The session aims to bring together scholars who, from different perspectives, are investigating authors, cartographic representations, political theories and interpretations of the early modern age (16th-17th centuries) from a geopolitical perspective.

Starting from a lively debate on the topic, which in both the historical and geographical spheres has become particularly fervent and highly topical in recent years, the primary objective of the session is to stimulate academic discussion in an interdisciplinary sense around the geopolitical dynamics that have unfolded since the early modern age. The European opening to global spaces through political treaties, concrete actions and trade routes; the political spatiality that was determined with the rise of nation states; the conflict dictated by the primacy of the territorial factor; the increasing relevance of borders in relations between states; political realism as an emerging theory for interpreting political modernity; and cartographic representation as an indispensable tool for political projects within and outside the European context, have determined the fundamental contours and the foundations of what we now call “geopolitics”.

There is in fact a geopolitical dimension of the Early Modern Age that still needs to be properly explored and that can represent a fruitful field of dialogue of enormous scientific interest for the community of scholars of political geography, historical cartography, history of exploration, history of the modern age, political philosophy and economic history.

Contributions concerning the geopolitical dimension of early modernity will therefore be welcome, both in its historical dynamic and in the theoretical-conceptual dynamic of authors who have emphasised the geopolitical features emerging in political thought between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition, contributions will be considered that highlight the geopolitical dimension proper to emerging globalisation and historical issues of the early modern age, cartographic representations and the production of maps, atlases and globes, political authors and theories, territorial expansions and border diatribes.