Cosmopolite

Cosmopolitics is an exciting framework for rethinking human existence, particularly for social scientists. Placing emphasis upon plurality in the processes of world-making, it usefully decentres dominant epistemologies, constructing a richer understanding of the different worlds we inhabit together. The early moderns had no term for this. Nonetheless, writers toyed with ideas of the cosmopolitical, and with what cosmoi might be present alongside their own.

Before cosmopolitics came the cosmopolite. A compound of two Greek nouns, cosmos (world) and polis (citizen), a cosmopolite is, literally, a world-citizen. As far as we know, John Dee was the first English writer to use the word, in his General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577). For Dee (fiddling the term slightly), to be ‘cosmopolites’ was to be ‘A Citizen, and Member, of the whole and only one Mysticall City Universall: And so, consequently, to meditate of the Cosmopoliticall Government thereof, under the King Almighty’ (G3v). The word holds a spiritual expansiveness: a cosmopolite is embedded in a Christian cosmos and asked to consider how that cosmos is governed according to the mores of the Christian deity. However, Dee also cloaks the term in imperialist trappings. Reading the word in a text which advocates for English imperialism at the earliest stages of colonial expansion should give us pause. Who is building the shared world, how are they building it, and to what end?

The tensions within cosmopolite increased as the word gained popularity towards the middle of the seventeenth century (it declined in use after 1660, reviving briefly in the 1800’s). For some, the cosmopolite bordered on the blasphemous, exemplifying a greedy zest for earthly life. One preacher lamented ‘these fooles, these Cosmopolites’ who only find ‘their heaven upon earth, sith they looke for no other heaven’ (Benefield, Rr3v). Another attacked the cosmopolite who was forever ‘planting, transplanting, rebuilding, studying for roome to lay up his fruites’, hoarding his earthly resources and grasping ‘so much wealth in his gripulous fist’ (Adams, L2r).

Alternatively, to be cosmopolite was acceptable, even aspirational. For instance, an anonymous 1592 translation of Justus Lipsius’ Epistola de Peregrinatione Italica (A Direction for Travailers) asked its readers to celebrate ‘the libertie which nature hath geven them (to be Cosmopolites, that is Cytizens of the whole world)’, reminding them that ‘the best and wisest, the cheefe and noblest men, have alwaies travelled’ (A3r). In the seventeenth century, James Howell developed this idea into something we might recognise more readily as global sophistication, suggesting:

Earth is our common Mother, every ground May be one’s Countrey, for by birth each man Is in this world a Cosmopolitan (Epistolae, I2v).

Elsewhere, Howell picks up on Dee’s and Lipsuis’ wanderlust, explaining the joys of being a cosmopolite, a ‘free Denizon of the World’:

For what an Indignity is it to Captivate the mind of man, which Heaven can scarce hold, to one territory or clod of Earth? What an injustice is it, that the Volatils of the Aire should have such liberty to flye, and the Fish of the Sea to swim where they please without controulement, or interruption, and that man, who by divine Charter is Lord of all Elementary Creatures, should be confin’d within the compasse of one poor tract of ground (German, B2r).

Dee’s imperialism is, here, extended further. The true cosmopolite should transcend habitats, with freedom extending over and above all other creatures. The cosmopolite is an earth-dweller, earth-traveller, earth-embracer, and earth-controller. But what cosmos makes up his [sic] terrain?

Engraving from James Howell, Therologia (London, 1660). BC LTQ/HOW, Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. Reproduced with the kind permission of Leeds University Library.

This is the question raised by twenty-first century thinkers Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, who ask what it means to claim that there is a cosmos of which we can all be a part, and whether such a thing is possible. Stengers and Latour raise alarm at the idea of imposing a common cosmos, constructed by empirical science and within which all other epistemologies are variations on the same (Latour, 454-7). Instead, they argue for a process of composition. In her ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal’, Stengers calls for the work of common world-making to be slowed down, in order to ensure that such composition is ‘as difficult as possible’ and no acts of valuing or classification take place prematurely (994-1003). Latour, and later Mario Blaser, argue for a pluriverse over a universe, with Latour puzzling over what, if anything, can be considered common in the cosmos. Blaser emphasises that a common cosmos should be a ‘result’ of, not a ‘starting point’ for discussion (548). Cosmopolitics also hums through Donna Haraway’s work, which emphasises the importance of respectful attentiveness and sets much store by the politeness inherent in cosmopolite (see Species, 3-94). This notion of attentive composition allows for the application of an elastic and germinal twenty-first century term to the early modern world.

Whilst English early moderns may not have been explicitly interested in the nuances of pluriversal potentialities when composing their fraught political, environmental, and zoological debates, it is evident that such writers were intrigued by the idea that the world might be composed of and with the nonhuman beings which inhabit the planet. For instance, Laurie Shannon has argued that early moderns understood Genesis as a legal document, which offered a political framework that gave animals no control in the composition process, but nonetheless offered wiggle-room to resist Man’s tyranny in controlling a shared earth. Talking animals pop up in unexpected places: they protest hunting, satirise courtly life, discuss international politics, and the nature of the human. People who regularly navigated inter-species relationships also demonstrated an awareness that there is more than one way to inhabit the earth. Husbandry manuals provide ample evidence of this, and Erica Fudge’s 2018 study of human-bovine interactions demonstrates Haraway-esque attentiveness embedded in early modern dairy and meat production, too.

Thinking early modern cosmopolitics and its cosmopolite actors demands an alertness to its unique valencies, beyond the term’s twenty-first century applications. The cosmopolite is potentially anti-Christian in its unrepentant earthliness, energised by an impulse towards travel and exploration, which is itself tied to imperialist aims. But a different, more imaginative and productive cosmopoliticism can also be found within the period’s literary fictions, giving voice to nonhuman animals and attending to the worlds we share.

Anjali Vyas-Brannick is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York.

Selected Bibliography.

Adams, Thomas. Englands Sicknes, Comparatively Conferred with Israels (1615).

Benefield, Sebastian. A Commentary or Exposition vpon the Third Chapter of the Prophecie of Amos (1628).

Blaser, Mario. ‘Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?’ Cultural Anthropology, 31.4 (2016), pp. 545-70.

Dee, John. General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Nauigation (1577).

Fudge, Erica. Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and their Animals in Early Modern England (Cornell, 2018)

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet (Minnesota, 2008).

Howell, James, Epistolae Ho-Elianae. Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren […] (1650)

- A German Diet, or, The Ballance of Europe […] (1653)

Latour, Bruno, ‘Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?': Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck’, Common Knowledge, 10.3 (2004), pp. 450-62.

Lipsius, Justus. A Direction for Trauailers Taken Out of Iustus Lipsius, and enlarged […]. Trans. Anonymous (1592).

Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago, 2013).

Stengers, Isabel. ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal’ in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (MIT, 2005), pp. 994-1003.

5 March 2021.