This article refers to the interconnected military, naval, economic, and informational developments that occurred outside Europe during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). Although the conflict is traditionally portrayed as a Central European and intra-imperial war, several Atlantic, African, and Asian theatres significantly influenced its outcome. These overseas dimensions involved mainly the pro-Habsburg and Catholic Iberian Union (Spain and Portugal) against the anti-Habsburg and Protestant coalition (Dutch Republic, England, and various chartered trading companies), whose colonial rivalries reshaped the economic foundations of European states engaged in the war and were intimately related in the diplomatic and strategic area. This generally involved skirmishes and naval blockades (mainly to seize colonial outposts or trade ships) rather than large pitched battles.
Historiography
Since the mid-20th century, historians have emphasized that the Thirty Years' War was not merely a German civil war but concerned much of Europe. Then more recent scholarship has taken the next interpretive step by situating the war within early modern globalization. For this historiography, the Thirty Years' War can be described as the first pan-European colonial war, due to the war's international scale and the involvement of colonial empires (mainly the ones of the Iberian Union against the Dutch, English, Danish and French colonial empire), being this oversea conflict so intense that some have dubbed it the true "First World War".
While the wider European significance of the war has since been fully recognized, historians like John Pike, Johannes Müller, Geoffrey Parker, John K. Thornton, Wim Klooster, Peter H. Wilson, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Jonathan Israel, etc. have only recently begun to place it in a global context by more systematically integrating its various Trans-Oceanic side stages into their analyses. The global perspective emphasizes three main factors:
- Colonial and maritime warfare, especially Dutch–Portuguese and Dutch–Spanish conflicts.
- Transoceanic bullion flows, particularly the Spanish treasure fleets that financed Imperial and Habsburg armies.
- A transcontinental news culture, which integrated events from Brazil, the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian Ocean into European political discourse.
Background
The Iberian Union and global Habsburg warfare
In 1580, Philip II of Spain also became ruler of the Portuguese Empire, creating the Iberian Union, the largest connected overseas domain of early modern era which was key in the developing of a Proto-globalization between the Old World and the New World through maritime networks. However, such rapid expansion led to a chronic shortage of soldiers and enormous debts, making Spain reluctant to expand its territory, and thus it dominated a strategy of territorial defense against its enemies. Long-standing commercial rivals, the 1602 to 1663 Dutch–Portuguese War was an offshoot of the Dutch fight for independence from Spain that will merge with the Thirty Years' War. The Portuguese dominated the trans-Atlantic economy known as the Triangular trade, in which slaves were transported from West Africa and Portuguese Angola to work on plantations in Portuguese Brazil, which exported sugar and tobacco to Europe. During the Thirty Years' War, Spain relied heavily on American silver and on maritime routes to sustain its European armies. The vulnerability of these oceanic links (specially from the Portuguese empire in Asia) made the overseas theatres strategically decisive.
Every year, two Spanish treasure fleets (protected by a convoy system of galeones) sailed from the Americas (Callao or Veracruz) to Seville's Casa de Contratación, transporting Potosi and Zacatecas silver with other colonial products (either local American or even Asiatic from Manila), along the road the ships take scales in ports like Panama, Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Santo Domingo, Santa Cruz de Tenerife. During those scales, they were prey of pirates and corsairs hostile to Spain, being the most dangerous scale the Cuban one in the Bahama Channel. This turned the Philippines, Spanish Main and Canary Islands into important military objectives by the Anti-Habsburg Protestant coalition. Similar destiny had the Portuguese Cafila convoy system that transported their exotic products and slaves from the factories (across the Indian Ocean and coastal Africa) to Colonial Brazil and Lisbon's Casa da Índia, which turned into military objectives the strategic Portuguese intermediaries of Macau, Malacca, Goa, Ormuz, Cape of Good Hope, Luanda, São Tomé, Gold Coast, Cape Verde, Pernambuco and the Azores. The Spanish overseas possessions were generally better defended than Portuguese ones, which were widely scattered and difficult to reinforce.
Despite the international isolation of the House of Habsburg in the worst years of the Thirty Years' War, the Republic of Genoa still was a loyal ally of Spanish Habsburgs and became the only European power that sent military help to the Spanish Empire in Oversea (mainly due to the investments with Extraterritorial rights from the Genoese Bankers in Portobelo, Panama for the Asiento de Negros). Although were not capable to bring significative maid, the Genoese reached so far that they were fighting in the Spanish Philippines at 1630s.
Also, the Iberian Union was a Composite monarchy administrated through a Polysynodial System and under a legal pluralist constitution based in Fueros (local privileges to protect the customary law of determinated Nations and its Estates of the realm). So, the Kingdoms, States and Lordships that comprised the Hispanic Monarchy were united through aeque principaliter, so the constituent kingdoms continued to be treated as distinct entities which retained their own traditional rights, resulting in the king not having the same powers in every territory, like in the states of the Crown of Aragon and Portugal in which his authority was considerably limited by their laws and institutions (like the Constitutions of Catalonia or Portuguese Cortes), causing Castile to bear the greatest burden of the Monarchy's expenses and war efforts, with its economy ruined by a century of almost continuous colonial wars (did not help that the Indies fleets often arrived late, and utilities were not what they used to be either). That economical decline made Portuguese oversea troops to have logistical problems for lacking Castilian financiation (similar problem had the Austrian Habsburgs), and the Spanish troops to mutiny on several occasions at the Thirty Years' War due to not receiving their pay, so the Union of Arms was proposed by Count-duke of Olivares to strengthen the collaboration of all the kingdoms of the Hispanic Monarchy in a common policy of military defense contribution, but he failed to gain acceptance from the institutions of each territory due to suspects of centralisation and attempts to impose Legal Uniformism. This revealed the unstable internal relationship between the Spanish and Portuguese (who feared Castilianization) in developing a consistent foreign policy, which was exploited by Iberian Union's enemies.
