Empires, Privateering and the Sea (EMPRISE)

The Empires, Privateering and the Sea (EMPRISE) Project investigated broad processes of international change with the aim of rethinking fundamental concepts in International Relations. A basing tenet of EMPRISE has been to question conceptual dichotomies that have guided much of our understanding of modernity and the rise of the state: the distinction between (1) empires and states, between (2) land and sea, and between (3) private and public. Thus, EMPRISE brought the sea into analyses of political transformation in the period 1500-1856, focusing on empires and seaborne power, and how these two interacted. At the core of our investigations was the institution of privateering, a medieval institution which was tweaked during the early modern period so as allow private ships under sovereign license to raid enemy vessels, and which became a key feature of most imperial ventures. We have asked two big questions: How did states become empires? And how did empires become states again? Our hypothesis was that small European states stumbled into empire-building largely through privateering, and that, in the end, large colonial empires suffered decisive blows at the hands of privateers. This hypothesis has been largely confirmed through the project studies so far. Privateers bridge the dichotomies on which much of our thinking about political transformation rests: land and sea, state and empire, trade and plunder. By bridging these, privateers contributed to building empires, but also weaken them; when European states used privateers against each other, but also when newly independent states used them against their former colonies. Agents of European states, privateers were also builders of colonial empires. This work has recently been published in “The Sea and International Relations” (2022) which was published by Manchester University Press. Our main point of contention is against the tendency of historical sociologists and IR scholars to focus on land and states at the expense of sea and empires. By “bringing in the sea” we contribute to make sense of a key process of political transformation that took place beyond European shores, in the periphery of the European state system: colonial state formation. Based at NUPI, EMPRISE (2018-2023) has had a core team consisting of Benjamin de Carvalho (PI) and Halvard Leira, in addition to Minda Holm (NUPI), Morten Skumsrud Andersen (NUPI), Jens Bartelson (Lund), John Hobson (Sheffield), Julia Costa Lopez (Groningen), og Xavier Guillaume (Groningen). Sindre Gade Viksand and Cho Lucas Yabah have provided much needed research assistance at NUPI. During the course of the project, others have collaborated in a number of events and publications as well, including Ayse Zarakol (Cambridge), Andrew Phillips (Queensland), Shogo Suzuki (Manchester), Jeppe Mulich (LSE), Oliver Kessler (Erfurt), Zeynep Gulsah Capan (Erfurt), Alejandro Cólas (Birkbeck), Claire Vergerio (Leiden), Hendrik Spruyt (Northwestern), Mauro Caraccioli (Virginia Tech), and Daniel Nexon (Georgetown). The findings of EMPRISE have been presented at a series of international conferences and workshops. The main findings of the project will be made available through three main publications: (1) an edited volume entitled "The Sea and International Relations", (2) an edited volume entitled "The Empire State System" and (3) a monograph on the importance of privateering for the emergence of overseas empires. The project findings indicate that the sea ought to figure to a larger extent in our theories and imaginaries of international politics. Without this, we may misread important elements of how global governance in sustained. When it comes to the emergence of empires, our findings indicate a need for a broad conceptualization of imperial emergence in comparative and historical perspective, which we have achieved through a reconceptualization of state formation and imperialism through the concept of the “empire state”. Finally, the project has confirmed the importance of privateers not only in the emergence of empires but as a bulwark against the emergence of global hegemony. In addition to the three main publications (sea, empires, privateering), EMPRISE has focused on fundamental concepts and theories in International Relations, and their conceptual and historical dimension. These findings have been published through a series of books and articles such as «Hva er Internasjonal Politikk» (Benjamin de Carvalho og Halvard Leira, Universitetsforlaget), «Multicultural Origins of the Global Economy: Beyond the Western-Centric Frontier» (John Hobson, Cambridge University Press), «Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations» (Benjamin de Carvalho, Julia Costa Lopez of Halvard Leira, Routledge), «Utenrikspolitikkens opprinnelse : Norge og verden» (Halvard Leira, Universitetsforlaget), and «Becoming International» (Jens Bartelson, Cambridge University Press).

The overall aim of EMPRISE was to attempt a reconceptualization of the tenets of macro-historical change along five dichotomies which have been fundamental to political thinking: private/public, feudal/modern, land/sea, trade/warfare, state/empire. Through a series of publications and dissemination activities at international conferences, the project has largely achieved those outcomes, highlighting the importance of conceptualizing large-scale political change beyond these dichotomies: a volume on the sea in international relations (Manchester, 2022), a handbook on historical international relations (Routledge, 2021), an edited volume on the empire state system (forthcoming, 2025) and a volume on privateering and empires (forthcoming, 2024) have all contributed to initiate a shift in the way International Relations conceptualizes big processes of change. All in all, including volumes in process, EMPRISE will have resulted in the publication of: • 5 monographs • 3 edited volumes • 6 articles in international peer-reviewed journals • 13 chapters in edited volumes

The project 'Empires, Privateering and the Sea' (EMPRISE) is a historical and comparative inquiry into the importance of forms of seaborne violence for the emergence, consolidation, and political transformation of European states and overseas empires in the period between c. 1500-1856, when the Treaty of Paris banned privateering. EMPRISE will further our understanding of how this practice, which until now has been the object of little sustained scrutiny in the social sciences, contributed to reconfigure the global spatiality of empires in the early modern period. The question driving EMPRISE is how northern European states (England, France, the Netherlands), which had been excluded from the New World by papal treaties in the fifteenth century, not only went to sea, established thriving networks of maritime trade, but also came to replace the Iberian powers as successful overseas empire-builders. This change happened even though these states had no substantial navies until the turn of the sixteenth century, and knew precious little about what went on beyond their shores. The main contention of EMPRISE is that privateers were central drivers of this change. Against leading accounts in the field, the key innovation of EMPRISE is the recognition that privateering and maritime predation were axiomatically neither inimical nor parasitical to state enterprises at sea; they were an intrinsic part of these efforts - at times the most important one. The core team of EMPRISE will be Dr. Benjamin de Carvalho and Dr. Halvard Leira at NUPI, together with an early career scholar who will be recruited to NUPI for the project. Efforts will be made to address the gender balance of the project when recruiting.