New Worlds?: Transformations in the Culture of International Relations Around the Peace of Utrecht

243 Pages·2017·2.44 MB·English

by  Inken Schmidt-Voges

New Worlds?

The Peace of Utrecht (1713) was perhaps the first political treaty that had
a global impact. It not only ended a European-wide conflict, but also led to
a cessation of hostilities on the American continent and Indian subconti-
nent, as well as naval warfare worldwide. More than this, however – as the
chapters in this volume clearly demonstrate – the treaty marked an impor-
tant step in the development of an integrated worldwide political system.
By reconsidering the preconditions, negotiations and consequences of the
Peace of Utrecht – rather than focusing on previous concerns with interna-
tional relations and diplomacy – the contributions to this collection help
embed events in a richer context of diverging networks, globalising empires,
expanding media and changing identities.
Several chapters consider the preconditions and challenges to political
entities such as the British and Spanish empires and French monarchy, dem-
onstrating that far from being nation-states these were conglomerates with
diverging forms of affiliation, which developed different modes and inter-
ests to face the needs and consequences of the Utrecht negotiations. This
“macrostructural” perspective is complemented by chapters that focus on
“microstructural” aspects, considering the personal networks and relation-
ships that informed day-to-day actions in Utrecht. Both perspectives are
then drawn together by further contributions that examine the formation of
images and discourses that were intended to identify key individuals with
larger political entities and their assumed interests.
This approach, combining both broad and more narrowly focused case
studies, reveals much about how the diplomatic discussions were framed
with political and social contexts. In so doing the volume offers new per-
spectives concerning the formation of modern Europe at the beginning of
the eighteenth century, beyond and yet connected with diplomatic develop-
ments and global entanglements.
Inken Schmidt-Voges is a Full Professor for Early Modern History of Europe
at the Philipps-University of Marburg in Germany.
Ana Crespo Solana is Tenured Scientist at the Consejo Superior de Investiga-
ciones Científicas (CSIC) in Spain.
Politics and Culture in Europe, 1650–1750
Series Editors
Tony Claydon
Bangor University, UK
Hugh Dunthorne
Swansea University, UK
Charles-Édouard Levillain
Université de Lille 2, France
Esther Mijers
University of Reading, UK
David Onnekink
Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
Focusing on the years between the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the end of the
War of the Austrian Succession, this series seeks to broaden scholarly knowledge of
this crucial period that witnessed the solidification of Europe into centralised nation-
states and created a recognisably modern political map. Bridging the gap between
the early modern period of the Reformation and the eighteenth century of colonial
expansion and industrial revolution, these years provide a fascinating era of study
in which nationalism, political dogma, economic advantage, scientific development,
cultural and artistic interests and strategic concerns began to compete with religion
as the driving force of European relations and national foreign policies.
The period under investigation, the second half of the seventeenth century and
the first half of the eighteenth, corresponds with the decline of Spanish power and
the rise of French hegemony that was only to be finally broken following the defeat
of Napoleon in 1815. This shifting political power base presented opportunities and
dangers for many countries, resulting in numerous alliances between formerly hostile
nations attempting to consolidate or increase their international influence, or restrain
that of a rival. These contests of power were closely bound up with political, cultural
and economic issues: particularly the strains of state building, trade competition,
religious tension and toleration, accommodating flows of migrants and refugees,
the birth pangs of rival absolutist and representative systems of government, radical
structures of credit, and new ways in which wider publics interacted with authority.
Despite this being a formative period in the formation of the European landscape,
there has been relatively little research on it compared to the earlier Reformation,
and the later revolutionary eras. By providing a forum that encourages scholars
to engage with the forces that were shaping the continent – either in a particular
country, or taking a transnational or comparative approach – it is hoped a greater
understanding of this pivotal era will be forthcoming.
New Worlds?
Transformations in the Culture of International Relations Around
the Peace of Utrecht
Edited by Inken Schmidt-Voges and Ana Crespo Solana
New Worlds?
Transformations in the Culture of
International Relations Around
the Peace of Utrecht

