Early Modern Globalization Research Articles

Early modern globalization and the extent of indigenous agency: Trade, commodities and ecology

Early modern globalization and the extent of indigenous agency: Trade, commodities and ecology

Zhangzhou Immigrants between China and the Spanish: Diplomatic Conversations Concerning the 1603 Incident in Manila

Starting in 1573 with the establishment of Manila, the circulation of Chinese goods along the trans-Pacific route brought the Ming Dynasty and the Spanish Empire into contact. Consequently, many people from Fujian Province, especially Zhangzhou city, went to Manila and facilitated the operation of the city. This paper examines the interactions of Zhangzhou immigrants in Manila, focusing their roles and living situations in Parián, the designated neighborhood for the Sangleys. In particular, the diplomatic conversation concerning the 1603 Incident is analyzed to elucidate how the Sangleys were perceived by both the Ming court and the Spanish governors. Records produced by Chinese elites, local gazetteers, and Spanish correspondence reveal the conflicts and negotiations between the Ming government and officials of the Spanish Empire concerning this matter, as well as local and state differences in views. While the contributions of the Sangleys were recognized and used to promote the moral superiority of both sides, they were not seriously considered by either the Chinese court or the Spanish government. The Sangleys offer a unique perspective on the positioning of these two state powers: Each desired to maintain a peaceful relationship yet simultaneously adopted a cautious stance. This study illuminates some of the connections and conflicts which emerged during early modern globalization.

Ivory and feathers: St Jeromes across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans

On both sides of the Pacific, seventeenth-century ivory carvers in Manila and feather workers in New Spain produced triptychs depicting St Jerome: the feather-backed triptychs made in Mexico are based on the Filipino-made ivories, which may be based on Flemish prints. These related objects made variously of paper, wood, feathers and ivory, reveal the mechanics of early modern globalization, the ways in which copying at a distance allowed for a realignment of economies of labor and materials, affording opportunities for artists both to imagine and respond to faraway consumers, and to experiment with acts of appropriation and creative assembly in a newly global art market.

Religion in a Global Context: the reframing of the concept during early modern globalization

In recent decades, many scholars have questioned the use of the term “religion” to describe non-Western cultures. Many espoused the idea that the word had no accurate translation or correspondence in these contexts, and hence, it had to be invented. However, even in the West, the concept went through significant transformations throughout History. This article discusses the transformations it underwent during the early modern period when global connections were forged due to European expansion initially led by the Iberian kingdoms. Building on debates raised by the scholarship that regards religion as an invented category artificially applied to non-Western settings, but also countering its conclusions, I argue that a new understanding of “religion” developed as a result of early modern globalization and Christianity’s universal aspiration combined. Since the concept of “religion” incorporated and responded to non-European realities and traditions, it cannot be interpreted as an exclusively Western concept.

Nautical astrology: a forgotten early modern tradition

ABSTRACT While the link between navigation and astronomy is quite evident and its history has been extensively explored, the prognosticatory element included in astronomical knowledge has been almost completely left out. In the early modern world, the science of the stars also included prognostication known today as astrology. Together with astronomical learning, navigation also included astrology as a means to predict the success of a journey. This connection, however, has never been adequately researched. This paper makes the first broad study of the tradition of astrology in navigation as well as its role in early modern globalization. It shows how astrological doctrine had its own tools for nautical prognostication. These could be used when dealing with the uncertainty of reaching the desired destination, to inquire about the condition of a loved one, or an important cargo. It was widely used, both in time and geographical context, by navigators and cosmographers for weather forecasting and elections for the start of a successful voyage.

Seed Lists: Information Maintenance and a Woman’s Work in Early Modern Global Exchanges

Abstract: As Europe saw an increase in newly known plants, the seed list format was employed to make specimens legible across an informal network for botanical exchange. This article explores the medium specifications of the format and a rich repository of these lists, compiled by the English aristocrat Mary Somerset (bap. 1630–1715), who dedicated much of her time to maintaining the flows of information that seed lists mediated. This will show the work required to make exchanges meaningful and useful, the credibility and authority this could grant to a woman like Somerset, and, significantly, the importance of maintenance in transforming mobile units of information scattered across the world into something we call knowledge.

