Globalizing the Thirty Years War: Early German Newspapers and their Geopolitical Perspective on the Atlantic World*

Abstract

Abstract At the height of the Thirty Years War, news from South America, West Africa and the Caribbean was widespread and quickly distributed in the central European peripheries of the early modern Atlantic world. Despite the German retreat from sixteenth-century colonial experiments, overseas reports sometimes appeared in remote southern German towns before they were printed in Spain or the Low Countries. This article explains the vivid German interest in Atlantic news and examines how correspondents designed their overseas reports for a specifically German news market by connecting them to the European political and military situation, using a rhetorical frame of global conflict. While the domestic importance of American news was sometimes overstated by German newsmakers, its dissemination helps us understand how a sense of global connectedness emerged in a new print genre and created a discourse that supported the spatial and temporal integration of events around the globe.