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Queen Elizabeth claims the world in the allegorical Armada portrait shown in Figure 0.1. Her right hand rests on a globe, her fingers “covering the Americas, indicating England’s dominion of the seas and plans for imperialist expansion of the New World.”¹ Dated c. 1588, this painting commemorates the defeat of the Armada, part of an “outpouring of the eulogistic material” that marked this event, but the date of the portrait has also been anecdotally linked to the birth of the first English child in the Virginia colony.² The viewer’s gaze is particularly drawn to the terrestrial globe under her hand – seemingly innocuous in terms of its dimensions – but a familiar object of the period, represented in print and paintings, that functioned as a “socially affective object” signaling a “transitional moment in the history of modernity” (Brotton 1999, 72). History and geography intersect in the allegorical image of the globe, marking recognizable territorial boundaries of the new world, while observing a triumphal moment in Elizabeth’s reign in which England defeats Spain, a Catholic power and its rival, with one instance of its rivalry being the colonization of the Americas. Here, it is apparent that placed in the luxurious setting of this painting, the globe would appeal to the emotions and imagination of the viewers while signaling the development of an emergent geography in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Showing the ways in which the terrestrial globe figured in promoting “an affective global awareness,” Brotton explains its history as follows:

Figure 0.1 Elizabeth I, Armada Portrait, attributed to George Gower, c. 1588. Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire. The Bridgeman Art Library. Source: Digital Image Library/Alamy Stock Photo

By the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century, geographers and diplomats began to question the effectiveness of the flat, rectangular map for encompassing the growing dimensions of the terrestrial world. In 1512 the Nuremburg scholar Johannes Cochlaeus reflected a sense that classical geographical perceptions were no longer adequate in describing and representing the proliferation and expansion of newly discovered territories … [One] response of a range of geographers and cosmographers was to intensify their interest in projecting the earth’s surface on a sphere, rather than on a plane surface.

(1999, 78)

Another telling instance of the symbolic and affective power of the terrestrial globe is narrated by Matthew Dimmock, evoking “a broadening of access of worldly materials ... and a new sense of England and its queen as a global actor” (8). He begins his recent illuminating study, Elizabethan Globalism (2019), with a description of an episode involving Queen Elizabeth I and framing it with a question: “What was an English vision of the wider world at this point [at the end of the sixteenth century]?” (3).

In late 1592 the merchant and financier William Sanderson had formally presented the queen with the first English-made terrestrial globe … for Elizabeth and her subjects … this new globe was an encompassing of new geographical knowledge, a tool for facilitating action, a national triumph, a profoundly “affective object”...

(3–4)

Viewing this moment as having an uncanny symbolic significance, as representative of an emergent “Elizabethan globalism” (4), he elaborates on its specific associations with the new mercantile forces and Elizabethan explorers:

The new globe was a product of English voyages of trade and exploration, most prominently the famous circumnavigations of Francis Drake (1577–1580) and Thomas Cavendish (1586–1588), whose routes are carefully traced across its surface in red and blue … and valorized the flourishing of English global enterprise …

(4)

Interestingly, however, these terrestrial globes not only figured in the development of global geography in early modern England and Europe but also were also ideologically deployed by rulers in drawing their claims to territorial possessions in newly discovered, distant territories, and generally invested with geographical and political power by men of authority and knowledge at the time.³ Not surprisingly, then, images of terrestrial globes proliferate in Renaissance cultural artifacts, as symbols and markers of a new global consciousness, evident in Holbein’s famous portrait of the Ambassadors, which depicts French claims to Brazil; on the crest of Francis Drake’s coat of arms on which a sailing ship sits atop a globe; in Queen Elizabeth’s Armada portrait mentioned earlier; and in the Ditchley portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger that depicts the queen standing on a map of England on a globe, among numerous others. A preoccupation with the image of the globe vividly evokes an awareness of an expanding world, which Europeans began to recognize through their experiences of travel, exploration, discovery, commerce, and competitive conquest and colonization of new lands.

As the terrestrial globes symbolized growing territorial power, they were also reminders that European nations – despite their bitter religious and political schisms and rivalries – shared a proximity of history and geography, even as they were often rivals in commerce and conquest. But did they realize that some powerful, non-European, Islamic rulers, for instance, also claimed the globe on their own terms – in which Europeans were often inconsequential and insignificant? Not only in Europe and England, as in Elizabeth’s portraits, was the terrestrial globe deployed as a symbol of power, but it also functioned as a “socially affective object” in non-European, Islamic imperial representations of the global imaginary, as in Mughal court paintings. A remarkable example is an allegorical painting of the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, embracing the Persian monarch, Shah Abbas, both standing on a terrestrial globe (on the cover of this book), as way of contextualizing the “Global Renaissance” via an affective imagery of Islamic rulers beyond Europe. Painted by Abu’l Hasan, the painting seems geographically accurate, according to some critics who suggest that it is “based on European allegories and probably on English models introduced at court by [the English Ambassador] Sir Thomas Roe” (Okada, 55). Azfar Moin interprets the “message” of the painting, often titled “Jahangir’s Dream,” from a Mughal perspective in his study of kingship, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (2012). As an allegorical representation of Emperor Jahangir and Shah Abbas of Persia, Moin describes it “as a unique cultural artifact of the period” that defines the mystical power of the Mughal kings, and the painting itself explains its genealogy:

According to the commentary on the painting Jahangir saw a dream in which Shah Abbas appeared in a wellspring of light (chashma-i nur). He ordered his artist to paint the dream quickly before the approaching Persian New Year … the painting is also marked by a verse that spontaneously came to Jahangir’s “miraculous tongue:” “Our Shah came in our dream, and so gave us joy / The enemy of my dream is the one who woke me up.”

