The Legal Regime of the South Atlantic World, 1400-1750: Jurisdictional Complexity as Institutional Order

Abstract

What were the boundaries of the early modern world? Answers to this question rest upon assumptions about the nature of global interconnectedness. World-systems approaches have explicitly marked participation in global production networks as a criterion for inclusion in the world-economy of the sixteenth century, an emphasis that critics have noted leaves Africa and Asia oddly outside its boundaries. 1 Highlighting trade is an alternative that leads toward different conclusions--for example, toward a greater emphasis on the importance of Asia in the global system. 2 Yet as critics of world-systems history noted decades ago, understanding local-global connections through the analysis of trade invites inadequate attention to local conflicts that appear crucial in structuring regional incorporation in global markets. 3 The alternatives, however, have always appeared badly [End Page 27] flawed. One is to revert to a modified civilizational approach that traces cultural continuities--and that tends to represent increasing global interconnectedness as a function of the spread of Western ideas and institutions. Another possibility is to retreat from systemic kinds of questions altogether. Many studies of the discourse of cross-cultural contact, colonial policy, and representations of metropolitan identity not only refrain from speculating on the relation of local cultural shifts to global trends but also urge us to view any broader narrative as itself a cultural representation. Such a perspective does much good in warning against investigating the global economy as the "real" substratum beneath discursive and supposedly more ephemeral cultural exchanges. But the result is often a surrender of discussions of global structure to scholars with scant interest in cultural dimensions of change.