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As the first version of Calderón de la Barca's play La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) went into press in Madrid in late November 1635, two Portuguese dreamers had a chance encounter thousands of miles away from the imperial capital, in... more
As the first version of Calderón de la Barca's play La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) went into press in Madrid in late November 1635, two Portuguese dreamers had a chance encounter thousands of miles away from the imperial capital, in the South Indian port of Cochin. 2 Both were Jesuits, but approaching the supernatural in very different ways. The older of the two, Pedro Machado de Basto, had been living in India since the 1580s, when Portugal became a part of the Catholic Monarchy of Philip II. Basto was now in his sixties, a humble and saintly man known across the Portuguese communities of South India as a visionary with a gift for prophecy. The younger man, Fernão de Queiroz, had just arrived from Lisbon. Young, educated and ambitious, he was readying himself for a brilliant career in the Society of Jesus. What he did not know yet was that decades later he would become the author of a 600-page Vita dedicated to
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Reflections, echoes, connections: the sixteenth century abounds with transcontinental phenomena carrying the potential to challenge Eurocentric narratives in global history. Even as we look back on the now substantial historiography of... more
Reflections, echoes, connections: the sixteenth century abounds with transcontinental phenomena carrying the potential to challenge Eurocentric narratives in global history. Even as we look back on the now substantial historiography of early modern global flows and connections, new and surprising aspects catch our eye every time we delve into the sixteenth century. We may take almost any single year — for example, 1546, not a particularly remarkable one in the making of the new global order — and still be confronted with a series of events calling for novel enquiries into big, globally relevant processes. In Yucatan, 1546 brought a renewal of warfare following the conclusion of one of the most violent campaigns of Spanish territorial conquest at the end of the previous year.1 In Gujarat, an Ottoman-led coalition besieged the Portuguese fort of Diu, set up a decade earlier as a result of negotiations with violent turns that had led the sultan Bahadur Shah to concede this key Indian O...
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Review article of Zupanov & Xavier Catholic Orientalism and Subrahmanyam Europe's India
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A revised and extended version of the 2009 JESHO article
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Article published in 2009. For a corrected and extended version from 2014 see "Colonialism and Cosmopolitanism" (above).