Empires between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Description

Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800 uses the innovative approach of "connected histories" to address a series of questions regarding the early modern world in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. The period between 1500 and 1800 was one of intense inter-imperial competition involving the Iberians, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the British, and other actors. Rather than understand these imperial entities separately, Sanjay Subrahmanyam reads their archives and texts together to show unexpected connections and refractions. He further proposes, in this set of closely argued studies, that these empires often borrowed from each other, or built their projects with knowledge of other competing visions of empire. The emphasis on connections is also crucial for an understanding of how a variety of genres of imperial and global history writing developed in the early modern world. The book moves creatively between political, economic, intellectual, and cultural themes to suggest a fresh geographical conception for the epoch.
Preface

1. Introduction: Revisiting Empires and Connecting Histories

Beginnings

2. Rethinking the Establishment of the Estado da India, 1498–1509

3. Italians, Corsicans, and Portuguese in the Indian Ocean

4. Unhappy Subjects of Empire, 1515–1530

Connections and Comparisons

5. Connecting the Iberian Empires, 1500–1640

6. Mughals, Ottomans, and Habsburgs: Some Comparisons

7. Iberian Roots of the British Empire

Representations

8. World Historians in the Sixteenth Century

9. Empires and Wonders

10. Early Modern Empires and Intellectual Networks

11. Asia Between and Beyond Empires

Bibliography
Index

Maps and Illustrations

Map 1. The Iberian Empires on a World Scale, 1580–1640

Map 2. The Central Habsburg and Ottoman domains, ca. 1550

Fig. 1. Arabic letter from the ruler of Kannur (Cannanore) to Antonio Carneiro in Portugal (1518), Torre do
Tombo, Lisbon

Fig. 2. Letter from the Tamil merchants of Melaka to the King of Portugal (1527), Torre do Tombo, Lisbon

Fig. 3. Text of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon

Fig. 4. Representation of Portuguese fidalgos in Goa from Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Itinerario (1596)

Fig. 5. View of the mining centre of Potosi in Bolivia, by Bernard Lens (1715)

Fig. 6. World map from the Ottoman Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi (1730)

Fig. 7. Hunting exotic animals in America, from the Ottoman Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi (1730)

Fig. 8. Portuguese representation of a monster in Turkey, from Emblema vivente (1727)

Fig. 9. John Stafford, Asia, from an allegory of the continents (1625–35)

Fig. 10. Map of ‘Iqlīm Āsyā’ based on Katib Celebi’s Cihānnumā, printed by Ibrahim Muteferrika (1732)

Sujets

• Islam
• History

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 27 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438474366
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Empires Between Islam and Christianity 1500–1800
SUNY series in Hindu Studies
WENDY DONIGER, EDITOR
Empires Between Islam and Christianity 1500–1800
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Empires between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800 by Sanjay Subrahmanyam was first published by Permanent Black D-28 Oxford Apts, 11 IP Extension, Delhi 110092 INDIA, for the territory of SOUTH ASIA.
Not for sale in South Asia
Cover design by Anuradha Roy
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 Sanjay Subrahmanyam
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, author.
Title: Empires between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800 / Sanjay Subrahmanyam.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series in Hindu studies | ”Empires between Islam and Christianity 1500-1800” by Sanjay Subrahmanyam was first published by Permanent Black”-- Title verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027696| ISBN 9781438474359 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438474366 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: World history. | History, Modern. | East and West. | Imperialism.
Classification: LCC D22 .S83 2019 | DDC 909.08--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027696
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for
CAROLINE
Contents

Preface
1 Introduction: Revisiting Empires and Connecting Histories
BEGINNINGS
2 Rethinking the Establishment of the Estado da Índia , 1498–1509
3 Italians, Corsicans, and Portuguese in the Indian Ocean
4 Unhappy Subjects of Empire, 1515–1530
CONNECTIONS AND COMPARISONS
5 Connecting the Iberian Empires, 1500–1640
6 Mughals, Ottomans, and Habsburgs: Some Comparisons
7 Iberian Roots of the British Empire
REPRESENTATIONS
8 World Historians in the Sixteenth Century
9 Empires and Wonders
10 Early Modern Empires and Intellectual Networks
11 Asia Between and Beyond Empires
Bibliography
Index

MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS Map 1 The Iberian Empires on a World Scale, 1580–1640 Map 2 The Central Habsburg and Ottoman domains, ca . 1550 Fig. 1 Arabic letter from the ruler of Kannur (Cannanore) to António Carneiro in Portugal (1518), Torre do Tombo, Lisbon Fig. 2 Letter from the Tamil merchants of Melaka to the King of Portugal (1527), Torre do Tombo, Lisbon Fig. 3 Text of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon Fig. 4 Representation of Portuguese fidalgos in Goa from Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Itinerario (1596) Fig. 5 View of the mining centre of Potosí in Bolivia, by Bernard Lens (1715) Fig. 6 World map from the Ottoman Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi (1730) Fig. 7 Hunting exotic animals in America, from the Ottoman Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi (1730) Fig. 8 Portuguese representation of a monster in Turkey, from Emblema vivente (1727) Fig. 9 John Stafford, Asia , from an allegory of the continents (1625–35) Fig. 10 Map of ‘Iqlīm Āsyā’ based on Katib Çelebi’s Cihānnümā , printed by Ibrahim Müteferrika (1732)
Preface

