Early Modern Business Diplomacy: an Appraisal

Jennifer Kesteleyn, Shaun Riordan and Huub Ruël define business diplomacy as “an approach to geopolitical and non-commercial risk management that is based on the practices and mindset of diplomats.”1 In this definition, firms take “diplomat-like” actions in seeking to accommodate, avoid and manage external risks to the entrepreneurial activity itself. In this sense, the authors make a clear distinction between business diplomacy and current definitions of economic diplomacy, which can be summarized as actions taken by national governments to support and advance the competitive advantage of the firms these governments support.2 Even if the definition of business diplomacy is, at times, confused with a multitude of concepts like corporate diplomacy, public affairs, corporate social responsibility or public relations, Kesteleyn, Riordan and Ruël insist that “The key distinction of business diplomacy ... is not the actor, but the diplomatic mindset, which seeks to place geopolitical risk management within a coherent and long-term strategic context.”3 While the conceptual framework and distinctions proposed by experts in contemporary diplomacy and international relations do not play a role in diplomatic studies regarding the Early Modern period, the absence of this framework does not necessarily mean that Early Modern historians are oblivious to matters concerning business and economic diplomacy as understood for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On the contrary, both concepts appear prominently in historiography pertaining to the chronology encompassed by the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, albeit concerning specific forms of diplomacy, particular firms and very specific geographical spaces.