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Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal, Twenty Thousand Cannibals, and an Ottoman Plot to Rule the World*
GIANCARLO CASALE
University of Minnesota–Twin Cities
| Politics might fairly be called the final frontier of the world historian. Over the past several decades, no one would deny that truly impressive advances have been made in our ability to trace the growth of global interconnectedness over time. But most would also agree—with a few notable exceptions—that these advances have been achieved through the study of migration, long-distance trade, biological exchange, technology transfer, and other such phenomena that operate on a plane largely independent of superficial political developments. "International history" in the political sense has remained very much the domain of specialists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while, at least for many, the study of political history in earlier periods still smacks of old-fashioned Eurocentric empiricism. |
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At least on the surface, the limitations of political history appear particularly daunting for scholars of the sixteenth century: the first historical period in which the intercontinental reach of European maritime powers becomes impossible to ignore, but seems to have no obvious corollary in any contemporary non-Western state. And yet, if told from only a slightly different perspective, the history of sixteenth-century political relations can become infinitely richer than the simple (and tired) narrative of contacts with, or resistance to, Europeans. During these years, in fact, alongside the self-consciously global maritime states of Portugal and Spain, imperial competitors such as the Ottomans and Mughals also began to think in global terms and to formulate political ideologies and practical strategies on a similarly vast world stage. And over time, the rivalry between all of these competing imperial centers in turn drew a constantly expanding network of smaller polities, both voluntarily and involuntarily, into their widening political orbits. In this sense, it is precisely during the sixteenth century that political history first becomes "world history."1 |
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In the following pages, we will examine one example of this process at work, involving a little-known Ottoman naval expedition to the Swahili Coast in the late 1580s. This expedition, led by the elusive Ottoman corsair Mir Ali Beg, has until now failed to attract serious attention from historians, to whom it has seemed little more than a case of single-handed adventurism by an opportunistic soldier of fortune. But, as we shall see, Mir Ali was hardly the rogue buccaneer he is often made out to be. Instead, his campaign was the result of a carefully orchestrated plan by a group of higher-ups in the Ottoman administration, who were eager to use it as a stepping stone for further expansion in the Indian Ocean. Even more importantly, their strategy was based on a complex political calculus with origins dating back to the late 1570s, when a series of nearly simultaneous events at opposite ends of the world upset the international balance of power from the North Atlantic to Southeast Asia. |
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Here, however, we risk getting ahead of ourselves. Before moving on to a discussion of such larger issues, let us take a few moments to recount the actual events as they unfolded off the coast of East Africa between 1588 and 1589. |
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