Edited by Inken Schmidt-Voges
and Ana Crespo Solana
First published 2017
by Routledge
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Crespo Solana; individual chapters, the contributors
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Contents

Notes on contributors vii
List of abbreviations x
Introduction: New Worlds? Transformations in
the Culture of International Relations Around the
Peace of Utrecht 1
INKEN SCHMIDT-VOGES AND ANA CRESPO SOLANA
PART I
Politics 19
1 The peace settlement and the reshaping of Spain
(to c. 1725) 21
CHRISTOPHER STORRS
2 The repercussions of the treaties of Utrecht for Spanish
colonial trade and the struggle to retain Spanish America 37
ANA CRESPO SOLANA
3 Continuity and change in Spanish–Dutch relations between
Westphalia (1648) and Utrecht (1714) 58
MANUEL HERRERO SÁNCHEZ
4 Disagreement over a peace agreement: The Barrier
Treaty and the conditional transfer of the
Southern Netherlands to Austria 79
KLAAS VAN GELDER
5 Savoyard representatives in Utrecht: Political–aristocratic
networks and the diplomatic modernisation of the state 96
PAOLA BIANCHI
vi Contents
6 Ending a religious cold war: Confessional trans-state
networks and the Peace of Utrecht 113
SUGIKO NISHIKAWA
PART II
Perceptions 129

7 Old worlds, new worlds? Contemporary reflections upon
international relations ca. 1713 131
DAVID ONNEKINK
8 Empire and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) 153
STEVEN PINCUS
9 The “balance of power” in British arguments over peace,
1697–1713 176
TONY CLAYDON
10 From the warrior king to the peaceful king: Louis
XIV’s public image and the Peace of Utrecht 194
SOLANGE RAMEIX
11 Diverging concepts of peace in German newspapers 1712/1713:
A case study of the Hamburger Relations-Courier 209
INKEN SCHMIDT-VOGES
Index 227
Notes on contributors

Paola Bianchi has a PhD in History of European Society and is currently lec-
turer at the University of Aosta Valley (Department of Human and Social
Sciences), where she teaches History of Europe in the Early Modern Age.
Recently (2014) she was made associate professor. Her main fi elds of
interest are ‘new’ military and diplomatic history, history of the courts
and their élites (XVII–XVIII centuries), social and cultural history of the
Grand Tour, in particular from Great Britain to Savoy-Piedmont. She
collaborates with several Italian scholarly reviews (in particular R ivista
storica italiana and S ocietà e storia) and is part of the scholarly commit-
tee of the series G uerra e pace in età moderna. Annali di storia militare
europea (Milan, Franco Angali publisher).
Tony Claydon is Professor of Early Modern History at Bangor University
in Wales. He is author of William III and the Godly Revolution (Cam-
bridge University Press, 1996), a study of government propaganda after
the 1689 revolution in England; of E urope and the Making of England,
1660–1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2007), an examination of the
sense of participation by English people in a Protestant international and
in Christendom in the century after the civil war; and of articles on vari-
ous aspects of the faith and political culture of late Stuart Britain.
Ana Crespo Solana holds a PhD in Geography and History and a Masters
in Latin-American History and has worked as a research fellow in Spain,
Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. She has been professor in the
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científi cas (CSIC) in Spain from
2007. She has led several research projects on Atlantic Economic and
Social History and in Spatial Humanities (European Science Foundation,
Spanish National Endowment for Humanities and Marie Curie Actions)
and is a member of several editorial and advisory boards and scholarly
committees. She is the author of eight books and over seventy essays and
articles about Spanish colonial trade, merchant communities, European
expansion in the Atlantic and GIS tools for the study of the colonial trade
with America.
viii Notes on contributors
Klaas van Gelder fi nished his PhD on the establishment of Austrian rule in
the Southern Netherlands following the War of the Spanish Succession at
Ghent University, Belgium, in 2012. From October 2012 until Septem-
ber 2015, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Founda-
tion Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) at the History Department of Ghent
University. His current research project aims at studying the different
reform plans for the central institutional apparatus in the Austrian Neth-

