), pp. 37-64.

57 John M. Headley, Geography and Empire in the Late Renaissance: Boteros

Assignment, Western Universalism, and the Civilizing Process, Renaissance Quarterly,

vol. 53, 2000, pp. 1119-1155.

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city-states. Since these symbols and metaphors had been tailored to fit boundless forms

of political community, the task at hand was how to restrict their range of applicability

in such a way that they could be used to reinforce those particularistic forms of political

identity needed to sustain emergent territorial states. In order to achieve this, certain

things had to be remembered in order to bestow the emergent territorial order with

intelligibility and legitimacy. Other things had to be forgotten, and for much the same

reasons. This was commonly done by making crucial symbols and metaphors appear to

be new and exclusive inventions of particular peoples, while concealing the fact they

constituted parts of a cultural heritage common to the entire West, and sometimes even

to a wider world than that.

As I have argued earlier, similar moves had been undertaken during the Italian

Renaissance, and then notably in the political context of city-states and their quest for

survival in an increasingly hostile environment. Thanks to the peculiarities of

Renaissance modes of knowing and writing, ancient sources could be re-appropriated

and important political insights distilled from them by means of the use of the esoteric

doctrines of resemblance and exempla. Provided that the underlying conception of time

was cyclical, history was bound to repeat itself infinitely. Against the backdrop of such

a cosmology, it was fully possible to argue by means of examples derived from ancient

sources when legitimating different forms of rule or different lines of action against

ones opponents. What once applied in Athens or Sparta now apparently applied in

quattrocento Milan or Firenze, without the slightest degree of anachronism being felt as

long as certain rules had been obeyed in the selection of and sampling from classical

texts. In other words, there was no firm divide separating past and present, simply

because the concept of secular and linear time (tempus) could not claim to be the sole

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legitimate foundation of historiography.58 Perhaps the best example of the resulting

propensity for time traveling is found in Petrarchs letters in support of Cola di

Rienzos effort to reestablish the Roman Republic in 1344, in which Petrarch seems to

assume that the past millennium merely had been a blip on the screen, having done

nothing to change the identity of the Roman people, and its capacity to endow the

emperor with legitimacy.59 And while the Roman concept of patria was used to describe

such secular communities during the Middle Ages, and while the term natio had been

used to denote common birth and ancestry among their members, these secular

communities were intrinsically hard to make sense of outside the universalistic

framework of medieval legal theory.60

But by the sixteenth century, similar rhetorical strategies were redeployed in order

to make sense of a kind of entity that had not yet been conceptualized in fully

independent terms before. This new entity was premised on the actual or desired

coincidence between a sufficiently homogeneous people and a continuous territory, and

58 Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1995); Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories, pp. 541-62.

59 Francesco Petrarca, Letter to Cola di Rienzo and the Roman People (Variae 48,

Horatorio) in Petrarch, The Revolution of Cola di Rienzo (New York: Italica Press,

1996), pp. 10-36; Yates, Astraea, pp. 13-16; Coleman, Ancient and Medieval

Memories, p. 558. See also sa Boholm, Reinvented Histories: Medieval Rome as a

Memorial Landscape, Ecumene, vol. 4, no. 3, 1997, pp. 247-272.

60 See Ernst Kantorowicz, Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought, American

Historical Review, vol. 56, no. 3, 1951, pp. 472-92; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five

Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

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was most frequently created through the assimilation of ancient myth. This is not to say

that any fully modern conceptions of nations or national identity originated at this point

in time, since no such fully particularized conceptions of community were yet

available. Rather, these efforts to justify the congruence between peoples and territories

in mythical terms represent the first steps towards the nationalization of political

community. Not surprisingly, the first authors to tell stories that purported to explain

the spatiotemporal trajectory and gradual triumph of distinct peoples were from that

corner of Europe that had the strongest reasons to do so, given their political

experiences of conquest and discovery. For this purpose, they vernacularized

predominantly Latin sources, and used those sources in order to create poetic defenses

of their achievements.

