While Southeast Asian ports have emerged as a favoured site for studying cultural encounters, little is known about how transregional interactions shaped the principles of cross-cultural political communication necessary to forge alliances and set up lasting collaborations between different interest groups. Moreover, local elements and trans-regional links to the greater Sinosphere and the Indian Ocean world remain understudied. EcoDip has significantly reshaped our understanding of early modern Asian diplomacy.
EcoDip SEA has studied negotiation practices and diplomatic exchange between domains in insular Southeast Asia and the Spanish, Portuguese and the Dutch as aspiring imperial powers. Looking at learning processes and considering how mediation between a multitude of plural actors affected the spread of different concepts and different modes of governing, EcoDip SEA contributed to a new understanding of developing diplomatic relations and changing international systems. For that purpose, it explored how local Southeast Asian agencies and indigenous traditions shaped diplomatic practices. Thus, the study challenged stereotypical narratives of rivalry and conflict, military superiority and indigenous passivity. EcoDip provides informed and empirically sound answers about questions of in/commensurability of concepts and practices, circulation of knowledge, appropriation and accommodation.
The overall objectives are the dissemination of new research results to diverse audiences and the beneficiary's career development. The project resulted in four peer-reviewed open-access publications (two journal articles, and two handbook articles), a book chapter, an edited volume, and several public outreach deliverables including 18 conference papers (see below). The project helped to develop the research field of global diplomacy, notably with the establishment of the Global Diplomacy Network which currently has over 100 members and hosts regular online events.
EcoDip has explored the dynamics behind global diplomacy and knowledge in Asian maritime empires between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century. Various episodes of diplomatic exchange between provided a rich resource for an analysis of how global diplomatic agents co-produced material objects, images, and written records which in turn impacted politics and trade relations. The project made four important interventions in the burgeoning field of new diplomatic history. First, it sheds light on certain aspects of growing research on Asian diplomatic encounters connecting the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia; second, it offers insights into the manifold actors involved in creating and negotiating knowledge; third, it highlights the epistemological importance of the visual and material archives for the study of global diplomacy in the early modern period; and fourth, it challenges narratives of cross-cultural foreign relations which tend to overemphasize asymmetrical and confessional explanations.
The study has widely disseminated non-European avenues of writing and thinking about inter-polity relations and introduced a variety of diplomatic actors to a diverse audience.
