Research project
Empires, Privateering and the sea
Events
The project 'Empires, Privateering and the Sea' (EMPRISE) is a historical and comparative inquiry into the importance of forms of seaborne violence for the emergence, consolidation, and political transformation of European states and overseas empires in the period between c. 1500-1856, when the Treaty of Paris banned privateering.
EMPRISE will further our understanding of how this practice, which until now has been the object of little sustained scrutiny in the social sciences, contributed to reconfigure the global spatiality of empires in the early modern period. The question driving EMPRISE is how northern European states (England, France, the Netherlands), which had been excluded from the New World by papal treaties in the fifteenth century, not only went to sea, established thriving networks of maritime trade, but also came to replace the Iberian powers as successful overseas empire-builders. This change happened even though these states had no substantial navies until the turn of the sixteenth century, and knew precious little about what went on beyond their shores.
The main contention of EMPRISE is that privateers were central drivers of this change. Against leading accounts in the field, the key innovation of EMPRISE is the recognition that privateering and maritime predation were axiomatically neither inimical nor parasitical to state enterprises at sea; they were an intrinsic part of these efforts - at times the most important one.
The core team of EMPRISE will be Dr. Benjamin de Carvalho (Principal Investigator) and Dr. Halvard Leira at NUPI.
The project is funded by The Research Council of Norway through the programme FRIPRO Young research talents.
Project related events:
Project Manager
Participants
New publications
The Emergence of Sovereignty in the Wake of the Reformations
The elusiveness of the emergence of sovereignty represents a challenge to IR, as it leaves us with many possible beginnings. And as any new beginning marks an end, settling the question of sovereignty begs the question of how the world was without it. Did sovereignty mark the end of an era that would make little sense to IR and its sovereignty prism? In the present contribution I will take issue with such clear delimitations and make the case for a broad understanding of change grounded in the practical challenges of international politics rather than canonical statements about them. My argument is rooted in a dissatisfaction with extant accounts seeking to redraw the temporal limits of international politics in the wake of the fall of the foundational myth of 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia
What, When, and Where, Then, is the Concept of Sovereignty?
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the concept sovereignty for international relations (IR). And yet, understanding the historical emergence of sovereignty in international relations has long been curtailed by the all-encompassing myth of the Peace of Westphalia. While criticism of this myth has opened space for further historical inquiry in recent years, it has also raised important questions of historical interpretation and methodology relevant to IR, as applying our current conceptual framework to distant historical cases is far from unproblematic. Central among these questions is the when, what, and how of sovereignty: from when can we use “sovereignty” to analyze international politics and for which polities? Can sovereignty be used when the actors themselves did not have recourse to the terminology? And what about polities that do not have recourse to the term at all? What are the theoretical implications of applying the concept of sovereignty to early polities? From different theoretical and methodological perspectives, the contributions in this forum shed light on these questions of sovereignty and how to treat the concept analytically when applied to a period or place when/where the term did not exist as such. In doing so, this forum makes the case for a sensitivity to the historical dimension of our arguments about sovereignty—and, by extension, international relations past and present—as this holds the key to the types of claims we can make about the polities of the world and their relations.
Introduction: The Emergence of Sovereignty: More Than a Question of Time
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the concept sovereignty for international relations (IR). And yet, understanding the historical emergence of sovereignty in international relations has long been curtailed by the all-encompassing myth of the Peace of Westphalia. While criticism of this myth has opened space for further historical inquiry in recent years, it has also raised important questions of historical interpretation and methodology relevant to IR, as applying our current conceptual framework to distant historical cases is far from unproblematic. Central among these questions is the when, what, and how of sovereignty: from when can we use “sovereignty” to analyze international politics and for which polities? Can sovereignty be used when the actors themselves did not have recourse to the terminology? And what about polities that do not have recourse to the term at all? What are the theoretical implications of applying the concept of sovereignty to early polities? From different theoretical and methodological perspectives, the contributions in this forum shed light on these questions of sovereignty and how to treat the concept analytically when applied to a period or place when/where the term did not exist as such. In doing so, this forum makes the case for a sensitivity to the historical dimension of our arguments about sovereignty—and, by extension, international relations past and present—as this holds the key to the types of claims we can make about the polities of the world and their relations.