Colonial/Global

Abstract

Colonial/Global Stephanie Kirk Throughout the articles brought together in this dossier entitled "Colonial/Global," authors interrogate the complex ways in which the multiple projects of Spain's early modern globalized empire (and those of its rivals) played out in American colonial contexts and beyond. In addition, dossier authors reflect on how a range of imperial expediencies—literary, political, religious, cultural, and economic—transformed as they circulated through global circuits of power and encountered colonial realities and resistance. At the center of these discussions, we find the intersection of globalism and colonialism. While empire is, of course, a crucial concept for understanding the early modern global, here I want to flip the switch and focus on colonialism rather than imperialism, as well as on the creation of colonial/global spaces that speak to what Mary Louise Pratt designates as contact zones: "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths" (34).1 While scholars do not readily agree on what constitutes the global in an early modern context, they do concur that it is extremely difficult to define (De Vries 710; Strathern 318). One of the recurrent threads running through much scholarship, however, is the question of exchange or connectivity on a global level. As Alan Strathern explains, "perhaps the most important reason why the notion of a Global Early Modern period has gained traction has been its capacity to capture the connective flux of these centuries" (319).2 Strathern, further, celebrates a connectivity in which an imperial framework allowed for connections between peoples who, while living in close proximity, knew nothing of each other's existence: Consider that before the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1480s the kingdom of Kongo appears not to have been in contact with the kingdom of Benin to the north (in what is now southern Nigeria), one of the few other major sites of state construction south of the Sahel by this [End Page 5] point. Or that across the Atlantic, where many central Africans were now destined to travel, the Aztecs and Incas were apparently unaware of each other's existence before the Spanish subjected both of them to an improbable authority ultimately located in Madrid. (321)3 Gruzinski also celebrates an opening up of the globe in this way, explaining that imperial incursions led to a "proliferation of links of every type between parts of the world previously unaware of each other or in only the most distant contact" (4). While these relationships or links might appear thrilling, we must interrogate the stakes of this connectivity and its cost. As Ania Loomba explains, "work on 'connected histories' does not always pay attention to the fact that this single global modernity was forged, or at least drastically reshaped, alongside colonialism" (145). This dossier foregrounds the ways colonialism underscores all our understandings of the early modern global as well as to "foreground difficult questions about the historical processes and global relations through which this modernity came into being" (Loomba 145). An imperialist narrative is inextricably bound up in that of global early modernity if we think of it in terms of connectivity. For, as Alan Strathern explains, "it is only with the creation of sea-lanes that joined up the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans for the first time that truly global interconnections were established" (321). He further elucidates the contours of this connectivity and its materialization: "From this point on, empires could extend from the forests of the Amazon to the waters of the Melaka straits; new fiscal systems in Asian polities could be propelled or undermined by the quantities of silver mined in Bolivia and sent across the Pacific via Manila" (321). This view of empire as a series of exciting and cosmopolitan meeting points neglects its colonial dark side, without which it is unsustainable and which, in turn, cannot be divorced from questions of exploitation, subordination, and dispossession of peoples and territories in the name of religious and cultural hegemony and emergent capitalism.4 While we may celebrate cultural connections, we must do so with caution. As Jack Green has stated: "Historians...