Thus, when Lus Vaz de Cames wrote his poem Os Lusadas (1572), it was not

only to celebrate the discoveries of Vasco da Gama, but also to instill a sense of

peoplehood to the ancient races of Lusitania. Thus, in Os Lusadas , the triumph of the

Portuguese discoveries is intimately connected not only to the glory and bravery of

those who achieved it, but also, and more importantly, to the formation of the

Portuguese people, their independence from the Castilian Crown, their expulsion of the

Moors, and the dynastic legitimacy of their Crown.61 Connecting all of the above in one

single epic, Cames assimilates and compares the Portuguese experience to that of

other glorious empires in the past. Skillfully redrawing the line between fact and

fiction, the gods of those empires are now on the side of Portugal, the legitimate heir to

their imperial greatness. Thus no one less than Jupiter sets the stage in Canto One:

61 For an analysis of the rhetorical structure of Os Lusadas, see Richard Helgerson,

Forms of Nationhood. The Elizabethan Writing of England, (Chicago: The University

of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 149-163.

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Eternal dwellers in the starry heavens, you will not have forgotten the

great valour of that brave people of the Portuguese. You cannot

therefore be unaware of that it is the fixed resolve of destiny that

before their achievements those of Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and

Romans shall fade into oblivion. Already with negligible forcesthey

have expelled the Moslemwhile against the redoubtable Castilians

the have invariably had heaven on their side.62

This task also required a shift in vantage point from the global perspective conveyed

by Copernicus and the Venetian cartographers. Instead of viewing the whole world

from a hypothetical point above it, Cames views this new world from a point within it:

Proud Europe lies between the tropic of Cancer and the Arctic zone,

where cold is as intense as the heat is here on the equator. To the north

and west it is bounded by the ocean, to the south by the Mediterranean

Sea. And if Spain is the Head of Europe, Portugal, set at its western

extremity, where land ends and sea begins, is as it were the crown on

the head.

63

Cames succeeds in mobilizing a wide range of mythological sources in his

celebration of the Portuguese discoveries. Yet this might strike a more inquisitive

reader as strange, since these glorious battles also include Viriatos guerilla-like war

62 Lus Vaz de Cames, The Lusiads (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1952), p. 42.

63 Cames, Lusiads, p. 78-80.

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against the Romans. But why so daringly count on the support of Roman deities while

taking a fair amount of pride in their victory against the Romans? Would not that most

likely upset the same deities, and tempt them to withdraw their support with reference

to the obvious hubris of the Portuguese? But Os Lusadas is built on a strategy of

textual assimilation. Everything that is foreign to the Portuguese in time and space is

gradually swallowed up in the course of their providential march to unity and grandeur.

Memory traces of earlier empires and their gods are rendered visible and intelligible

only to the extent that they condition the formation of the Portuguese people, and can

be used to justify its achievements. Portugal and the Portuguese become real only to the

extent that the Romans are forgotten other than as a distant yardstick of military valor

and aristocratic virtue. But in order to institute this forgetfulness in a persuasive way,

the Romans must be confronted and beaten on their mythological home ground, as it

were. This is done by the fearsome creature of Adamastor, who introduces himself in

the following way in Canto Five:

I am that mighty hidden cape, called by you Portuguese the Cape of

Storms, that neither Ptolemy, Pomponius, Strabo, Pliny nor any other

of past times ever had knowledge of. This promontory of mine, jutting

out towards the South Pole, marks the southern extremity of Africa.

Until know it has remained unknown: your daring offends it deeply.

Adamastor is my name. I was one of the giant sons of earth, brother of

Enceladus, Briareus, and the others. With them I took part in the war

against Jupiter, not indeed piling mountain upon mountain but as a

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sea-captain, disputing with Neptunes squadrons the command of the

deep.64

It seems like Vasco da Gama finally has met somebody in the same trade from

whom he has things to learn. The discovery of Adamastor by Vasco marks the final

poetic victory over the Romans, since this bizarre innovation by Cames is a potent

newcomer in the Western gallery of mythological creatures. His claim to fame is to

have fought none but Jupiter himself, if only in order to be turned into a rock as a

punishment. Yet as we might recall from Matthew, being turned into a rock is not

necessarily a bad thing, since both empires and churches can be built on them. 65 And

through this double move, Vasco da Gama is now admitted to the same aristocratic hall

of fame, closely followed by his men, since no trial, however great, has caused them to

falter in that unshakable loyalty and obedience which is the crowning quality of the

