England's Global Transition and the Cosmopolitans Who Made It Possible (2007)

THE SINGLE MOST DRAMATIC shift in English history in the early modern period lay in the kingdom's altered status in a transformed world beyond its shores. For all the upheavals and transitions at home, from the consolidation of the national state to the tumult of civil war, from the turmoil of successive religious reformations to the population explosion and ensuing economic strains of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was England's new position as an emerging world power that defined England's early modern moment. Cosmopolitanism--and especially cosmopolitans--were central to this transition. Perched on the western fringes of Europe, the most remote sovereign kingdom in a trading world centered around the Mediterranean, England was a nation characterized above all by its weakness in the middle of the sixteenth century. Annual fleets carrying silver and other treasures from the Americas enabled Spain to achieve unprecedented power in Europe and the Mediterranean while the English and other rivals watched in frustration. England's geographic position, however, turned out to be crucial. After Columbus's voyage in 1492 and especially after Spain's spectacular conquests on the American mainland in the early sixteenth century, a European trading world once oriented toward the Mediterranean shifted toward the Atlantic. Through no initiative of its own, these larger geopolitical shifts transformed England from a kingdom on the European margins to one well positioned to take advantage of new opportunities to the west. But it took considerable enterprise and ingenuity for the English to turn this accidental geographic advantage into a real opportunity, and in the period between 1560 and 1700 they did so. In this remarkable period the English dislodged the Spanish from some of their holdings in the Americas, challenged Spanish dominion over the American continents, established new long-distance trade routes to the eastern Mediterranean and the East Indies, and emerged in the seventeenth century as a kingdom on the rise. Cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitans facilitated this shift. Men and women voyaged overseas in numbers sufficient to secure colonial holdings, and they traveled around the globe on commercial ventures that pushed English trade routes into America, eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and India. And in their travels they demonstrated their interest in and sympathy for foreign mores, worked with and for foreigners, sometimes immersed themselves in foreign worlds, and gradually dislodged themselves from unthinking attachments to a single nation. These cosmopolitans were most evident in the world of commerce. Tangibly centered around the circulation of goods, commerce first required the circulation of people who traveled abroad, inserted themselves in foreign communities, and brought back their treasures. Everywhere, the appearance of cultural understanding was crucial to successful trade. The advice merchants offered to each other invoked themes of humility and restraint: there was no place for xenophobia in this world. Merchants needed to acquire cultural understanding in order to facilitate trade, and they required strategies to enable themselves to perch in foreign ports. We might now consider much of this behavior to be private and personal--what men wore, how they dressed and ate, with whom and how they socialized--but for these enterprising traders, personal attributes facilitated commercial relations. In this era when many English merchants were the first of their nation to open new markets, to assess new commodities, to persuade foreign merchants that they wanted to buy English goods, to cement trade relations with strangers, and to blunder their way through unfamiliar diplomatic rituals, men had to rely on their social acuity to establish trade. Merchants were ambassadors, not simply traders. Successful merchants had to be willing to acknowledge their cultural ignorance and to be guided by European competitors and by their foreign hosts in diplomatic and commercial conventions. …