GLOBALGUNS · Guns for a Global Empire: Deployment of Artillery Technology in the Iberian Colonial Space (1580-1640)
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-09-01 → 2022-12-21
- EU contribution
- €259,399
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Guns for a Global Empire: Deployment of Artillery Technology in the Iberian Colonial Space (1580-1640)
GlobalGuns investigates the relationship between the development of a key military technology, gunpowder artillery, and the development of European overseas empires. The research focuses on the Spanish and Portuguese empires during the period of the Iberian union (1580-1640), when these political entities were united under the same sovereign. In this period, the sustained development of maritime flows between Europe, America, Africa and Asia required the massive deployment of artillery technology on board of ships and in defense of sea-fortresses. The project aims to offer a better understanding of how the Iberian empires met the crucial challenge of multiplying cannon technology at a world scale. This topic which has often been studied through nationalistic lenses requires to be analyzed in a much more transnational perspective by paying attention to the multiple circulations of material and experts not only between Spain and Portugal but more broadly between the various regions of these empires, which included parts of Italy, the Low Countries, and all overseas colonial territories in Africa, America and Asia, whose contribution to the armament industry has long been ignored by nationalist narratives. Colonial history tends to be seen by our modern society as a moment of European absolute domination over the rest of the world, while this research aims to bring some nuance to this picture by shedding light on the role of colonial societies and non-European actors in the world-wide deployment of a weapon which has been considered a symbol of European conquest. It also proposes to reflect on the driving forces behind the development of military technology, and particularly on the role of the maritime private economy. Conclusions show that the Iberian empires managed to deploy cannons at a global scale through the involvement of private merchant ships and their huge pool of technical resources, including ships, cannons, and specialized technicians such as gunners. The transnational nature of the resources used by the Iberian empires highlight the necessity to study the phenomenon at a broader scale. Therefore, the research carried out for this project opens a wider scope of reflection on the relationship between the rise of the private merchant shipping in Western Europe and the capacity of some Western European state to achieve maritime projection world-wide.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This project studies the historical relationship between military technology, globalization and the rise of European overseas empires by focusing on the provisioning system of cannons in the first political entity which ever connected the four parts of the world: the Iberian Union (1580-1640). If cannons have become a symbol of early modern European expansion, no study has tackled their contribution in sustaining overseas conquests. In defence of dozens of sea-fortresses and on board of hundreds of ships spread around the globe, cannons played a crucial role in the first globalization as key infrastructures of the Iberian empires. The project aims to shed light on this world-wide deployment of artillery technology by revealing the emergence of a system combining gun-manufactures in Europe, America and Asia, all connected through circulations of weapons, raw material and technical experts. The special attention granted to the actors of the system intends to highlight the importance of human capital in the imperial state-building and globalizing processes. The project implements a twofold interdisciplinary methodology: while computer software is used in order to quantify and map the system, archival sources are crossed with material evidence coming from the wide collections of cannons hold in museums so as to reveal circulations and hybridizations of knowledge. Complemented by thorough archival work on case studies about the gun-foundries in Mexico, Cuba, Manila and Macau, this research addresses the issue of technological asymmetries between centres and peripheries inside the Iberian empires and questions the role of European colonial spaces in the globalization of the military revolution. By doing so, this project contributes to two EU priorities as it provides a reflection, from a historical perspective, on Europe’s place in a global context and generates knowledge on the cultural heritage of European coastal areas regarding their proto-industrial developments.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSIDAD PABLO DE OLAVIDE · SevillaCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union