Portuguese.66

Thus, Cames succeeded in creating a veritable poetic vortex that soaked up what

was of value in both Roman and Christian symbolic heritage, and twisted all those

memory fragments into a poetic defense of Portuguese peoplehood and imperial

ambition.67 In a gesture that later would find its full justification in Vicos attempt to

shed light on the deplorable obscurity of the origin of nations, Cames established a

mnemonic practice that could make sense of a desired future of a people in terms of a

64 Cames, Lusiads, p. 131.

65 XVI, 18-19.

66 Cames, Lusiads, p. 134.

67 For an analysis, see David Quint, Epic and Empire. Politics and Generic form from

Virgil to Milton, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 113-125.

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past which then could be made to look increasingly alien and easily forgotten.68 Doing

this, he could draw on an established tradition of rhetorical prophecy that stretched

back into which had earlier been used to boost dynastic claims against the Castilians.69

This was the final victory of the Portuguese over the Romans, a victory which made it

possible for Cames to find his place side by side with the other heroes of the

discoveries.

As a result of their collaboration with Italian cartographers, the Portuguese were

now using sophisticated maps and instruments to assist navigation, and hence to further

imperial ambitions. In 1478, Abraham Zacuto had circulated his Almanach perpetuum,

which made it possible to calculate latitude on the basis of the position of the sun. Other

solar tables were published by Valentim Fernandes in his Reportrio dos Tempos

(1518) in order to further facilitate maritime explorations.70 The gradual accumulation

of knowledge in these areas led to the establishment of a hydrographical repository

within the Armazem da Guine e Indias in order to keep this knowledge from falling into

the hands of competitors.71 Maps and globes also became prized possessions, not only

68 Giambattista Vico, The New Science [1746] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976),

pp. 102-103.

69 See Helder Macedo, The Rhetoric of Prophecy in Portuguese Renaissance

Literature, Portuguese Studies, vol. 19, 2003, pp. 9-18.

70 Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories. Mapping the Early Modern World, (London:

Reaktion Books, 1997), p. 54.

71 J. B. Harley, Silences and Secrecy. The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early

Modern Europe, in Paul Laxton ed., The New Nature of Maps. Essays in the History of

Cartography, p. 93, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 84-107. See

also A. Texeira da Mota, Some Notes on the Organization of Hydrographical Services

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keeping their owners informed of the latest discoveries and commercial ventures, but

also providing them with a sense of security as to their own identity within such an

ever-changing world.72

In the larger context of maritime exploration, this meant that

the ocean, previously seen as an impassable barrier, by the last third of the fifteenth

century hadbecome an intercontinental highway for those impious ships. 73 Thus, in

Portugal and elsewhere, dreams of unlimited territorial power found the beginnings of

its realization in the map or sphere that was dedicated to the monarch, framed by his

arms and traversed by his ships, and that opened up to his dreams of empire a space of

intervention stretching to the limits of the terraqueous globe.74 In the process of

expansion, the Portuguese empire had to digest all new knowledge it encountered, since

it was indispensable to its success and consolidation. Hence the appropriation of space

in Portugal before the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Imago Mundi, vol. 28,

1976, pp. 51-60.

72 Brotton, Trading Territories, p. 75.

73 John M. Headley, The sixteenth-century Venetian celebration of the earths total

habitability: the issue of the fully habitable world for renaissance Europe, p. 9, Journal

of World History, vol. 8, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1-27.

74 Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaisasance World. The geographical imagination

in the age of discovery, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), p. 23. See also Denis

Cosgrove, Apollos Eye. A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western

Imagination, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 79-101; David

Turnbull, Cartography and science in early modern Europe: Mapping the construction

of knowledge spaces, Imago Mundi, Vol. 48, 1996, pp. 5-24; Mark Neocleous, Off

the Map. On violence and cartography, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 6, no.