erlands and its gradual penetration of formerly autonomous local and
regional administrations. His publications include articles in the E uro-
pean Review of History , the Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung and
the Revue d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine .
Manuel Herrero-Sanchez teaches at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville.
He holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and
has taught as a research fellow at the Istituto Benedetto Croce of Naples,
the Leiden Center for the History of European Expansion (IGEER), the
Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, Liège University, Complutense Univer-
sity of Madrid and at the Institute of History (CSIC). A specialist in the
History of International Relations during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, his research interests focus on the comparative approach to the
history of the mercantile republics and on the complex constitution of the
Hispanic Monarchy. Other areas of research include Atlantic History and
models of European expansion.
Sugiko Nishikawa took her fi rst degree from the Graduate School of Arts,
Rikkyo University (Tokyo, Japan), and subsequently was a research stu-
dent at University College, London, where she obtained her PhD in His-
tory in 1998. From 2000 to 2005, she was Associate Professor of Western
European History at Kobe University (Kobe, Japan), and since 2005, she
has been Associate Professor at the British Section, Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences, at the University of Tokyo. She specialises in the study
of Protestant communications networks in early modern Europe, which
expanded from the British Isles to the Baltic and the Mediterranean regions.
David Onnekink is Assistant Professor in the History of International Rela-
tions section of the Department of History of the Universiteit Utrecht. He
is interested in early modern foreign policy, in particular in connection with
the Dutch Republic and England. He is the author of The Anglo-Dutch
Favourite. The career of Hans Willem Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland (Alder-
shot 2007) and co-authored a monograph on the Peace of Utrecht (Hilver-
sum 2013) (with Renger de Bruin). He has also edited and co-edited several
volumes of essays, including Ideology and foreign policy in early modern
Europe (1650–1750) (Farnham 2011) (with Gijs Rommelse).
Steve Pincus is Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale University. He
has published widely on the political, cultural, intellectual and economic
history of early modern Britain and its empire, most recently 1688: The
Notes on contributors ix
First Modern Revolution . He is now completing a history of the British
Empire c.1650–c.1784, which seeks to understand the evolution of the
British imperial state in comparative perspective.
Solange Rameix studied history at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. She com-
pleted her PhD on ‘The Language of Just War: Comparing French and
English Perspectives on the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish
Succession (1688–1713)’ in 2011. She is also a fellow at the ‘Fondation
Thiers’ (CNRS) (2009–2012).
Inken Schmidt-Voges teaches early modern history at the Philipps-University
of Marburg. Her research interests cover studies on early modern peace
processes, combining political, social and cultural history for a more
encompassing understanding. In this context, she has recently fi nished
a major work on peace semantics and practices in domestic and matri-
monial matters in the eighteenth century (Mikropolitiken des Friedens,
Berlin 2015). Furthermore, she guided studies on peace as code of politi-
cal communication in Sweden c. 1600 and is currently leading a research
project on ‘media constructions of peace in Europe, 1710–1721’. Further
areas of interest are the history of Scandinavia, especially Sweden, the
history of the Holy Roman Empire, the history of houses and households
in Early Modern Europe as well as how narratives of collective identity
shaped, changed and infl uenced the formation of societies in Europe.
Christopher Storrs is Reader in History in the School of Humanities, Univer-
sity of Dundee. He has published widely on the Savoyard state, Italy and
Spain in the early modern era, including various articles and the mono-
graphs War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy, 1690–1720 (Cambridge,
1999), and T he Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy 1665–1700 (Oxford,
2006). He recently edited The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century
Europe (Aldershot, 2009) and is currently preparing a monograph on
Spanish policy in the western Mediterranean and Italy in the fi rst half of
the eighteenth century and a survey of eighteenth-century Italy.