The Renaissance Territorialization of International Society

Abstract

Martin Wight has written “[w]hether or not we agree with Adam Smith that ‘the discovery of the Americas and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind,’ those events largely governed the development of international society.”¹ If the previous two chapters discussed the internal dimension of Renaissance territorialization, this chapter looks outward, to its external projection through the discovery and conquest of the New World and the beginning of the expansion of European International Society. This process was, as William Connolly has observed, one in which the inscriptions of identity and difference were paramount.² Columbus did not discover America but a “world of otherness.” The encounter between Europeans and Amerindian natives was not simply a meeting between two already-constituted subjects and the subsequent mastery of one by the other. America was not a preexisting world which the Europeans happened upon but a text to be discovered in the sense of an unfamiliar, unrecognizable set of empirical date which, in order to be made intelligible and therefore conquerable, was created and imagined in terms of the cultural predispositions and expectations of the Europeans, which were themselves altered by the experience of the encounter. In terms of space, the new was rendered intelligible and conquerable by processes of territorialization, which drew on representational media, notably cartography and traveler’s narratives, to invent America as a space that could be understood, assimilated, and possessed by Europeans.