GlobalGuns investigates the relationship between the development of a key military technology, gunpowder artillery, and the development of European overseas empires. The research focuses on the Spanish and Portuguese empires during the period of the Iberian union (1580-1640), when these political entities were united under the same sovereign. In this period, the sustained development of maritime flows between Europe, America, Africa and Asia required the massive deployment of artillery technology on board of ships and in defense of sea-fortresses. The project aims to offer a better understanding of how the Iberian empires met the crucial challenge of multiplying cannon technology at a world scale. This topic which has often been studied through nationalistic lenses requires to be analyzed in a much more transnational perspective by paying attention to the multiple circulations of material and experts not only between Spain and Portugal but more broadly between the various regions of these empires, which included parts of Italy, the Low Countries, and all overseas colonial territories in Africa, America and Asia, whose contribution to the armament industry has long been ignored by nationalist narratives. Colonial history tends to be seen by our modern society as a moment of European absolute domination over the rest of the world, while this research aims to bring some nuance to this picture by shedding light on the role of colonial societies and non-European actors in the world-wide deployment of a weapon which has been considered a symbol of European conquest.
It also proposes to reflect on the driving forces behind the development of military technology, and particularly on the role of the maritime private economy. Conclusions show that the Iberian empires managed to deploy cannons at a global scale through the involvement of private merchant ships and their huge pool of technical resources, including ships, cannons, and specialized technicians such as gunners. The transnational nature of the resources used by the Iberian empires highlight the necessity to study the phenomenon at a broader scale. Therefore, the research carried out for this project opens a wider scope of reflection on the relationship between the rise of the private merchant shipping in Western Europe and the capacity of some Western European state to achieve maritime projection world-wide.