4, 2003, pp. 409-25.

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on a global scale was as much a source of knowledge as it was a source of

sovereignty.75

But the Portuguese were not to be left alone in their quest for mastery over this global

space. Similar efforts to create a nation on the basis of ancient myths produced similar

results in England during the same period. While this quest for identity in part was

motivated by the need for domestic legitimacy, it also fuelled overseas expansion and

dreams of global mastery. Again the geographical and cartographical revolutions

provided these ambitions with critical momentum. As Hakluyt claims in his Principal

Navigations (1589), he was the first that produced and shewed both the olde

imperfectly composed, and the new lately reformed Mappes, Globes, Spheares, and

other instruments of this Art for demonstration in the common schooles, to the singular

pleasure, and generall contentment of my auditoryI meddle in this worke with the

Nauigations onely of our owne nation.76 The conceptual resources with which this

nation was built were drawn from a variety of ancient and medieval sources, making

Tudor imperialism a blend of nascent nationalism and surviving medieval

universalism.77 In order to achieve this precious blend, authors like Davenant and

75 Brotton, Trading Territories, p. 83; Vitorino Magalhes Godinho, Entre Myth et

Utopie: Les Grandes Dcouvertes. La construction de lespace et linvention de

lhumanite aux XVe et XVIe sicles, Archives Europenes de Sociologie, vol. 32, pp.

3-52.

76 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the

English Nation, (London, 1589), dedicatory epistle and preface. See Armitage,

Ideological Origins of the British Empire, pp. 61-99.

77 Yates, Astraea, p. 87; Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, pp. 107-47; Armitage,

Elizabethan Idea of Empire.

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Drayton transferred symbols and images from the Roman Empire and Christianity to

the new context of the territorial state.78 True to this ambition, Drayton warns against

staying local in the quest for nationhood in his Poly-Olbion (1613). Those who remain

content to do this are, [p]ossest with such stupidity and dulnesse, that rather then thou

wilt take pains to search into ancient and noble things, choosest to remaine in the thicke

fogges and mistes of ignorance, as neere the common Lay-stall of a Citie; refusing to

walker forth into the Tempe and Feelds of the Muses.79

In order to actually manifest the kind of identity that this poem so eloquently

celebrates, nascent nationalism had to be disseminated to the populace in order to stir

the right sentiments in them. Thus Davenant speculated about how to turn his own

proto-nationalist poetry into popular entertainment. In his Proposition for the

Advancement of Moralities (1651), this was to be done through a spectacle, [i]n which

shall be presented severall ingenious Arts, as Motion and transposition of Lights; to

make a more naturall resemblance of the great and virtuous actions of such as are

eminent in Story; and chiefly of those whose famous Battails and Land and Sea by

which this Nation is renownd.80That the theatre was chosen as the preferred channel

of dissemination is perhaps no coincidence, since the way in which theatres were

78 Patricia Springborg, Global Identity: Cosmopolitan Localism, paper presented at

IPSA, Seoul, 17-21 August, 1997. Cited with kind permission by the author.

79 Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, or a chorographicall description of the tracts, riuers,

mountaines, forests, and other parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britaine, in The

Works of Michael Drayton, ed. by William Hebel (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933), vol.

4. Quoted in Springborg, Global Identity, p. 29.

80 William Davenant, Proposition for the Advancement of Moralities (London, 1651), p.

249. Quoted in Springborg, Global Identity, p. 30.

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constructed closely reflected simultaneous developments in the art of memory during

Renaissance.81Ultimately, the purpose of this re-appropriation and assimilation of the

Roman and Christian heritage was not only to create a sense of common identity, but

also to reinforce the legitimacy of their monarchy by wrapping the English Crown in

mythical splendor.82 As Selden commented on Draytons efforts, [i]f in Prose and

Religion it were justifiable, as in Poetry and Fiction, to invoke a Locall Power (for

anciently both Jewes , Gentiles & Christians have supposed to every Countrey a singular

