Early modern Europeans lived during an age of faith, and religion undeniably played a crucial role for individuals, groups, nations and empires. Definitions of the self and of the other always included confessional elements, next to national, social and gender markers. However, for the early modern period, the role of religion in imperial geopolitics and diplomacy remains poorly understood. Historians and social scientists often downplay the role of religious arguments, issues and protagonists in favour of purely secular ones, such as economic, commercial, dynastic or territorial motives—especially with regard to the imperial age.Footnote ¹ This may be a more or less a direct effect of the Marxist legacy on intellectuals.Footnote ² Was religion a genuine motive in early modern imperial geopolitical thinking and policy making or was it more of a conscience-appeasing fig leaf in the face of more worldly concerns?

The early modern period has more often than not been dubbed ‘the confessional age’.Footnote ³ This master narrative has to be nuanced, though. The period between 1400 and 1815 can just as well be understood as ‘the imperial age’ and ‘the economic age’, with the rise of European empires, powerful global merchant networks, and proto-industrial slave societies. Religious or confessional interests could be at odds with imperial, dynastic and mercantile concerns. While we have some knowledge about clashing dynastic, territorial and confessional agendas with regard to the Wars of Religion in sixteenth century FranceFootnote ⁴ or the Thirty Years’ War in EuropeFootnote ⁵ , the role of religion in imperial geopolitics overseas remains under-studied. To better understand spiritual geopolitics in the imperial age the following questions need to be addressed:

1. » What role did religion play in the decision-making process at both central and local level?

2. » Who had agency in geopolitics?

3. » What was the place of missionaries, priests, ministers, and other religious agents in the world of diplomacy and warfare, as negotiators, spies, or advisors?

4. » What role did communities of religious refugees play in imperial geopolitics?

5. » Can we think of a Protestant-Catholic divide in Europe or do we have to address divers Catholic and Protestant agents and agencies?

6. » How did confessional and national identities intersect? What was the role of religious ‘others’ in cementing national or confessional bonds?

Through six case studies, this special issue looks at the role religion played in the making of Europe’s overseas empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in Mediterranean (Escribano Páez), Atlantic (Smith, Brunelle, Roitman), Pacific (Vu Thanh), and global perspectives (Winnerling). It analyses imperial states as a driving force in the building of European empires (Escribano Páez, Brunelle, Smith, Roitman) but has a special emphasis on Catholic orders (Winnerling, Brunelle, Vu Thanh) and merchants (Roitman) as powerful agents—often rivalling the imperial states’ own agendas—in this process. The contributions here presented examine a wide range of imperial agents: Catholic (Winnerling, Brunelle, Vu Thanh), Protestant (Smith, Roitman), Jewish (Escribano Páez, Roitman), Muslim (Escribano Páez), European (Smith, Brunelle, Roitman, Escribano Páez), and African (Escribano Páez), their agendas, their networks, how the latter produced imperial structures on the ground, how they informed confessional, national and transnational identities. Most of these contributions present new and so far rather neglected aspects of spiritual geopolitics in the early modern imperial age; some of them are concerned with failed endeavours.

In his “Negotiating with the Infidels. Imperial Expansion and Cross-confessional Diplomacy in the Early Modern Maghreb,” José Miguel Escribano Páez analyses the influence of religious divide in the construction of a Mediterranean frontier between the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Questioning the influence that religious differences had on the geopolitics of the early modern Mediterranean could seem superfluous since historians have traditionally depicted the Mediterranean world as a space of confrontation between two deeply religious empires, those of the Muslim Ottomans and the Catholic Habsburgs. Nevertheless, by focusing on a selection of diplomatic negotiations from the Western Mediterranean it appears that several actors envisioned a scenario in which religious and political frontiers were far from coinciding. This article shows how, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, different Muslim communities from the Maghreb promoted diplomatic negotiations to voluntarily enter under the rule of the Catholic kings and as such into the framework of Spanish imperial expansion. In studying these negotiations from an actor-based approach, the contribution does not deny the religious or political divide existing between the Christian and the Islamic shores. It argues, however, that this frontier was constructed through the interaction of a wide array of agents such as local elites, royal officers, military men, religious actors, and rulers, each with their own agendas vis à vis religious difference.

With Tobias Winnerling’s “A Kingdom of Heaven. The Spiritual Empire of the Society of Jesus” we approach a global imperial network, that of the Jesuits. Winnerling shows that the missionary activities and the networks of the Jesuit order may be understood as a sui generis empire. Early Jesuit missionaries, in India and Japan but also in South America and the Caribbean, established power structures that were fundamentally different from those of contemporary colonial and economic imperial ventures of European states and companies. In the first place, the Jesuits were less interested in territorial and financial concerns than in spiritual ones: the control over people’s souls. This spiritual power nevertheless invested the missionaries with new possibilities for action and with real power to be wielded in the political and economic arena of their time. The reading of the sources moves away from the normative to the praxeological, action-centered approach that views the spiritual sphere as a field of human social interactions.