The rise of Dutch and English naval power
Before Thirty Years' War, the Dutch Republic and England challenged Iberian monopoly over Atlantic and Indo-Pacific commerce. These conflicts, though rooted in earlier struggles (the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) and the Eighty Years' War), became intertwined with the anti-Habsburg coalitions fighting within the Holy Roman Empire (HRE) after the end of the Twelve Years' Truce.
- Although originally the Dutch navy goals were mainly exploratory and essentially commercial (even originally developing pacific trade with the Madeira, Canary Islands and Cape Verde merchants while the Dutch let themselves to be employed by Portuguese merchants to transport European merchandise to Brazil), since Spain closed the Portuguese ports against the Dutch in 1594, the Dutch ships adopted military purposes and started to do raids on Ibero-America, Macaronesia, the Gulf of Guinea and the Indo-Pacific (crossing the south of Equator in 1599, and even briefly occupying the Canary Islands and Sao Tome island). After the 1595-97 First Dutch Expedition to the East Indies, also the Dutch developed colonialist goals, succeeding the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in establishing factories in Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Maluku, the Malay Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent by 1605, while gaining sovereignty over Amboina and then on Ternate in 1607, developing a naval power in the Far East that outmatched the Iberian one at Goa, Malacca and Manila (having engagements in Bantam, Changi, Amboina, Malacca, Cape Rachado, Mozambique, Pulo Buton, Philippines, Bengal, etc.; so forcing the Iberian Union to develop Luso-Castilian collaborations like the 1606 conquest of the Moluccas by Pedro de Acuña), although never consolidating a significant naval power in the Western Hemisphere, being outmatched by the Iberian counter-offensive of Don Luis Fajardo at the Araya Peninsula in 1605-06 (which was the first Spanish significant counter-offensive against Anglo-French-Dutch privateering in the West Indies). During the 1609-1621 truce there were established colonies in areas unoccupied by the Iberians, like the New Netherland, Dutch Surinam (briefly destroyed in 1614 by Spaniards of Trinidad), Dutch Gold Coast, etc. Key Dutch admirals who resalted in this early inter-colonial struggles were Paulus van Caerden, Willem Haultain de Zoete, Jacob van Heemskerck, Cornelis Matelief, Pieter Verhoeff, François Wittert, Jacques Lemaire, Joris van Spilbergen, Jan Dircksz Lam, Pieter van der Hagen, Jan Pietersz Coen, etc.
- Similar military success, although without establishing significant colonies (outside of some factories in Indonesia and Bengal), were done by the Elizabethan Sea Dogs with English admirals like Francis Drake, Thomas Cavendish and James Lancaster who did circumnavigations, by explorers like Henry Hudson or William Baffin who did discoveries in the Hudson Bay and the Northwest Passage, or diplomats like Thomas Roe and Thomas Shirley who did treaties in the Mughal Empire and Safavid Iran; while also the English having military engagements against Iberians (firstly by the Spanish Company and then the East India Company) at Newfoundland, Cape Verde, Bermuda, Colombia, Florida, Azores, West Indies, Honduras, Ecuador, Brazil, Guiana, Canary Islands, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, Ireland, Malacca-Ternate, Swally, Surat, etc.
First wave of colonial chartered companies
An indirect effect of the Eighty Years' War was the participation of new European powers in the first wave of colonialism. Due to the successes of the VOC in defy the Iberian Mare clausum of Tordesillas and to spread Protestantism in the New World against the "Papist heresies", a lot of Protestant great powers tried to imitate the Dutch Empire with their system of Chartered companies (in which colonies were projects of private investor with the protection of the monarchy as a shareholder) that seemed to be cheaper for the state and less risky than attempting colonies with direct control and inversion from the Crown Treasury (which was the system applied in the Spanish viceroyalties), desiring to develop colonial empires capable to military defy the one of the Habsburg Spain. Also France, despite being catholic, imitated the system in an attempt to defy the Papal concession to the Iberian Monarchies as the only ones with rights to spread the Catholic Gospel, while also getting a part of the benefits in the International trade with the Indies. In that spirit were founding the following armored chartered companies in the early 17th century:
- Kingdom of England: East India Company, Guinea Company, Council for New England, Providence Island Company.
- Denmark-Norway: Danish East India Company.
- Swedish Empire: Swedish Indies Company, Swedish South Company
- Kingdom of France: Compagnie des Moluques, Company of One Hundred Associates, Compagnie de Saint-Christophe, Company of the American Islands.
While originally were external initiatives that were unrelated to the Thirty Years' War (and even there were inner rivalries, like the Anglo-Dutch, Anglo-French, Franco-Dutch and Dano-Swedish), several political leaders—like Maurice of Nassau, Christian IV of Denmark, Gustavus Adolphus and specially the Cardinal Richelieu—tried to integrate those in the strategic plan of the Anti-Habsburg coalition to develop a common effort to defy Portuguese and Spanish Empire with their Mare clausum monopoly. For example: