The Nascent Globe: Diplomacy and the Making of the First Global Order, c.1480-c.1520

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Why were Europeans so successful as they ventured into distant seas and established new contacts at the beginning of the early modern age? And how exactly did the first global political order emerge from those voyages? My project takes a novel approach to these questions by studying the diplomatic encounters that unfolded during the crucial decades leading up to the first circumnavigation of the globe, completed 500 years ago in 1521. It explores historical sources produced from around 1480 in the context of early Portuguese and Spanish voyages that paved the way for later, British, French and Dutch empire building. Whilst acknowledging the importance of trade and navigation, I will dig deeper to study the overlooked diplomatic mechanisms supporting them. At the heart of early transcontinental conversations was a widely shared desire to imbue encounters with meaning and make them last. Diplomacy, I argue in this project, was key to making long-distance connections work.Diplomatic encounters, I further propose, were not just the result of European "expansion". Much was down to various foci of attraction. Local rulers across the continents reached out to the Portuguese and the Spanish to engage in politically meaningful exchanges of envoys, letters, gifts, and geographical knowledge. They looked for new opportunities in trade, but also new military allies who might help them cope with regional and local enemies, or simply the symbolic value of diplomatic exchanges. Without this desire of non-European rulers to cooperate, European navigators would have had nowhere to go. To understand the combined processes of expansion and attraction, I will examine six representative cases and draw them together into an overarching study for the first time. These are (in chronological order): Ghana; Hispaniola/Puerto Rico; the Swahili Coast in East Africa; the Malabar Coast in South India; the Moluccas or Spice Islands; and the Philippines. I will establish historical connections between these regions and engage in a comparative study of the diplomatic initiatives taken by local rulers to attract Portuguese and Spanish navigators. This is important because the histories of small states in Africa, Asia and the Americas have been written largely in isolation from each other. Their influence on early Portuguese and Spanish navigations and imperialism is rarely mentioned. Portuguese and Spanish activities themselves are usually studied separately. Bringing all these actors together will allow me to identify a pattern and argue that the first global political order grew out of a widely shared desire for diplomatic alliances and the symbolic power they carried. In fact, we are yet to understand who exactly was first in seeing the full potential of thinking globally: the kings of Portugal and Spain, who oversaw the first global connections and possessed the first global maps? Or perhaps rulers such as the sultans of the Maluku islands in the Pacific, who harnessed the potential of pitching those distant rivals against each other for their own benefit?To answer these questions, I will be working with sources and critical literature written in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, and German. I will make use of the world-leading libraries of London, where I teach and live, and complement this with research periods in archives in Portugal and Spain, some of which I have worked with before. I will talk about my findings with other global and regional historians. I will also share ideas with local historians and audiences in Ghana, Puerto Rico, and South India, and work towards establishing, for the first time, a network of scholars connecting these regions. By doing so, we will together start telling - critically, without romanticising this often violent past - a story of early globalisation shared by Europeans, Africans, Asians and Americans alike.