(204)

Some critics view this imperial embrace within the allegorical “dream” as a reflection of Jahangir’s anxieties about actual Persian incursions into the western border of the Mughal territory (Okada, 54–55). Moin counters this view of Jahangir’s “anxiety over losing the border province of Qandahar in … Afghanistan, to the Safavids” (204), arguing that these “political and psychological interpretations overlook the important fact that in Jahangir’s time the dream was a medium of miracles and prophecy” (206). However, it would be fair to assume that while the painting depicts Abbas in a brotherly submission and Jahangir proclaims it gave him “joy,” he is perhaps aesthetically eliding the political rivalries between the two kingdoms. And, from a historical perspective, the political implications of the painting are evident in the placement of the figures, as Sumathi Ramamurthy (Going Global in Mughal India) interprets it. Identifying the motif of the lion and the lamb on the painting, dad-o-daam, “a ferocious beast of prey, usually a lion (dad) … lying peaceably with its potential victim, generally a lamb (daam),” she goes on to unpack what these images reveal about the relationships of the monarch:

In “Jahangir’s Dream” the lion on which he [Jahangir] stands sprawls across a good part of his rival’s domain … as well as extends into what we would today call central Asia … that [would] have been under the sway of his ancestor Timur [Tamburlaine]. In turn, the vast Safavid empire is reduced to some paltry territories that the lamb is made to rest on, east of what we recognize today as the Mediterranean Ocean. Europe hardly matters in this vision, barely visible as it is on the left margins of the globe – and the painting.

(65)

Ramaswamy also goes on to observe:

[What is particularly remarkable] is that both sovereigns are shown standing on a large terrestrial globe … the general configuration of territories shown on the globe are clearly derived from European maps although the level of detail on the map of India exceeds anything known about the sub-continent in the West. Many places are clearly named, including Agra, Delhi, and Lahore, and Iran, and Portugal.

(65)

Based on this painting, she also suggests that Jahangir must have owned a terrestrial globe.

Overall, it seems, with the two rulers standing on a swathe of territory stretching from the edge of Europe over the land mass of India, this painting evokes a range of associations about the close relationships and rivalries in the Islamic world, which included the Ottomans, Persians, and Mughals while implicitly excluding Europe. The painting depicts Jahangir claiming the world in terms that would have been familiar to the peoples of the Islamic kingdoms, both the internal rivalries as well as the exclusions of Europe.

I invoke the portraits of the two early modern rulers, Elizabeth and Jahangir, not quite contemporaries, here facing each other, symbolically, if not literally, in order to show how their claims of world domination (though with a differing sense of the frontier) were ideologically inscribed via the globes represented in these paintings. Like Elizabeth I claiming the globe after the defeat of Spain in the Armada portrait or towering over the globe with her feet firmly planted on the map of England in the subsequent Ditchley portrait, this image of Jahangir by his court painter Abu’l Hasan represents the power politics of his region, authorizing a view in which the Safavid ruler is shrunk in the Mughal’s dominant embrace, although they both seem to be claiming the same global territory. And the name Jahangir itself, which literally means “World-Seizer” – a name chosen by the emperor on his accession to the Mughal throne – signals a self-aggrandizement that befitted the large Mughal empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though their “notions of a frontier of expansion largely seem to have been southwards and eastwards” to the “ancestral homelands” of their ancestor Timur (Tamburlaine), and Europe held little interest for them (Subrahmanyam 2006, 72). Jahangir was not alone in projecting an image of himself as a “‘World-Seizer’ and successive Mughal emperors in India used similar titles … Shahjehan (World-Emperor) and Alamgir (World Seizer)” (Subrahmanyam 2005, 29).

Similar to Renaissance representations, and evidently influenced by Western iconography and art forms, Mughal paintings frequently deployed the image of the globe or an orb denoting the world or “Jahan,” which the particular ruler grasped or held under his feet. The socially affective power of the image of the globe in the two cultures suggests, perhaps in an uncanny way, that they were a part of a gradually emerging “global cultural economy.”⁴ Here the implied presence of European artistic conventions behind the representation of Jahangir and the looming presence of England’s tussle with Spain over the Americas in Elizabeth’s image both implicitly gesture at this widening of the horizons. And it is also noteworthy to recall, for instance, that in the period between the Armada portrait of Elizabeth (c. 1588) and the allegorical image of “Jahangir’s Dream” (c. 1618–1622), England expanded its influence and trade in East India, as evidenced, among other sources, in letters exchanged between the Mughal rulers and Elizabeth and James, before and after the formation of the East India Company in 1600. Elizabeth’s formal letter to the Mughal ruler, Akbar (Jehangir’s father), in 1583, describes how her English subjects have “great affection to visit the most distant places of the world” and calls the king to allow “mutual and friendly trafique of marchandize on both sides” (Hakluyt, V 1904: 450). And the reply received by her successor King James I from the Emperor Jahangir (1618) to his “letter of friendship” assures access to English trade: “I doe command that to all the English marchants in all my Dominions there be given freedome and residence” (Foster, 559). These exchanges offer one instance of the mid-seventeenth-century globalizing trends, whereby the European imagination was being stimulated by increasing trade and cross-cultural interactions across the globe. Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589, 1598–1600), for example, not only offers ample testimony of England’s increasing engagement with different parts of the globe – the Americas, Africa, East Asia, and even the North seas – but in the process also incorporates European forays into travel and trade, as England’s competitors, while offering ethnographic accounts of non-Europeans kingdoms, rulers, and societies.