T HE WORK GATHERED TOGETHER in this book has percolated for a time, though most of it was written over the past decade and a half. The subject of empire has preoccupied me almost since the beginning of my academic career, more so since the late 1980s. Its first explicit manifestations came in the form of two books, one published in 1990 on how the Portuguese “improvised” an empire in the Bay of Bengal, and the other a far more general (and inevitably better-known) book from 1993 on the political economy of the Portuguese empire in Asia between 1500 and 1700. By the time this second work appeared, I had already taken the first somewhat tentative steps towards the study of another, quite different, empire – that of the Indian Timurids, or Mughals – mostly in collaboration with my dear friend and colleague Muzaffar Alam (though I have also occasionally ventured to publish essays on Mughal history on my own). Together we first published a reader on Mughal history in the late 1990s, following it up about a decade later with a jointly authored book on travel accounts in the Mughal world. Then, in the early 2010s, we brought together a sizeable collection of our jointly authored essays on Mughal themes.
At the same time, my interest in the Ottoman empire and its history has been with me from the late 1980s, starting with a series of conferences at Munich, Boston, and elsewhere (organised by Suraiya Faroqhi and others), that brought “sheltered” Indian historians such as myself and Muzaffar Alam into regular contact with our sophisticated Ottomanist counterparts like Cornell Fleischer and Cemal Kafadar, who have been wonderful (albeit intermittent) conversational partners. I have been a voracious reader ever since of the rich historiography on the Ottomans, and I am grateful to my many friends and colleagues in that field for their indulgence in the face of my regular transgressions. Less systematically, I have kept up to the extent possible with writings on Ming and Qing China, thanks to colleagues such as Timothy Brook, Richard von Glahn, and R. Bin Wong – with the last of whom I co-taught a seminar over several years at UCLA. It was considerably easier, for linguistic reasons, for me to traverse the porous frontier between the Portuguese and Spanish empires, a process that took shape in the short decade or so (between 1995 and 2004) that I taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, with Serge Gruzinski, Carmen Salazar-Soler, Nathan Wachtel, and others.
This book is, in short, the consequence of constant intellectual trespassing born of curiosity. It is probably the perverse outcome of my having been brought up in the intellectual milieu of Delhi, where hardly anyone had dared by the 1980s to venture out of the stifling straitjacket of Indian history. Luckily, I was not trained there as a historian but as an economist, in the midst of a far more adventurous and ambitious tribe of them, and I found their horizons far wider than those of Indian historians. This was so to the point that my mentor, the late Dharma Kumar, warned me against leaving the safe confines of an Indian economics department for a history department – for fear of the provincialism of historians! I did not heed her advice.
Besides those mentioned above, there are others I should thank – and for a variety of reasons. Several chapters of this book draw directly on the work and influence of the late Jean Aubin, who studied the Timurids, the Safavids, and the Portuguese with equal diligence and talent. For help and advice with Portuguese materials, I must also mention Jorge Flores and Luís Filipe Thomaz, both friends now of very long standing. Helpful comments or hints regarding one or the other chapter came from Perry Anderson, Evrim Binbaş, John Elliott, Antonio Feros, Carlo Ginzburg, Claude Guillot, Valerie Kivelson, Giuseppe Marcocci, Claude Markovits, Anna More, Matthew Mosca, Geoffrey Parker, Kapil Raj, and Stuart Schwartz. I am particularly grateful to Anthony Pagden, who co-authored one of these chapters, and with whom I organised a series of meetings in 2006–7 at UCLA on “Imperial Models in the Early Modern World”.
In earlier shapes these chapters have appeared before, but they have been revised, at times extensively, and rendered more coherent for the purposes of this book. Their earlier appearance in print is as follows:

“The Birth-Pangs of Portuguese Asia: Revisiting the Fateful ‘Long Decade’ 1498–1509”, Journal of Global History , vol. 2, no. 3, 2007, pp. 261–80.
“Semper per viam portugalensem: Of Italians, Portuguese, and the Indian Ocean”, Purusārtha , no. 35 (“L’Inde et l’Italie”), 2018.
“What the Tamils Said: A Letter from the Kelings of Melaka (1527)”, Archipel , no. 82, 2011, pp. 137–58.
“Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640”, American Historical Review , vol. 112, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1359–85.
“A Tale of Three Empires: Mughals, Ottomans and Habsburgs in a Comparative Context”, Common Knowledge , vol. 12, no. 1, 2006, pp. 66–92.
(With Anthony Pagden) “Roots and Branches: Ibero-British Threads across Overseas Empires”, in Per Adriano Prosperi, Vol. 2: L’Europa divisa e i Nuovi Mondi , ed. Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe Marcocci, and Stefania Pastore, Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2011, pp. 279–301.
“On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century”, Representations , no. 91, Fall 2005, pp. 26–57.
“Monsters, Miracles and the World of ‘ajā’ib-o- gh arā’ib : Intersections Between the Early Modern Iberian and Indo-Persian Worlds”, in Naturalia, Mirabilia Monstrosa en los Imperios Ibéricos (siglos XV–XIX) , ed. Eddy Stols, Werner Thomas, and Johan Verberckmoes, Leuven: Leuven University