Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640

The early modern world was for the most part a patchwork of competing and intertwined empires, punctuated by the odd interloper in the form of a nascent “nation-state.” At the time of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the real contours of the political map of the world were as follows: from east to west, a China that had just been conquered by the Qing, who would make an expansive push westward; then the vast Mughal Empire, from the hills of Burma to Afghanistan; the Ottoman Empire, whose writ still effectively ran from Basra to Central Europe and Morocco; the Russian Empire, by then extending well into Siberia and parts of Central Asia; the limited rump of the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe; the burgeoning commercial empires of England and the Netherlands in both Asia and America; and, last but not least, the still-extensive spread of the great empires of Spain and Portugal.2 Other states could also make some claim to imperial status, including Munhumutapa in southeastern Africa, the Burma of the Toungoo Dynasty, and Safavid Iran. The crucial point, however, is not just that these empires existed, but that they recognized one another, and as a consequence they often borrowed symbols, ideas, and institutions across recognizable boundaries. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Habsburg ruler Charles V and the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Lawgiver explicitly vied for the same status as universal ruler, sharing a set of ambitions and horizons; that same notion of shared symbols and horizons was held by the Mughal ruler Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) and his neighbor to the west, Shah ʿAbbas of Iran (r. 1587–1629). The idea of translatio imperii, the transfer of imperial models and notions, which is usually deployed in the diachronic sense of an orderly temporal succession of empires, could thus equally be seen as having a synchronic counterpart in the sense of movement across a group of competing empires.3