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Empires Between Islam
and Christianity
1500–1800
SUNY series in Hindu Studies
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.
Preface ix
beginnings
2 Rethinking the Establishment of the Estado da Índia,
1498–1509 26
3 Italians, Corsicans, and Portuguese in the Indian Ocean 56
4 Unhappy Subjects of Empire, 1515–1530 85
representations
8 World Historians in the Sixteenth Century 234
9 Empires and Wonders 276
10 Early Modern Empires and Intellectual Networks 319
11 Asia Between and Beyond Empires 344
Bibliography 380
Index 441
viii Contents
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
x Preface
Los Angeles,
March 2018
Map 1: The Iberian Empires on a World Scale, 1580–1640
1
Introduction
Revisiting Empires
and Connecting Histories
History. This is far more successful than the rather dull and unimaginatively
organised compendium by Rabasa, et al., ed., The Oxford History of Historical
Writing.
1
2 Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800
would be equally true whether one were located in China, India, the
Mediterranean, or Scandinavia. To the extent that the survival of source
materials slants and filters the modern-day historian’s understanding of
a distant past, it is inevitable that we remain even today constrained in
some measure by these conceptual and organisational choices made by
actors of another age: our histories cannot entirely liberate themselves
from their way of seeing history.3 We may turn matters this way and
that, read texts and other sources “against the grain”, or claim to adopt
a perspective “from below” while favouring or downplaying this or that
group; in the end, however, there may be good reason consciously to
accommodate our ancestors and their preferences in some measure,
because the institutions and sites that mattered to them did not do so
as a simple matter of hazard. Or, to put it in a more familiar language
deriving from linguistics, our perspective – the “etic” one – can surely
find a place for theirs – the “emic” one.
This book centres on one of these long-familiar sites, namely the
empire. But it does so in a particular way. Many recent works continue
to deal with empires, usually by focusing on a single imperial entity.
Indeed, historians are often trained to see themselves as specialists of,
say, the British empire, the Spanish empire, the Ottoman empire, or
the Mughal empire. Often, their specialisations are even narrower,
coming down to a specific time period within the trajectory of these
empires, or – in the case of some of the more spread-out imperial
examples – to picking one theatre rather than another. Thus, it has
often been a complaint that historians of the British empire in Asia (or
the Indian Ocean) and of the British Atlantic have few occasions for
creative conversation, let alone ongoing intellectual cross-fertilisation.4
In this book, the strategy explicitly chosen is to break out of the
straitjacket of the “single-empire” framework. This is not to deny
that many important works have been produced in that framework,
and will probably continue to be, whether for the Roman empire
of antiquity or the imperial Qing in China. Nonetheless, the fact
remains that few empires have existed in lonely splendour; rather,
they were more often than not located in a wider inter-imperial
Empire, see Ghosh, “Another Set”, pp. 772–93. For a more wide-ranging
consideration, see Cooper, “Empire Multiplied”, pp. 247–72.
7 I return here to issues addressed earlier in Subrahmanyam, “Imperial and
11 Pagden, Peoples and Empires, pp. 10–11. Also see the discussion in Kumar,
Visions of Empire, pp. 8–13.
12 Maier, Among Empires, p. 7. A simple examination of the histories of the
historian of the “Comanche Empire”, who appears to believe that a large space
and an expansionist drive are criteria enough. See the problematic discussion
in Hämäläinen, “What’s in a Concept?”, pp. 81–90.
6 Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800
14
Alcock, et al., Empires, p. xix. The Iberian empires are dissected by several
contributors, including myself.
Introduction 7
15 See Elliott, Spain and Its World, pp. 217–40; and Costa, Lains, and
and because a class oriented toward war maintained itself in a ruling posi-
tion. This class clung to its domestic interest in war, and the pro-military
interests among the bourgeoisie were able to ally themselves with it.
This alliance kept alive war instincts and idea of overlordship, male
supremacy, and triumphant glory – ideas that would have otherwise long
since died. It led to social conditions that, while they ultimately stem
from the conditions of production, cannot be explained from capitalist
production methods alone.19
comes from the Spanish given name Diego. It is nautical in origin and originally
referred to Spanish or Portuguese sailors on English or American ships. This
usage dates to the 1830s. The meaning eventually broadened to include anyone
from southern Europe, before narrowing again and restricting usage to Italians.”
See http://www.wordorigins.org/wordord.htm.
Introduction 11
22
İnalcık and Quataert, ed., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman
Empire, p. xlii.