“Trans-Pacific geopolitics? The Franciscans’ role in the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Philippines and Japan” by Hélène Vu Thanh studies the role of Franciscan missionaries in the establishment of economic and diplomatic relations between the Spanish Philippines and Japan. More specifically, it argues that the missionaries played an active part in the construction of a transpacific commercial and religious network connecting the Spanish Americas with Asia. The article thus overcomes the commonplace view that the Franciscan presence in Japan was ‘negligible and of little interest compared to the Jesuits’.Footnote ⁶ It also follows Serge Gruzinski’s approach of ‘global’ or ‘connected’ history, showing that the Franciscans’ activities are best understood within and beyond the global framework of the Spanish monarchy, whose dynamics Eurocentric or segmented regional approaches fail to capture accurately.Footnote ⁷ Furthermore, the article tries to avoid the pitfalls of what Sanjay Subrahmanyam termed the ‘obstinate historiographical separation’ between the Portuguese and Spanish empires, apprehending Japan as a space of contact, cooperation, and rivalry in its own right.Footnote ⁸

Gayle Brunelle’s “Ambassadors and Administrators: The Role of Clerics in Early French Colonies in Guiana” is concerned with an early modern colonial venture that has attracted little historiographical attention so far: the settlements, missions, and plantations in French Guiana. This contribution shows that the seventeenth-century French colonies in Guiana had much in common with the sixteenth-century French efforts to colonize Florida and Brazil: their trajectories were every bit as dramatic and their outcomes equally dismal. Although not sponsored as Huguenot refuges in the New World from Catholic oppression in the Old, and thus not burdened with the fierce competition between Protestant and Catholic colonists that plagued the earlier ventures, the Guiana colonies were nonetheless prey to deep internal divisions over piety and morality, and even more over power and the purpose of the colony. Brunelle enquires into the specific character of this French colonial venture: was it primarily about missions to the native peoples or commercial ventures focused on locating sources of precious metals or establishing plantations? She makes clear that the role of clerics in the genesis, financing, trajectories, and collapse of the earliest French colonies in Guiana was crucial, in particular in the two colonies founded about ten years apart, in 1643 and 1652. She argues that whereas historians have often assumed that missionaries and evangelizing were often little more than an encumbrance to early colonial ventures, useful mostly for raising funds in France, in reality clerics played a central role in shaping chartered colonial companies and the colonies they founded, for good and for ill.

In his “The Western Design and the spiritual geopolitics of Cromwellian foreign policy,” David L. Smith explores the multifaceted nature of the spiritual geopolitics that shaped Cromwellian foreign policy in relation to the Western Design of 1654–55.He stresses the central importance of Protestantism as a motivating force and argues that the failure of the Design was interpreted in religious terms just as much as its original aims had been. A number of motives combined to drive Cromwell into launching the Western Design, which included the Elizabethan tradition of English anti-Spanish policy; the pursuit of England’s imperial/colonial interests in the Caribbean; an attempt at strengthening England financially by weakening the Spanish economy; the search for security within Europe by allying with France against Spain; and, underpinning all these, the launching of a Protestant crusade against a power that Cromwell regarded as England’s “providential enemy”. The failure of the Design in the summer of 1655 was perceived in similarly religious terms, and it had a number of important consequences. Cromwell’s critics, such as Sir Henry Vane, interpreted the defeat as a providential sign from God, as divine punishment for the Lord Protector’s ambition and greed. Cromwell shared this interpretative framework and descended into a prolonged period of depression. His desire to propitiate God led him to declare a series of national days of “solemn fasting and humiliation” in 1655–56, together with the enforcement of a “reformation of manners” by the major-generals, whose rule was established shortly after the Design’s defeat. The Design also had a “millennial” dimension that can be related to his discussions for the readmission of the Jews to England, which reached their climax in December 1655. The defeat made Cromwell draw steadily closer to France in the treaties of 1655 and 1657. It convinced him more than ever of Spain’s enduring enmity, as set out in his opening speech to the second Protectorate Parliament on 17 September 1656, which in turn heralded further campaigns against Spanish power in Flanders in 1657–58. It heightened republican criticism of the Protectorate from the Commonwealthsmen. It also made Cromwell extremely sensitive to charges of pride, greed and ambition, and thus may have contributed to his rejection of the kingship in 1657. Just as recent scholarship on Britain’s internal conflicts of the 1640s has emphasized the central role of religion and its inseparability from other issues, so the same phenomenon is evident not only in the motives for the Western Design but also in how its defeat was perceived and interpreted.

