Abstract
In this innovative study, Robert Batchelor asks how London emerged as a global city in the 16th and 17th centuries. He argues that London went from a second-rate European port to a city that ‘enabled and indeed fostered global commerce between Asia, the Atlantic World, and Europe’ (p. 9) due to the translation of encounters, both textual and personal, with Asian societies. It is only through its engagement with Asian political systems, maritime commerce and science that London matured into a dynamic portal through which not only the city was transformed but also the monarchy, legal systems, intellectual community and economy.
Batchelor reached this conclusion through the examination of the acquisition, organization and interpretation of the Asian materials that make up the major collections now held in the Bodleian and other libraries, collections that were largely curated during the period of London’s early modern globalization, ca. 1550–1690. One document in particular provided an interpretative breakthrough, the Selden map, named after the collector who acquired it, John Selden, a legal theorist. Rediscovered thanks to Batchelor’s research, the map shows a diagram of a Chinese merchant network, the only surviving example of its kind. Examination of the reverse of the map reveals that the merchant nodes were drawn first: ‘a forgotten form of Chinese mapmaking’ (p. 17).
This focus on merchant networks reveals more about how the early modern world functioned than any map by Mercator, Bachelor argues, and this ‘alternative form of mapping that nevertheless translates’ forms the backbone of his interpretative structure (p. 17). Although the broad use of ‘translation’ is stretched at times to refer to diverse activities such as the movement or transfer of objects, the translation of languages or the passing of information, the overall point stands: London was the centre for this processing of goods and ideas from Asia that then had national and international consequences.
The bulk of the book is devoted to the examination of the classic, and perhaps over emphasized, ‘rise of modernity’ question. Rather than use a European, national or strictly comparative perspective, Batchelor instead examines how global events as translated through London affected the ‘classical signifiers of modernity’: the corporation; the nation; the rule of law; the state; and political revolution. For example, in chapter 5, Batchelor shows how the Glorious Revolution came about not just in response to European, particularly French, absolutism, but also with reference to the (perceived) despotism of and/or alternative approaches to sovereignty and power in China, Siam and India.
Batchelor offers a fresh analysis of the early modern period from a much-needed global perspective. He sees the origins of modernity not as a great divergence, but as a dynamic, if often misunderstood, interchange based on constant interaction and attempts to comprehend, in translation, Europe’s most important economic partner. He gives early modern globalization a geography as well as a history. Its development was an uneven and subnational phenomenon, one that can be understood particularly well through the example of London and its translation, however garbled, of Asian ideas and institutions.