12 Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800
territories in the way that Castile drew resources from its American
territories. Moreover, the two empires witnessed contrasting processes
of acculturation. If, as Serge Gruzinski and others have shown, the
Spanish empire in the Americas was a case of the colonisation de l’imagi-
naire, no such conquest of minds took place in Ottoman Hungary
or Iraq.23 There was no attempt at a comprehensive programme of
the top-down imposition of an Ottoman Leitkultur, whether in the
Balkans, Iraq, or the Maghreb, even if we are aware that some forcible
conversion to Islam did take place.
In this sense, the Ottoman empire stands apart from other empires
that were based either on programmes of economic exploitation or
cultural homogenisation or both. Even if sixteenth-century observers
often compared Charles V to Süleyman the Lawgiver, the empires
that the two presided over were in fact fundamentally different.
And no matter what measures of reform the Ottomans attempted
in the nineteenth century, these were simply not designed to make
their structure conform to something like the Habsburg or, after the
accession of Philip V in 1700, Spanish Bourbon model. True, the
slogan of the Tanzimat reforms of the years 1839–76 was centralisation
and westernisation, but this was paradoxically meant to transform the
Ottoman empire into a sort of sprawling unitary state rather than into
a colonial empire in the European style.
In other words, the true heirs of the Spanish Habsburgs and
Bourbons in the matter of empire may well have been the British in
the late-eighteenth century. Some late-twentieth-century historiogra-
phy, such as P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins’ ambitious two-volume
work on the British empire, admits that too much has been made
of the “modernity” of the nineteenth-century British empire, and
prefers to see long-term continuities in terms of the “gentlemanly
capitalists” who presided over that empire from as early as 1688.24
In similar vein C.A. Bayly, in an important work of the late 1980s,
wrote of the British empire between 1800 and 1840 not in terms of
its precocious modernity imposed over a set of traditional societies
Vierzehntes Kapitel.
In voller Ernte.
Newala, gegen Ende September 1906.
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, und grün des Lebens
goldner Baum. Dank dem braven Sefu, oder richtiger wohl, weil es
die Zeitumstände so mit sich gebracht, habe ich zunächst den
goldenen Baum der frohen Feste genossen und gerate seitdem
immer rettungsloser in den Bann der grauen Theorie hinein, das
Studium des Unyagoverlaufs für beide Geschlechter in seinem
ganzen Umfange. Wie schwer wird mir gerade diese Arbeit gemacht!
Mit dem Knaben-Unyago bin ich allmählich ins reine gekommen,
wenngleich auch die Festlegung seiner Regeln unendliche Mühe
verursacht hat; aber die andere Seite des Problems erscheint mir
geradezu als verhext, so viel Schwierigkeiten und Widerstände
türmen sich seiner Lösung entgegen. So etwas könnte unter andern
Umständen schließlich auch den geduldigsten Forscher zur
Verzweiflung bringen, doch dazu ist hier auf dem Makondeplateau
erfreulicherweise gar keine Zeit, denn zu jener Frage gesellen sich
hundert andere, die nicht minder interessant und wichtig sind und
demgemäß mit ebenderselben Dringlichkeit der Beantwortung
harren.
Seit einer Woche führen wir obendrein den Kampf gegen den
Sandfloh, der in dem warmen Sande des Makondeplateaus sein
Dorado gefunden hat. Unsere Leute sieht man den ganzen Tag,
soweit ihnen ihre Dauerkatarrhe und die auch bei ihnen stark
grassierende Dysenterie dazu Zeit lassen, mit ihren unteren
Extremitäten beschäftigt, um diese Geißel Afrikas abzuwehren und
ihren verheerenden Wirkungen vorzubeugen. Daß den hiesigen
Eingeborenen als Folge dieser Sandflohplage eine oder ein paar
Zehen fehlen, ist etwas Häufiges; vielen fehlen alle Zehen, ja selbst
der ganze Vorderfuß, so daß das Bein in einen unförmigen Stumpf
als den letzten Rest des ehemals so wohlgeformten Beines endigt.
Diese Zerstörungen werden bekanntlich durch das Weibchen des
Sandflohes hervorgebracht, das sich unter die Haut einbohrt und
dort einen bis erbsengroßen Eiersack entwickelt. In allen Büchern
steht zu lesen, daß man auf das Vorhandensein eines solchen
Schmarotzers durch ein unerträgliches Jucken aufmerksam gemacht
werde; nach meinen Erfahrungen stimmt das sehr wohl, soweit die
zarteren Teile der Fußsohle, die Partien zwischen und unter den
Zehen und die innere Fußseite in Frage kommen; bohrt sich das Tier
indessen durch die härteren Teile des Ballens oder der Ferse
hindurch, so kann es selbst dem aufmerksamsten Beobachter
passieren, daß er das Tier erst im höchsten Reifestadium entdeckt.
Dann ist es aber allerhöchste Zeit, es vorsichtig herauszuheben, um