War and globalisation in the modern era (1500s–2000s): actors, technologies and spaces

What was the historical relationship between war and globalisation? While scholars have challenged conventional assumptions about the alleged deglobalising effects of war, global historians have not yet provided satisfactory answers to this crucial question. This article draws on a vast and growing historiography on the early modern and modern periods to explain how warfare fostered unexpected global connections, long-distance displacements, and new portals of globalisation in the last five centuries. Transcending the conventional focus on specific cases of global wars, this article proposes to interpret the relations between war and the globalising process from a longue durée perspective. By examining the actors, technologies, and spaces of war since around 1500, this article showcases the long-term patterns of bellic globalisation, concludes that war not only thwarted but also increased global interactions, and further proposes to consider warfare as an intrinsic element of globalisation.