With “Economics, Empire, Eschatology: the Spiritual Geo-politics of Jewish Settlement in the Americas, 1650–1670” Jessica Vance Roitman offers insights into the Dutch and English endeavours to settle Spanish and Portuguese Jews in their New World colonies. As compelling as the economic and military rationales for Jewish settlement were, there were also ‘spiritual’ reasons to encourage Jewish settlement – and for Jews, themselves, to venture to the colonies. The mid-seventeenth century was a time of eschatological fervour in both Christian and Jewish communities, and millenarianism and messianism formed the backdrops against which Jewish colonization in the New World occurred. Roitman’s contribution discusses whether the English and/or the Dutch encouraged Jewish settlement in the New World with the idea that it could help in ushering in the much yearned-for second coming. It also discusses whether Jews may have been tempted to go to the colonies with the idea that they were helping to bring about the dispersion described in Daniel 12:7—a scattering that was necessary before the prophesized ‘Second Coming.’

All six contributions make evident that European imperial endeavours, the Spanish as much as the Portuguese, the English, the French and the Dutch were deeply informed by religious interests and religious strife and thus reproduced Europe’s confessional divide in its overseas empires. They thus confirm a more recent tendency of the historiography on Europe’s early modern empires to emphasize the role of religion, of confessional and religious divides in the process of empire building; they show how deeply political, dynastic, economic, and religious interests intertwined and, at the same time, could be at odds with each other.

From an imperial history perspective, all six contributions also highlight that we have to conceive of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as being simultaneously an imperial, a confessional, and an economic age. While these three major driving forces might clash, they nonetheless cannot be separated from each other. However, the confessional age meant as much as religious divide and strife, the age of ‘tolerance’. The settlement of religious minorities served the purpose of empire building and satisfied spiritual and millenarian needs that could bring together religious groups that were generally at odds with each other, as both the papers by David Smith and Jessica Roitman show.

While spiritual geopolitics in the early modern period became more poignant with the Reformation and the start of European expansion into the worlds of Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Asia, they followed traditions already established in the middle ages, with the crusades and the Reconquista, as Escribano Páez’s essay makes evident. The early modern imperial age thus reproduced, altered and nonetheless preserved religious divide inherited from its ancient and medieval past and projected them, together with new elements, especially Protestantisms, into “New Worlds”.

The religious landscape of spiritual geopolitics in the imperial age was much more diverse than historians would have had it: there was not one Protestant-Catholic divide but several Protestantisms and diverse interests within Catholicism, from the different Catholic orders, old (Franciscan) and new (Jesuit, Capuchin), to the Pope, the ruling Catholic dynasties and the developing ‘national’ churches. Next to the ‘national’ church(es), church orders and imperial states transnational and even global religious communities and diasporas such as the Sephardi Jewish or the Huguenot had as much agency as merchants in the process of empire building and in imperial spiritual geopolitics. To a greater extent than the historiography has had it so far, the geopolitical endeavours of European imperial states depended on these agents—Catholic orders, transnational Protestant communities, and diasporas—as the contributions by Vu Thanh, Brunelle and Roitman clearly indicate. A closer look at divisions within Catholicism shows how much these clashing interests in imperial geopolitics can also be seen as representing global rather than national (or the imperial states’) interests, as Tobias Winnerling’s or Hélène Vu Than’s papers on Jesuits and Franciscans, respectively, and their transnational networks and agendas make evident. The same is true for Protestantism, which could have an imperial or national agenda as in the case of England or the Dutch Republic (see the papers by David Smith and Jessica Roitman) or a transnational and even global perspective as in the case of the Huguenots,Footnote ⁹ Moravians,Footnote ¹⁰ or French Prophets.Footnote ¹¹

Furthermore, the contributions of Escribano Páez, Brunelle, and Roitman show that the analysis of spiritual geopolitics in the early modern world, also from a Eurocentric perspective, have to include the agency of Muslims, Jews, African, and Native American religions. If we move from the top level of analysis, from the imperial powers in the metropolis to actors on the ground, we can see how much religious interests and spiritual geopolitics were in the hands of those subjected to European imperial powers: as much as European geopolitics and economic expansion was destructive to native and African societies, we can still see, as these three papers make evident, how Muslims, Jews, Native Americans and even African slaves moulded these spiritual geopolitics, how subaltern geopolitics could change geopolitics at other levels of imperial politics.

How much these findings for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are still valid for the eighteenth century will be the focus of another conference to be held in 2017/2018. The papers here presented hint that the common master narrative of the early modern period, that of Europeans moving from the confessional age to that of nationalization and secularization with the eighteenth century, might be too simplistic, linear, and essentializing.

All contributions raise one crucial question for historical analysis at large: Whose narrative? Walter Benjamin and Marc Bloch, among others, remind us that history has always been written by the victors.Footnote ¹² Postcolonial criticism and theory has substantially changed imperial history, the history of European expansion, and of colonialism. The analysis of the effects of colonization in a global perspective has developed a growing awareness of failed enterprises, of subaltern agency, and of the problems coming with master narratives and dominant interpretations. All six contributions add to a revised perspective not only with regard to the role religion played in the imperial age but also with regard to the voices we have to consider in order to understand the role of religion in the making of Europe’s overseas empires.