Thinking Global Politics in Difficult Times: Anthony Shirley’s ‘Peso de todo el mundo’ (1622) | Session 3
Tuesday 16 June (Week 8), 12:00-1:30pm
Staircase 8, Room 5, Exeter College (Turl Street) [Professor G. Marcocci’s room]
This Iberian History Reading Group series is devoted to reading and discussing Peso de todo el mundo, a treatise written in Spanish by the English adventurer, diplomat, and political theorist Anthony Shirley in 1622. Having served multiple courts, including that of the Shah of Persia, Shirley acted as a political advisor to Philip III of Spain at the time. In the same year as the Anglo-Persian capture of Hormuz, he wrote the treatise to offer the Count-Duke of Olivares, the Spanish royal favourite, a geopolitical assessment of the relative strength of global powers to the Spanish monarch.
Edition: Sir Anthony Sherley, Peso de todo el mundo (1622) and Discurso sobre el aumento de esta monarquía (1625), ed. Ángel Alloza Aparicio, Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra and José Antonio Martínez Torres (2010). The relevant part of the text will be made available to participants of the reading group as a PDF.
A few manuscript copies of Peso de todo el mundo can be accessed online.
