between Goa and other Asian courtly centers. And from many accounts across three sources – Mughal, Portuguese (Jesuit), and their English rivals – we learn of the Jesuit influence in the courts of the Mughal emperor Akbar and his son, