European Expansion and Indigenous Response

This book addresses the negotiation of categorizations in colonial societies in Spanish America from a new vantage point: fiscality. In early modern empires (poll) taxes were a significant factor to organize and perpetuate social inequalities. By this, fiscal categorizations had very concrete effects on the daily life of the categorized, on their assets and on their labor force. They intersected with social categorizations such as gender, profession, age and what many authors have termed race or ethnicity, but which is denominated here, more accurately with a term from the sources, calidad. They were imposed by legislation from above and contested via petitions from below, the latter being a type of source scarcely analyzed until now.

Were the Dutch-Africans in southern Africa a brother nation to the Dutch or did they simply represent a lost colony? Connecting primary sources in Dutch and Afrikaans, this work tells the story of the Dutch stamverwantschap (kinship) movement between 1847 and 1900. The white Dutch-Africans were imagined to be the bridgehead to a broader Dutch identity – a ‘second Netherlands’ in the south. This study explores how the 19th century Dutch identified with and idealised a pastoral community operating within a racially segregated society on the edge of European civilisation. When the stamverwantschap dream collided with British military and economic power, the belief that race, language and religion could sustain a broader Dutch identity proved to be an illusion.

How did individuals advance to the highest ranks in the Dutch colonial administrations? And how, once appointed, was this rank retained? To answer these questions, this book explores the careers of Dutch colonial governors in the 17th century with a focus on two case-studies: Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, governor of Dutch Brazil (1636-1644) and Rijckloff Volckertsz van Goens, Governor-General in Batavia in the 1670s.

By comparing a Western (Atlantic, WIC) and an Eastern (Asian, VOC) example, this book shows how networks sustaining career-making differed in the various parts of the empire: the West India Company was much more involved in domestic political debates, and this led to a closer integration of political patronage networks, while the East India Company was better able to follow an independent course. The book shows that to understand the inner workings of the Dutch India companies, we need to understand the lives of those who turned the empire into their career.

Hans Holbein’s Triumphs (1532-1534), commissioned for the headquarters of the Hanseatic League in London and Kano Naizen’s The Portuguese namban (‘foreigners’) painted in 1543 in Japan are representations of worlds of trade, where wealth, speculation, exploitation, poverty, curiosity, encounters and the exotic relate effortlessly. These worlds multiplied in Africa, the America’s, Asia and Europe as mercantile cultures met in a globalizing world. From these encounters, power, subjugation and conflict arose as part of the same world as cooperation, cross-culturalism and cosmopolitism. Understanding early modern merchant cultures is thus paramount to comprehend the sinews of globalization before 1800.

Merchants worldwide shared trading interests. These interests shaped a panoply of encounters of mercantile cultures across space and time. This book sketches the commonalities and underlines the differences of mercantile practices and representations during the Early Modern period.

Contributors are: Laurence Fontaine, David Graizbord, William Pettigrew, Edmond J. Smith, Radhika Seshan, Rila Mukherjee, Jurre J. A. Knoest, Noelle Richardson, Joseph P. McDermott, Mark Harberlëin, Francisco Bethencourt, Edgar Pereira, and Germano Maifreda.

The Bourbon monarchs who ascended the Spanish throne in 1700 attempted to reform the colonial system they had inherited, and, in particular, to make administration more efficient and cost-effective. This book analyses one aspect of the Bourbon reforms, which was the efforts to transform frontier missions, to make the missions more cost-effective, and to accelerate the integration of indigenous peoples in northern Mexico to European cultural norms. In some instances, the Crown had funded missions for more than a century, but with minimal results. The book attempts to show how the mission programs changed, and what the consequences – especially demographic – were for the indigenous peoples brought to live on the missions.

The global operations of the East India Companies were profoundly shaped by European perceptions of foreign lands. Providing a cultural perspective absent from existing economic and institutional histories, Ethnography and Encounter is the first book to systematically explore how Company agents’ understandings of and attitudes towards Asian peoples and societies informed institutional approaches to trade, diplomacy, and colonial governance. Its fine-grained comparisons of Dutch and English activities in seventeenth-century South Asia show how corporate ethnography was produced, how it underpinned given modes of conduct, and how it illuminates connections across space and time. Ethnography and Encounter identifies deep commonalities between Dutch and English discourses and practices, their indebtedness to pan-European ethnographic traditions, and their centrality to wider histories of European expansion.

In the Name of the Battle against Piracy discusses antipiracy campaigns in Europe and Asia in the 16th-19th centuries. Nine contributors argue how important antipiracy campaigns were for the establishment of a (colonial) state, because piracy was a threat not only to maritime commerce, but also to its sovereignty.

'Battle against piracy' offered a good reason for a state to claim its authority as the sole protector of people, and to establish peace, order, and sovereignty. In fact, as the contributors explain, the story was not that simple, because states sometimes attempted to make economic and political use of piracy, while private interests were strongly involved in antipiracy politics. State formation processes were not clearly separated from non-state elements.

Contributors are: Kudo Akihito, Satsuma Shinsuke, Suzuki Hideaki, Lakshmi Sabramanian, Ota Atsushi, James Francis Warren, Fujita Tatsuo, Murakami Ei, and Toyooka Yasufumi.

In The 1624 Tumult of Mexico in Perspective Angela Ballone offers, for the first time, a comprehensive study of an understudied period of Mexican early modern history. By looking at the mandates of three viceroys who, to varying degrees, participated in the events surrounding the Tumult, the book discusses royal authority from a transatlantic perspective that encompasses both sides of the Iberian Atlantic. Considering the similarities and tensions that coexisted in the Iberian Atlantic, Ballone offers a thorough reassessment of current historiography on the Tumult proving that, despite the conflicts and arguments underlying the disturbances, there was never any intention to do away with the king’s authority in New Spain.

This book addresses different dimensions of cosmopolitanism in the Portuguese-speaking world which have caused much debate, such as migration and globalisation. The volume includes contributions from leading specialists in History, Musicology, Literary Studies, Anthropology and Political Sciences. It focuses on specific processes in Brazil, Portugal, West Africa, Angola, and other parts of the world, from the sixteenth century to the present. Central topics are intercontinental trading elites, the cultural impact of forced and voluntary migration, the republic of letters, the possibilities created by freemasonry and liberalism, the adaptation of the Azorean Holy Ghost Feast to the United States, international links of conservative politicians, the international projection of the new Angolan elite, architecture and urban planning.

Contributors are: Vanda Anastácio, Cátia Antunes, Paulo Arruda, Francisco Bethencourt, Toby Green, Philip J. Havik, David R. M. Irving, João Leal, Giovanni Leoni, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, António Costa Pinto, and Phillip Rothwell.

In Silver by Fire, Silver by Mercury: A Chemical History of Silver Refining in New Spain and Mexico, 16th to 19th Centuries, Saul Guerrero combines historical research with geology and chemistry to refute the current prevailing narrative of a primitive effort dominated by mercury and its copious emissions to the air. Based on quantitative historical data, visual records and geochemical fundamentals, Guerrero analyses the chemical and economic reasons why two refining processes had to share production, creating along the way major innovations in the chemical recipes, milling equipment, mercury recycling practice, and industrial architecture and operations. Their main environmental impact was lead fume and the depletion of woodlands from smelting, and the transformation of mercury into calomel during the patio process.

The Commentaries is the first complete English language translation, with complete annotations, of a unique and extraordinary memoir from the pen of the erudite Spanish soldier-diplomat D. García de Silva y Figueroa over the course of his embassy to Persia (1614–1624). The Commentaries transcend the travel-literature genre, emerging as a precocious European intellectual global history that is remarkable for its encyclopedic breadth, its historical depth, and its ethnographic and even artistic sensitivity. The Commentaries will be of interest to historians, ethnographers, and literary critics, or anyone with an interest in early modern European accounts of the encounter between the Portuguese and Spanish Empires and Safavid Persia during the early modern period.

This book examines the relationship between medieval European mythologies of the non-Western world and the initial Portuguese and Spanish voyages of expansion and exploration to Africa, Asia and the Americas. From encounters with the Mongols and successor states, to the European contacts with Ethiopia, India and the Americas, as well as the concomitant Jewish notion of the Ten Lost Tribes, the volume views the Western search for distant, crusading allies through the lens of stories such as the apostolate of Saint Thomas and the stories surrounding the supposed priest-king Prester John. In doing so, Knobler weaves a broad history of early modern Iberian imperial expansion within the context of a history of cosmologies and mythologies.

In The Political Economy of Indigo in India, 1580-1930: A Global Perspective Ghulam A. Nadri explores the dynamics of the indigo industry and trade from a long-term perspective and examines the local and global forces that affected the potentialities of production in India and elsewhere and caused periods of boom and slump in the industry. Using the commodity chains conceptual framework he examines the stages in the trajectory of indigo from production to consumption.
Nadri shows convincingly that the growth or decline in indigo production and trade in India was a part of the global processes of production, trade, and consumption and that indigo as a global commodity was embedded in the politics of empire and colonial expansion.

Beyond Empires explores the complexity of empire building from the point of view of self-organized networks, rather than from the point of view of the central state. This focus takes readers into a world of cooperative strategies worldwide that emphasises the role played by individuals, rather than institutions, in the overseas expansion and consequent development of European empires. While unveiling the practices and mechanisms of cooperation between individuals, this volume show cases the role played by individuals for the creation, development and maintenance of self-organized networks in the Early Modern period. Applying new conceptual and theoretical inputs, this book values the contributions of different ‘worlds’, bringing to the fore the interactions of Europeans and non-Europeans, Christians and non-Christians, people living within-, on- or just outside the border of empire.

Henry Edward O’Neill was British Consul in Mozambique from 1879 to 1889. He completed thirteen exploratory journeys in northern Mozambique, including the first exploration of the Makua and Lomwe countries between Mozambique Island and Lake Malawi. This recreation of the book, which he never published, makes available for the first time a large body of information on the peoples of northern Mozambique (a region still little researched), on the history of the slave trade in the western Indian Ocean and on the expansion of Portuguese rule and the resistance to it by powerful local communities. The Introduction includes the first ever biographical study of O’Neill and his contribution to African exploration.

Annexation and the Unhappy Valley: The Historical Anthropology of Sindh’s Colonization addresses the nineteenth century expansion and consolidation of British colonial power in the Sindh region of South Asia. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach and employs a fine-grained, nuanced and situated reading of multiple agents and their actions. It explores how the political and administrative incorporation of territory (i.e., annexation) by East India Company informs the conversion of intra-cultural distinctions into socio-historical conflicts among the colonized and colonizers. The book focuses on colonial direct rule, rather than the more commonly studied indirect rule, of South Asia. It socio-culturally explores how agents, perspectives and intentions vary—both within and across regions—to impact the actions and structures of colonial governance.

In The Boxer Codex, the editors have transcribed, translated and annotated an illustrated late-16th century Spanish manuscript. It is a special source that provides evidence for understanding early-modern geography, ethnography and history of parts of the western Pacific, as well as major segments of maritime and continental South-east Asia and East Asia. Although portions of this gem of a manuscript have been known to specialists for nearly seven decades, this is the first complete transcription and English translation, with critical annotations and apparatus, and reproductions of all its illustrations, to appear in print.

In Encounters of the Opposite Coast Markus Vink provides a narrative of the first half century of cross-cultural interaction between the Dutch East India Company (VOC), one of the great northern European chartered companies, and Madurai, one of the 'great southern Nayakas' and successor-states of the Vijayanagara empire, in southeast India (c. 1645-1690). A shared interest in trade and at times converging political objectives formed the unstable foundations for a complex relationship fraught with tensions, a mixture of conflict and coexistence typical of the 'age of contained conflict'.
Drawing extensively on archival materials, Markus Vink covers a topic neglected by both Company historians and their Indian counterparts and sheds important light on a 'black hole in South Indian history'.

Beginning in 1609, Jesuit missionaries established missions (reductions) among sedentary and non-sedentary native populations in the larger region defined as the Province of Paraguay (Rio de la Plata region, eastern Bolivia). One consequence of resettlement on the missions was exposure to highly contagious old world crowd diseases such as smallpox and measles. Epidemics that occurred about once a generation killed thousands. Despite severe mortality crises such as epidemics, warfare, and famine, the native populations living on the missions recovered. An analysis of the effects of epidemics and demographic patterns shows that the native populations living on the Paraguay and Chiquitos missions survived and retained a unique ethnic identity. A comparative approach that considers demographic patterns among other mission populations place the case study of the Paraguay and Chiquitos missions into context, and show how patterns on the Paraguay and Chiquitos missions differed from other mission populations. The findings challenge generally held assumptions about Native American historical demography.

"Conversion" is a basic religious concept, which has manifold implications for our everyday lives. Ran Tene's Changes in Ethical Worldviews of Spanish Missionaries in Mexico utilizes a cross-disciplinary methodology in which the fields of Philosophy, History, and Literary Studies are drawn upon to analyze conversion. He focuses on two moments in Spanish writing about Mexican missions, the early to mid-sixteenth century writings of the Spanish missionaries to Mexico and the early seventeenth century manuscripts of the author/copyist Fray Juan de Torquemada. The analysis exposes changes in worldviews - including the concepts of identity, ownership, and cruelty - through missionary eyes. It suggests two theoretical models - the vision model and the model of touch - to describe these changes, which are manifested in the missionary project and in the texts that it (re)produced.

In Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Economic Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century, well-known economic and social historians examine important questions concerning temporal and spatial relationships among central places, hinterlands, commodities, and political economic developments in Asia and the Global economy over the long eighteenth century. These timely essays engage hinterlands and commodities providing novel foci on historical impacts maritime trade on political economic developments involving place, space, and time in Asia, thereby furnishing historical background for current conditions. They contribute to discourse concerning historical interactions among indigenous Asian merchant activities and European commercial counterparts.

Contributors are: George Bryan Souza, Dennis O. Flynn, Marie A. Lee, Ghulam A. Nadri, Bhaswati Bhattacharya, Tsukasa Mizushima, Tomotaka Kawamura, Atushi Ota, Ryuto Shimada, and Ei Murakami.

Forced convict labor provided the Portuguese with solutions to the growing criminal population at home and the lack of infrastructure in Angola and Mozambique. In Convict Labor in the Portuguese Empire, Timothy J. Coates examines the role of large numbers of convicts in Portuguese Africa from 1800 until 1932. This work examines the numbers, rationale, and realities of convict labor (largely) in Angola during this period, but Mozambique is a secondary area, as well as late colonial times in Brazil.

This is a unique, first study of an experiment in convict labor in Africa directed by a European power; it will be welcomed by scholars of Africa and New Imperialism, as well as those interested in law and labor.

In the sixteenth century Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian missionaries attempted to convert the native populations of central Mexico. The native peoples generally viewed the new religion in terms very different from that of the missionaries. As conflict broke out after 1550 as Spaniards invaded the Chichimeca frontier (the frontier between sedentary and nomadic natives), the missionaries faced new challenges on both sides of the frontier. Some sedentary natives resisted evangelization, and the missionaries saw themselves in a war against Satan and his minions. The Augustinians assumed a pivotal role in the evangelization campaign on both sides of the Chichimeca frontier, and employed different methods in the effort to convince the natives to embrace the new faith and to defeat Satan’s designs. They used graphic visual aids and the threat of an eternity of suffering in hell to bring recalcitrant natives, such as the Otomi of the Mezquital Valley, into the fold.

Today the bulk of tangible wealth around the globe resides in buildings and physical infrastructure rather than moveable goods. This situation was not always the case. Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment represents the first attempt to delve into the period’s enhanced architectural investment—its successes, its failures, and the conflicts it provoked. Not just cultural but clear economic and environmental reasons existed for a rejection of the new architectural agenda. Whatever its efficacy or flaws, it ultimately served as a model worldwide for cityscapes and housing well into the twentieth century.

Contributors include Jordan Sand, Robin Pearson, John Broad, Kiyoko Yamaguchi, Steven W. Hackel, Susan E. Hough, Johnathan Farris, Matthew Mulcahy, Charles Walker, Emma Hart, Chad Anderson, Ross H. Cordy, Grace Karskens, and Carole Shammas.

This book provides an original study of the sizeable Portuguese community in Ayutthaya, the chief river-state in Siam, during a period of apparent decline (1640-1720). Portuguese populations were displaced from their chief settlements like Melaka and Makassar, and attracted to the river-states of mainland South-East Asia by a protective model of kingship, hopes of international trade and the opportunity to harvest souls. A variety of sources will be used to shed light on the fortunes and make-up of this displaced, mixed-race 'tribe', which was largely independent of the matrices of Portuguese colonial power, and fared poorly alongside other foreign communities in this remarkably open, dynamic environment. Circumstances changed for the better after the National Revolution of 1688, when Portuguese started to fill many of the jobs at court and in commerce previously occupied by Frenchmen and northern Europeans.

Since 2000, there have been fewer studies released about the ‘formal aspects’ of the operation of colonial powers, such as Portugal, in the East during the Early Modern period. Prior, the fall of Communism, in the last decade of the twentieth century, gave a boost to liberal ideology, while research into topics related to autocracy or state apparatus have become unfashionable. The Portuguese role in the East is usually overlooked, being less high-profile than that of the Dutch or British. Drawing on unpublished materials from the Overseas Historical Archive, and other libraries in Portugal, this book considers Portuguese leadership and organization at home, where it pertained to the governance of the eastern colonies; as well as the formal and ‘soft’ instruments of state applied on the ground in these colonies in first half of the eighteenth century.

This book shows how knowledge about China became part of European general knowledge. It examines English, French, and German encyclopaedias published between 1700 and 1850 and explores the use and presentation of information on China in works of general knowledge. The first chapters explore the origins of early European perceptions of China until 1850, the development of European encyclopaedias, and the sources used for entries on China. The second major part of the book examines the ways in which encyclopaedias presented information on things Chinese (geography, government, economy, history, language and literature, arts and sciences) and how this information was shaped, expanded, perpetuated, revised, and updated.

Captain John Anderson served in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) as ‘Pilot-Major’ in a fleet of ships that set sail from Europe in December 1640, and returned with his ships in July 1643. This was Anderson’s fourth voyage to the East Indies.
His journey took three years during which time he safely brought a VOC fleet to Java and home again through tempests and full-scale battles with the Portuguese at sea.
In this, the first-ever edition of Anderson’s Journal, the editors have complemented his own words with chapters discussing the author’s contributions to the History of Warfare in Asia, Maritime Navigation and Early Modern Travel Writing.

This volume contributes rich, new material to provide insights into indigenous responses to the colonial empires of Great Britain (South Africa, Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia)) and Germany (Namibia) and explore the complex intellectual, cultural, literary, and political borders and identities that emerged across these spaces. Contributors include distinguished global scholars in the field as well as exciting young scholars. The essays link global-national-local forces in history by analysing how indigenous elites not only interacted with colonial empires to absorb, adapt and re-cast new ideas, forms of discourse, and social formations, but also networked with “ordinary” people to forge new social, ethnic, and political identities and viable social forces. Translated and other primary texts in appendices add to the insights.

The Western Indian Ocean in the Eighteenth Century is the first of four volumes offering a sweeping panorama of the Arabian Seas during the early modern period. Focusing on the period 1700-1763, the first volume concentrates on daily life in littoral societies, examining long term issues including climatic change, famine, and the structures of fishing communities. The volume examines littoral societies in each of the major coastal areas of the Western Indian Ocean: East Africa, the Red Seas, the Persian Gulf, and its traditional ties to surrounding hinterlands as well as to the west coast of India. While having particular interest to readers concerned with Indian Ocean history, as an absorbing and innovative account of a much neglected albeit critical area and period, Arabian Seas, 1700-1763 will be of great interest to anyone interested in early modern maritime, social, or economic history.

