The Eagle and the Dragon

For Serge Gruzinski the key word to understanding the sixteenth century is ‘globalisation’. While rejecting the identification of globalisation with the expansion of Western Europe, he admits nonetheless that a globalised history was brought about by Iberian overseas expansion, bringing China and the Americas to the forefront of our own contemporary globalised world. In this book, he offers to narrate the familiar stories of Hernan Cortez and Tomé Pires, set in the larger tableau of Spanish and Portuguese voyages in the early sixteenth century, one the conqueror of Mexico, the other a failed diplomat to Ming China. In seventeen chapters alternating between events in the Americas and in China, Gruzinski reflects on the simultaneous histories of Cortez and Pires, and of Spanish and Portuguese imperial expansion. His central argument is this: the Portuguese were not as mercantilist as one might like to think, being quite ready to fantasise about the conquest of China, while the Spaniards, the creators of the first global empire, were by no means destined to victories and conquests. Historical contingency is at the heart of Gruzinski’s retelling of these stories, inspired by his reading of Giraudoux’s inter-war masterpiece, La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu , in this case, with respect to the war on China. This literary analogy, however, does not quite work. Whereas in Giraudoux’s play it was the warriors Hector and Ulysses who agree on peace (their agreement sabotaged only by Demokros the poet), the Portuguese came to China as pirates, pillaging, burning and kidnapping, predestining their later diplomatic mission to failure

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · China · Empire · Globalization · Humanities · Literature · Political science · Portuguese · Early Modern Spanish Literature · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy