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Empires and protection: making interpolity law in the early modern world*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2017

Lauren Benton  and
Adam Clulow
Lauren Benton
Affiliation:
301 Kirkland Hall, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240, USA E-mail: lauren.benton@vanderbilt.edu
Adam Clulow
Affiliation:
SoPHIS-History, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia E-mail: adam.clulow@monash.edu
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Abstract

References to protection were ubiquitous across the early modern world, featuring in a range of transactions between polities in very different regions. And yet discourses about protection retained a quality of imprecision that makes it difficult to pin down precise legal statuses and responsibilities. It was often unclear who was protecting whom or the exact nature of the relationship. In this article, we interrogate standard distinctions about the dual character of protection that differentiate between ‘inside’ protection of subjects and ‘outside’ protection of allies and other external groups. Rather than a clear division, we find a blurring of lines, with many protection claims creatively combining ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ protection. We argue that the juxtaposition of these ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ meanings of protection underpinned the formation of irregular, interpenetrating zones of imperial suzerainty in crowded maritime arenas and conflict-ridden borderlands across the early modern world.

Keywords

borderlandsempireinternational lawpiracyprotection
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 74 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

A version of this article was presented at the ‘Protection and Empire’ workshop held at Harvard University in April 2016 and cosponsored by Vanderbilt University. The authors would like to thank all the participants for their many helpful remarks and suggestions, as well as the editors and reviewers of the Journal of Global History for their comments. Part of this research (Clulow) was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award.

References

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2 Benton and Ford, Rage for order, ch. 4. On protection as a framework for the reach of multiple European empires inside a colony from the late nineteenth century, see Lewis, Mary, Divided rule: sovereignty and empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Orford, Anne, International authority and the responsibility to protect, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Glanville, Luke, Sovereignty and the responsibility to protect: a new history, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014 Google Scholar.

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23 Garcia, ‘From plunder to crusade’, makes the point that historians have exaggerated the divide between a ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ Portuguese empire; fidalgos (noblemen) operated across these spheres and manoeuvred through ‘networks of nobility’.

24 Robert Innes, ‘The door ajar: Japan’s foreign trade in the seventeenth century’, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1980, p. 112.

25 Charles Boxer, The Christian century in Japan, 1549–1650, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1951, pp. 430–1. The supposed infringement can be traced back to 1608. In that year, a shuinsen belonging to Arima Haranobu, a prominent lord in Kyushu, arrived in Macao on its way back to Japan from a successful voyage to Cambodia. When the Japanese crew became involved in a violent riot, Portuguese authorities responded by executing at least one of the offenders. After Tokugawa officials learned of this incident – almost certainly via a doctored version of events that emphasized Portuguese culpability – they determined to take action for what was seen as an assault on Arima’s trading licence. In an important new book that puts forward a different interpretation, Reinier Hesselink argues that the infringement was in fact nothing more than an excuse and that the Tokugawa Bakufu was trying to exert control over the wider Portuguese trade. See Hesselink, Reinier, The dream of Christian Nagasaki: world trade and the clash of cultures, 1560–1640, Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2016 Google Scholar.

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27 In November 1617, for example, the head of the English factory in Japan sold a ‘junk w’th the goshon [shuinjō], for 1200 tais [taels]’ (ibid., vol. 2, p. 204).

28 See Clulow, Adam, The Company and the shogun: the Dutch encounter with Tokugawa Japan, New York: Columbia University Press, 2014 Google Scholar, ch. 4 and 5.

29 This happened even as the Tokugawa regime moved to end the shuinjō system in 1635, when it prevented most Japanese ships from leaving the archipelago. Laver, Michael, The Sakoku edicts and the politics of Tokugawa hegemony, Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011 Google Scholar.

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37 Of course, the English were hardly strangers to pass systems or the politics of maritime protection. On the English uses of protection in the early modern Mediterranean, see Tristan Stein, ‘The Mediterranean and the English empire of trade, 1660–1748’, PhD thesis, Harvard University, 2011.

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49 Ibid., p. 85.

50 Ibid., p. 171.

51 Ibid., pp. 165–6.

52 Ibid., p. 100.

53 Ibid., p. 181.

54 Ibid., p. 168.

55 Ibid., p. 179.

56 Ibid., p. 154.

57 Heeres and Stapel, Corpus diplomaticum, vol. 1, pp. 37–8.

58 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 162.

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