Understanding the Global Citizen, c.1200-c.1600

This paper seeks to reassess the contribution made by European societies to ‘globalisation’ before the advent of the nation-state and of industrial capitalism. While European expansion constitutes the background against which this reflection takes place, the focus of the paper will lie on imaginations and implementations of ‘global’ outlooks and solutions by groups of people as diverse as merchants, ‘bureaucrats’, scholars and many others. In order to understand the interactions between these various contributions and the dynamics that resulted from them, this paper will by the same token make some suggestions based on reflections from history, sociology and epistemology. Ultimately, it aims to contribute to answering the puzzling question of how decentralised societies were able to lay the groundwork for globalisation of European history and the European globalisation of the world.