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  • The Hidden Dimension: “European” Treaties in Global Perspective, 1500–1800
  • Peter A. Coclanis (bio)

The tiny Indonesian island of Run, one of ten volcanic islands in the Banda grouping in the Banda Sea, 2,000 kilometers east of Java, is seldom in the news these days. Four centuries ago, however, it was all the rage, at least among European merchants and consumers. For Run, the world’s leading source of nutmeg, was the most lucrative, and thus sought after—and fought over—of the so called Spice Islands, i.e., the Moluccas, located between Sulawesi (Celebes) and today’s Papua New Guinea.

In the 16th and 17th centuries Run was swept up in numerous international maelstroms involving major European powers—Portugal, England, and the Netherlands specifically—and the focal point of several major international incidents. The island’s value was one reason why New Netherland became an English colony. For it was the reluctance of the Dutch to part with Run (and Suriname) in the negotiations after the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–67) that led the English to hang onto New Netherland, which they had captured in August 1664. Although the Dutch had been expected to return Run over a decade earlier—according to the 1654 Treaty of Westminster that ended the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54)—they never had, and their recalcitrance paid off. In the quickly negotiated Treaty of Breda, signed on July 31, 1667, as Louis XIV’s troops were invading the Spanish Netherlands during the so-called War of Devolution, the English ceded their claims to Run, retaining in return, under the principle of uti possidetis, the “booby prize” of New Netherland.

To be sure, the above case is intended to draw in readers, to implicate all of you in the argument I wish to mount, but extant evidence from the early modern period—and even earlier—suggests that it is hardly unique or even unusual. There were, so to speak, many Runs—I’m tempted here to say cases of the Runs—Asian territories that figured prominently in European treaties, pacts, peaces, and settlements, hiding in plain sight. I have written elsewhere on the so-called truncation problem even in capacious approaches to the economic history of the West in the early modern period, most notably in the approach known as Atlantic history that has increasingly swept the field in recent years.1 Many purportedly Western events, developments, and processes are either completely inexplicable or at the very least inadequately explained without recognition of the degree to which the units we call the West and even the Atlantic world drew lifeblood from the misspecified entity commonly referred to as Asia.


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A world map from Geronimo Girava, La cosmographia, y geographia del S. Hieronimo Girava Tarragones (Venice, 1570). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

With the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas—and, by extension, the 1529 Treaty of Saragossa, which brought greater specificity to Tordesillas by establishing the anti-meridian—Spain and Portugal essentially divided up newly discovered extra-European parts of the world between themselves. Several papal bulls issued in the 1480s and 1490s hadn’t organized said division to the mutual satisfaction of the Iberian powers, so they demarcated things themselves in 1494 and, after failing in 1523, with more specificity in 1529. By the terms of these treaties, which are far too detailed for elaborate discussion here, the world was divided up into two more or less equal hemispheres (Portugal’s “half ” was actually somewhat larger than Spain’s), with Portugal getting title to Brazil, the Atlantic islands, Africa, and Asia, and Spain the rest of the Americas and the Pacific Ocean. To be sure, back then (like today) there was little honor among thieves: by the early 1540s Charles V of Spain was already trying to horn in on the Philippines, clearly west of the “Saragossa line” and thus in Portugal’s zone. Although he failed in this effort, his son Phillip II did not, establishing the first permanent Spanish presence in the archipelago at Manila in 1565. And by the late 16th century other European powers, having reached internal accommodations of...

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