Genius) I would therein joyne with the Author.83

In the this section, we have seen how early modern political communities were

bounded by means of rhetorical strategies that assimilated everything useful in the past,

while simultaneously erasing the traces of this act of assimilation. These strategies of

remembrance transferred symbols from boundless visions of community to the world of

territorially bounded states. What was deemed of value in the imperial past was dug up

from ancient sources, reinterpreted and then attributed to the vanguards of early-

modern order, the Crown, the nobility and the church. It was then a truly monumental

task to disseminate this collective memory to the populace and make it stick in an age

when literacy still was a privilege of the few. Poetry presupposed a degree of literacy

that made it impractical for this purpose if not staged into spectacles, a fact which

confined much of the knowledge of national traditions to the elites which had

invented them. But the early-modern strategy par excellencehad been to create spatial

symbols of identity that could be deciphered in terms of those virtues that had been

81 Yates, The Art of Memory, pp. 310-54.

82 Yates, Astraea, pp. 59-87.

83 John Selden, Illustrations, in The Works of Michael Drayton, vol. 4, p. 15.

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appropriated from the ancients.84 Cathedrals, royal palaces, public buildings were

erected with remarkable stylistic uniformity throughout Europe during this period,

drawing on similar principles of construction and decoration.

When we reach end of the seventeenth century, the territorialized substratum of the

international system had thus been created, with or without the aid of singular geniuses.

This had little to do with what happened in Westphalia, but more to do with the shift in

cosmological perspective that had occurred in the beginning of this century when

geographical and cartographical knowledge was being harnessed for the purposes of

imperial expansion. The vantage point from which human affairs could be

contemplated was then literally brought down to earth. This vantage point was no

longer located over and above the terrestrial globe, but was located at a series of

discrete points on the planetary surface, each of these points corresponding to a claim to

territorial sovereignty. It was then but a short step to particularize existing historical

memories, by assimilating the whole array of symbols, metaphors, and tropes within

emergent vernacular literary traditions. This process was greatly facilitated by the

philosophical contention that historical memory is constitutive of identity, implying that

those parts of the past that could not be tailored to fit present requirements of political

identity simply ought to be forgotten. Not only were parts of a more universalistic and

boundless past now recycled to boost claims to territorial authority and the

particularistic identities of hopefully congruent nations, but they were also providing

84 See for example Anne-Marie Lecoq, The Symbolism of the State. The Images of the

Monarchy from the Early Valois Kings to Louis XIV, in Pierre Nora, Rethinking

France: les Lieux de Mmoire, Vol. 1, The State, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 2001), pp. 217-267; Franoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic

Monument, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 40-62.

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fresh justifications of imperial expansion. In this process, medieval and Renaissance

visions of world community were translated into ideologies of empire, their constituent

concepts having their range of applicability firmly delimited by territorial boundaries. It

was then left to others to provide the theoretical justification of that which now largely

had been accomplished in practice, and, by consistent omission, help readers forget the

fact that the early-modern state had been crafted out of prior and boundless conceptions

of human community.

But none of this is visible from within the international system, since the trajectory

outlined above constitutes the very precondition of its emergence insofar as it provided

the conceptual resources necessary for territorial differentiation of political space and

the concomitant division of mankind into distinct and bounded political communities,

each carrying a corresponding claim to territorial sovereignty. The upshot of this

narrative has been to demonstrate not only that the social construction of a boundless

global socio-political space antedated the emergence of both individual states as well as

the larger system of which they came to form part, but that globality indeed conditioned

the possibility of the international system of states insofar as the construction of this

system not only took place within a pre-constituted global realm, but by means of

conceptual resources that were distilled from universalistic and boundless conceptions

of political community. As I have tried to show in the two previous sections, globality

is not a timeless condition existing by virtue of the shape of the earth or on actual the

interconnectedness between individual societies, but rather a social fact whose genesis

and dissemination is as open to historical and sociological inquiry as any other social

fact. On the basis of my analysis of the genesis of this particular social fact, I would

like to conclude that if we want to make sense of the concept of globality as a distinct

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analytical category, we must begin by realizing that the global realm not only is

historically prior to the international system of states, but also accord it ontological

primacy in relation to the international system for the simple reason that this system as

Bartelson- The Social Construction of Globality

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