Abstract
This impressive volume is the result of the combined work of more than 300 authors, most of them attached to institutions in German academia. It is an attempt to collect a large number of essays dealing with the aspects of European expansion outside of Europe. But rather than being a classic who’s who and what’s what within the context of European expansion from the fifteenth century onwards, the focus of this work is on less obvious matters, partly motivated by a desire to steer clear of a Eurocentric approach. The work includes an entry on the Vietnamese Boat People of the 1970s, next to a classic and extensive biography of Columbus. A discussion of the Spanish empire can be found, but also an entry on the Angolan coastal province of Cabinda, entirely surrounded by territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The entries themselves vary a great deal in length. On the one hand, this makes a lot of sense, as general discussion on slavery (almost 2.5 pages) warrants more space than an entry on cholera (a quarter of a page). On the other hand, these varying lengths introduce a certain arbitrariness to the work. While the biography on James Cook is quite complete, with two pages, Vasco da Gama was only given a quarter of a page, and Magellan is entirely absent. This randomness becomes a more serious problem when reflecting on the choice of entries to include. While it is only natural to be selective, it is difficult to discover consequent criteria that the authors applied for the selection throughout the volume. The regions that academics would expect to be there, are there; the Gold Coast, the gold- and diamond colonies of Minas Gerais in Brazil, locations all over Asia, Africa and the Americas. But while there is an entry on the city of Chicago, there isn’t one for New York. While there are three different entries on Danish colonial expansion (the Danish Indies, the Danish Gold Coast and the Danish colonial empire), there is not one on Swedish colonial effort. The same applies to persons. Why discuss king João VI of Portugal, but not his predecessors, not even those most involved in Portuguese oceanic expansion? The authors’ argument to provide access to knowledge on lesser known phenomena or figures is laudable, and important, but not fully manages to overcome this sense of arbitrariness, as based on that argumentation, someone such as Columbus might have been left out too.
The reference to ‘overseas history’ in the title adds to the confusion, as various entries have nothing to do with (maritime) European expansion per se. As mentioned before, Magellan isn’t there, but Julius Caesar is. The authors haven’t really justified this kind of entry in a work focussing on a time period from the fifteenth century onwards, but they did remark that the forerun to European expansion cannot be entirely neglected. Thus one finds Ptolemy or Alexander the Great in individual entries. This makes that the work is less about maritime or oceanic expansion by Europeans and the consequences for non-European regions, but about expansion and contact in itself, disregarding of it being maritime or overland, by direct conquest or the establishment of commercial or other types of durable relationships. The entry on the Ottoman Empire, for instance, is very succinct, and doesn’t include a reference to Christian–Ottoman tensions due to intensified contact, conquest and empire-building. It fails, for instance, to address any maritime aspect of the Ottoman empire, which would have been useful in this context. There is no paragraph on the North-African corsairs, or on the Ottoman admiral Barbarossa. A longer introduction with a clearer establishment on criteria of inclusion might have explained such an omission. A change of title might have helped change expectations of readers about the contents of the work. It is more a lexicon on the world outside of Europe as it got shaped because of European contact than a lexicon of overseas history. While this is not a problem in itself, it makes it hard for a reader to guess what will be in it, and what will be left out.
It does allow, on the other hand, for the construction of a unique set of essays. In the introduction, it is clearly stated that this is a multi-disciplinary work, and that becomes very clear when going through the pages. Multi-disciplinarity comes out the most in the co-habitation of very different entries in the book. So one can find, next to classic subjects from navigational devices such as the sextant, colonial cities from São Paulo to Jakarta, academics such as Margaret Mead, American indigenous tribes such as the Apache or Sioux and concepts from Shintoism to Apartheid, also less obvious things such as aids, baseball or entries on music, theatre and dance in India or the Spanish Caribbean. But I could not find entries related to colonial painting, the Mediterranean or the Caribbean pirates, things I expected to be there.
As the inclusion of some entries from Antiquity already suggests, there is an issue with time framing. It is very hard to determine clear start and end dates for topics to merit inclusion, as most entries will contain information on things occurring earlier in time. The same goes with setting an end date, as the authors explain in their foreword. It is elegantly solved by focussing on the period of European expansion, but in a way, this periodization cannot avoid a sense of Eurocentrism. This could have been avoided by included a chronology of a few pages, as it would have allowed the authors to clearer carve out their terrain, with the added bonus that it might have provided some insight into the choices made by the authors on what to include.
In conclusion, I would say that this work is wonderfully quirky, rich in scope and content. The authors have indicated that one of the motivations behind the construction of this lexicon was to offer something substantial to people with a thirst for knowledge. They have succeeded, and it is a pleasure to jump from one term to another, and to discover a great deal of new things. It does make the work a difficult tool for specialist historians to use, and I think its value lies in three aspects. Firstly, you might be able to find clear information on and some valuable references to a very particular topic which might be tangential to your research. Second, you can quickly read up on some general phenomena relevant to your work. References to other entries within the lexicon makes it possible to establish links that wouldn’t have been so obvious at first sight. For maritime historians, the use is more in context than in the possibility to look up a great amount of data specific to maritime history. Entries such as the one on shipping and navigation (pp. 719–721) are too general. The nature of this compilation makes it so that entries on maritime matters are of more use to non-maritime historians, and vice versa. As such, it offers the welcome possibility to look a bit further, which should be a welcome proposition to any scholar.