Kings, Gangsters, and Companies, volume two of Arabian Seas, 1700-1763 focuses on European relations with the major states and societies of the Western Indian Ocean during the eighteenth century. As such, it traces the major structural changes in African, South Asian, and Middle Eastern societies during this period. Chapters examine European communities and their relations with the societies of the Indian Ocean basin, the daily life of European soldiers and merchants, relations with Indian women, European views on the Indian caste system as well as the governmental systems they encountered. The volume also details the importance of Indian and Persian merchant communities in the Indian Ocean trading system and the impact of war on the economic development of this system during the eighteenth century.

Men and Merchandise, the third volume of Arabian Seas, 1700-1763, provides a detailed examination of the economic and social structures in the Western Indian Ocean focusing on key commodities like bullion, textiles, and the slave trade. Readers will also encounter interesting vignettes of daily life: an Indian nautch girl worried about her inheritance, a Portuguese gangster-friar and pariah workers, the infamous buccaneers of Madagascar, coffee-traders from Yemen, Cairo, and the Crimea, and Iraqi and Iranian bankers who all had relevance to this vast economic system. Men and Merchandise provides insights into other traditionally ignored aspects in the traditional historiography including uprisings aboard slave ships, and details of maroon societies involving refugee slaves in India and Mauritius as well as Dutch slave soldiers in the Persian Gulf. As such, it will prove of great interest to any reader concerned with the social and economic history of the Indian Ocean basin.

Europe in Asia, the fourth volume and final volume in Arabian Seas, 1700-1763, details the early phase of European territorial empire building in the western Indian Ocean basin. Particular attention is given to the much neglected history of the Portuguese Estado da India and the attempts of the Portuguese Crown to reform its administration and dwindling possessions in the eighteenth century. The volume examines the direct legacies of the longstanding Portuguese imperial presence in the Arabian Seas, including the experiences of Indian Catholic communities as well as the establishment of Indian settlements and communities in East Africa. Finally, the volume provides an exhaustive treatment of the structures and history of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and English East India Company (EIC), the establishment of the vast private country trade of the EIC, and the reasons for the relative decline of the VOC and the rise of English power in the region during the eighteenth century.

James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan was crucial in forming the modern image of the Rājpūt, a princely “martial” caste resident in India’s northwest desert. This book explores the relationships between the political power of the British imperial state, the construction of historical memories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the uses of these constructions by European writers and Indian nationalist elites. The case of the Rajputs demonstrates how imperial histories reflected Indian social processes and pre-colonial forms of knowledge, interpreted India for the world outside and for Indians themselves. This book explores the multiple discourses within Tod’s Rajasthan, and European Orientalism, to show how intricately coded the British Empire was and, historically, remains.

The voyage of Vasco da Gama to India (1497-1499) was one of the seminal events of the Renaissance period. An anonymous Journal kept by a member of his fleet has long served as the main documentary source for accounts of this voyage. Strangely, there has only been one English translation of this important document, published more than a century ago. This book provides a new, updated English translation of the Journal with extensive editorial notes and appendices which encompass and reflect changes in the historiography over the last century on Vasco da Gama and his first voyage. In doing so, it examines initial Portuguese impressions when confronted by the cultures of Africa and India during this period.

The twelve essays explore three connected aspects of European expansion in the period between 1500 and 1900 - migration, trade, and slavery - with some attention given to present-day echoes from that era. The book's first section deals with European migration to transatlantic and Asian destinations, the second and third sections focus on the Atlantic slave trade and representations of slavery, and the final section analyzes the demise and legacy of slavery. The authors reach surprising conclusions: European expansion did not entail major economic benefits; the small scale of the Europeans' intercontinental migration never jeopardized their colonial projects; and the unique popular nature of British abolitionism can be explained in part by the growth of the newspaper press in the mid-eighteenth century, which regularly reported about slave ship revolts.

This work aims to engage with the complexities surrounding evaluations of ethnic and national identity - a focus of recent interest by scholars from a range of disciplines including political science, anthropology and economics - through a case study of Chinese migration to and settlement in Mauritius. The book investigates the complex mechanisms and processes involved in the transplantation of groups of people within the colonial context, and in particular seeks to create a tableau within which the construction of a mythology of migration is set against the realities of negotiation and communication with the wider society.