Teaching French Neoclassical Tragedy. Edited by Hélène E. Bilis and Ellen McClure

The editors’ starting point in their impeccably judged Introduction to this collection of pedagogical essays is to confront the question of what value tragedy written in the 1600s can offer today. All contributors have embraced that challenge, mostly recounting their own experiences of teaching and even sharing some failures as well as successes of their different approaches. Appropriately, given the subject, the book is divided into five acts. The first, ‘Reframing Tragic Poetics’, contains an inventive and intellectually rigorous piece by Larry F. Norman and David Wray on the place of Racine’s Phèdre amongst the various ancient and modern versions of the Phaedra myth; John D. Lyons’s characteristically incisive essay on the role played by fate in French tragedy; a challenging article by Jeffrey N. Peters on place and space in Corneille and Racine; Faith E. Beasley’s wonderful reappraisal of the important creative role of female spectators in the success of and controversy generated by Le Cid; an interesting comparison by Andrea Frisch of two theatrical versions of Julius Caesar’s death (by Jacques Grévin and Georges de Scudéry); and Juliette Cherbuliez’s fascinating discussion of hypotyposis as a pedagogical tool with undergraduates and postgraduates. Part Two is devoted to ‘The Performance of Tragedy on Stage and in the Classroom’, with very useful contributions on text and image in theatrical performance (Laurence Marie), performance and interpretation as a tool to tap students’ creative and collaborative impulses (Blair Hoxby), Racine’s lessons on communicative strategies (Jennifer Tamas), teaching and performing musical tragedy (John Boitano and Louise Thomas), and machine theatre (Hélène Visentin). In Part Three, ‘New Geographies, New Temporalities’, three chapters focus on teaching neoclassical theatre beyond the canon: Julia Prest’s extraordinary work on staging theatre in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue is translated into an undergraduate course on theatre and society in the colonial era; Ellen R. Welch considers the staging of Corneille and Racine in multicultural France; and Sylvaine Guyot analyses the reception and performance of two modern versions of Bérénice by Faustin Linyekula. The fourth part concerns ‘Tragic Politics: Between the Ancien Régime and the Present’, with a comparison of Phèdre and more contemporary political worlds by Marc Bizer, an illuminating essay by Toby Wikström on teaching early modern globalization through two little-known plays (Des Croix’s Les Portugais infortunés and the anonymous Le More cruel), Sylvie Romanowski’s consideration of absolutist politics within Britannicus, and Jeffrey M. Leichman’s comparison of kingship within plays by Corneille and Aimé Césaire. In the final section, ‘Explorations in Theory and Technology’, Jennifer Row reads Polyeucte and Esther against the grain, giving them a persuasively queer makeover; Anna Rosensweig makes use of recent scholarship to consider theatre from an affective viewpoint; Theresa Varney Kennedy and David Jortner transform the Querelle du Cid into courtroom drama (with students playing the roles of debaters and jurors); and Hélène E. Bilis shows the huge value of using available databases to study neoclassical tragedy. A measure of the book’s success, upon this reader, was that it made me eager to introduce some of the excellent pedagogical suggestions into my own teaching but also deeply envious of those students who have had the privilege of attending such inspiring and innovative classes.

Tangled Strands of Silk: Globalizing the Local in Early Modern San Miguel Achiutla, Oaxaca

Abstract This article takes the community of San Miguel Achiutla, located in the Mixtec highlands of Oaxaca, as a case study through which to examine the complex involvements of Indigenous pueblos de indios of Mexico in the early modern dynamics of globalization. Drawing from both ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence, this analysis shows not only how residents of this community were affected by forces of globalization as they appropriated new goods and ideas from across the Pacific and Atlantic, but also how they played an active economic role in driving colonial expansion during the sixteenth century, particularly through the silk trade. In tracing these connections, we see how locally focused microhistories can shed light on aspects of early modern globalization that we might not otherwise attend to.

From the Atlantic to the Manchu: Taiwan Sugar and the Early Modern World, 1630s–1720s

Taiwan, the first post-Dutch-colonial society in Asia, experienced an exponential growth of sugar production in the six decades following the Siege of Fort Zeelandia (1661–1662) and emerged as a world-leading sugar producer in the 1720s, overshadowing any single sugar island in the contemporary Caribbean region. This unprecedented expansion of a non-western sugar frontier encourages us to revisit the existing theories about sugar and early modern globalization, which represent highly productive offshore sugar islands as a unique product of the expansion of the European capitalist economy in the Atlantic World. The case of Taiwan sugar instead shows how a former European colony in East Asia with a nascent sugar economy was first militarily occupied by a non-western maritime power, then politically incorporated by a non-western empire, and eventually economically integrated by a non-western consumer market. Combining Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and English sources, in this article, I investigate the rise of Taiwan sugar in a global context from a sugar crisis of the Atlantic system in the 1630s to the Pax Manjurica in the China Seas region in the early eighteenth century.

Miracles in Writing: Obstetric Intercessions, Scribal Relics, and Jesuit News in the Early Modern Global Cult of Ignatius of Loyola

Abstract The reputation of Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556), the founder of the Society of Jesus, as a miracle-worker grew during the 1590s, which included his aid in childbirth through handwritten relics. This article examines obstetric miracles associated with Ignatius in the early modern world prior to his canonization in 1622. Through his letters and signature, Ignatius rescued women and their offspring during dangerous and near-fatal deliveries; delayed certain neonatal mortalities long enough for a baptism to occur; and allowed the delivery of a dead fetus to save the mother’s life. While the claims had no bearing on the official declaration of his sainthood, the attributed miracles are emblematic of the concentric and transoceanic nature of his cult. Information and material pathways contributed to the promulgation of the founder’s sanctity in the confines of women in labor and childbirth that had their own patron saints for centuries.

The Swahili World

The Swahili World

Erin Kathleen Rowe. Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism.

Erin Kathleen Rowe. Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism.

Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism, written by Erin Kathleen Rowe “Black but Human”: Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700, written by Carmen Fracchia

Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism, written by Erin Kathleen Rowe “Black but Human”: Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700, written by Carmen Fracchia

Rowe, Erin Kathleen. Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism.

Rowe, Erin Kathleen. Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism.

Margins are central: identity and indigenous resistance to colonial globalization in Guam

ABSTRACT Early modern colonial globalization was the first producer of marginality and cultural erasure on a world scale. The CHamorus of Guam and Marianas know this well since they were the first Pacific islanders to be turned into indigenous ‘others’ by European colonial powers. In a certain sense, investigating Guam is like investigating a huge terrain vague, or an interstice or in-between space that exists outside the cultural, social, and economic dynamics acknowledged by the Global North. However, it is within these margins where vibrant resistance to global cultural standardization settles and happens, as CHamorus also know. In this article, we will focus on CHamoru cultural resilience at lånchos (rural properties outside cities and villages), at reducciones (villages or towns where CHamorus were forcibly nucleated in the seventeenth century), and at the current use of colonial ‘ruins’ to promote indigenous cultural enhancement and community wellbeing.

Erin Kathleen Rowe, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2019

Article Erin Kathleen Rowe, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2019 was published on April 1, 2021 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 312, issue 2).

‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700 by Carmen Fracchia

Reviewed by: ‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700 by Carmen Fracchia Tanya J. Tiffany Carmen Fracchia. ‘Black but Human’: Slavery and Visual Art in Hapsburg Spain, 1480–1700. OXFORD UP, 2019. 256 PP. THE ROLES of enslaved peoples and freed Black men and women as both the subjects and producers of images in early modern Spain have garnered increasing attention in recent decades thanks to the work of scholars such as Victor I. Stoichita, Luis Méndez Rodríguez, and Carmen Fracchia, the author of the book under review. At once drawing upon and going beyond previous, more specialized studies, Fracchia’s monograph is the first to analyze slavery and depictions of Blackness in visual culture across imperial Spain. As she states at the outset, Fracchia aims to explore both “hegemonic visions” of Black subjects and to uncover “critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves,” but she does not always make clear how she is engaging these opposing perspectives and the tensions between them (1). (Although she never explicitly defines the term, Fracchia uses “Afro-Hispanic” mainly to refer to people of sub-Saharan African heritage, and she occasionally also employs it to discuss Muslim North Africans and their descendants.) In assessing questions of representation, readers will therefore want to consider Fracchia’s book alongside contributions—too recent for her to have taken into account—by Nicholas R. Jones, who argues that Black agency can be uncovered even in apparently derogatory portrayals by white Spanish writers (Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, Pennsylvania State UP, 2019), and Erin Kathleen Rowe, who has examined “how Afro-Iberians participated in the co-creation of devotional life” across the Catholic world (Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism, Cambridge UP, 2019, 2). Like the book as a whole, Fracchia’s chapter 1, “Black but Human,” is named for the topos used by Afro-Hispanics to proclaim their humanity when facing a system that treated them as material goods. The author explores emerging theological as well as literary discourses on skin color as mobilized in Iberia and elsewhere, including the equation of whiteness with purity and the idea that pious Christian souls, whether housed in European or African bodies, were white and thus beloved by God. Chapter 2, “What Is Human about Slavery?,” considers how the institution was justified by royal and ecclesiastical officials in Spain and Portugal, where hundreds of thousands [End Page 103] of enslaved people from various ethnic backgrounds lived and worked. Many churchmen defended the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans as a means of introducing them to the faith. Within this framework of conversion, Fracchia discusses images of baptized Black men, in particular a Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by Saint Philip from The Book of Hours of Charles V (ca. 1519) and an eighteenth-century Allegory of Baptism in the Mosque-Cathedral in Córdoba: paintings whose iconography pictures the supposed whitening powers of the sacrament. Chapter 3, “Visual Culture and Slavery,” turns more fully to visual images, considering tensions surrounding the depiction of Blacks in Spanish sacred art, especially the figure of the Black Magus. Fracchia emphasizes that northern European artists routinely represented one of the Magi as Black beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, but this iconography became standard in Spain only in the 1520s. She sees this delay as part of a pattern in which images of Blacks were unusual in regions where slavery was widespread. The causal, chronological argument for this seeming paradox merits more detailed investigation. As Fracchia herself demonstrates, the Black Magus was central to the religious imaginary of Seville’s late fourteenth-century “Our Lady of the Kings” (the “kings” here refer to the Magi), which was founded as “the very first black confraternity in Western Europe” at a moment when enslaved Africans were beginning to arrive in the city (48). Fracchia also highlights the broader importance of Black saints to the Afro-Iberian communities that emerged with the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, noting that various later Black confraternities likewise dedicated themselves to the Virgin of the Kings and Saint Benedict of...

Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism by Erin Kathleen Rowe

Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism by Erin Kathleen Rowe

Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, and Rachel Sarah O’Toole (eds) (2020), Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization

The edited volume Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization is a collection of essays that seek to analyze the mechanisms and consequences of Iberian imperial expansion whilst simultaneously demonstrating that the outcome of these processes resulted in the “roots” of early modern globalization. In their approach, the authors of this volume not only engage with the “global turn” that has characterized much of recent historiography, but they also follow recent efforts within the historical...

Aḥmad Yasavī and the Ismāʿīlīs of Badakhshān: Towards a New Social History of Sufi-Shīʿī Relations in Central Asia

Abstract This article examines how a text attributed to the renowned Central Asian Sufi figure Aḥmad Yasavī came to be found within a manuscript produced within the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī community of the Shughnān district of the Badakhshān region of Central Asia. The adoption of this text into an Ismāʿīlī codex suggests an exchange between two disparate Islamic religious traditions in Central Asia between which there has hitherto been little evidence of contact. Previous scholarship on Ismāʿīlī-Sufi relations has focused predominately on the literary and intellectual engagement between these traditions, while the history of persecution experienced by the Ismāʿīlīs at the hands of Sunnī Muslims has largely overshadowed discussions of the social relationship between the Ismāʿīlīs and other Muslim communities in Central Asia. I demonstrate that this textual exchange provides evidence for a previously unstudied social engagement between Ismāʿīlī and Sunnī communities in Central Asia that was facilitated by the rise of the Khanate of Khoqand in the 18th century. The mountainous territory of Shughnān, where the manuscript under consideration originated, has been typically represented in scholarship as isolated prior to the onset of colonial interest in the region in the late 19th century. Building upon recent research on the impact of early modern globalization on Central Asia, I demonstrate that even this remote region was significantly affected by the intensification of globalizing processes in the century preceding the Russian conquest. Accordingly, I take this textual exchange as a starting point for a broader re-evaluation of the Ismāʿīlī-Sufi relationship in Central Asia and of the social ‘connectivity’ of the Ismāʿīlīs and the Badakhshān region within early modern Eurasia.