Talbot, Michael ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7198-1422 (2025) Tracing global diplomacy: early modern European and Asian commercial-diplomatic routes. In: Tremml-Werner, Birgit, Hellman, Lisa and van Meersbergen, Guido, (eds.) Writing Global Diplomatic History (1400-1900). Oxford University Press, Oxford. (In Press)

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Abstract

This chapter explores the centrality of commercial diplomacy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by tracing the possible journeys of an Ottoman coin minted in Istanbul that was discovered at an archaeological site in Okinawa. Taking the coin as a heuristic device, this chapter considers two possible historical and historiographical “routes” through which the coin might have travelled from West to East Asia at the turn of the eighteenth century. The “European route’ follows the well-explored maritime mercantile network of the Dutch and English, structured and governed by formal written treaties and agreements. The “Asian route’ considers the different forms of diplomacy that would have regulated merchants travelling between Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Acehnese, Chinese, and Ryukyuan spaces, considering a world of commercial diplomacy governed less by written treaties than by customs, conventions, and port-based intermediaries. By considering these two possible worlds, this chapter argues that commerce was a principal driver of global diplomacy in this period, but also aims to show the benefits of reframing a discussion of global diplomacy away from European practices and conventions, considering intra-Asian practices and vocabularies and diplomacy outside the embassy to consider different conceptions and connections in global commerce and diplomacy.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	global diplomacy, intra-Asian diplomacy, commerce, diplomatic practice, global history
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D890 Eastern Hemisphere H Social Sciences > HF Commerce
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences > School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Last Modified:	21 Nov 2025 09:55
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/51572

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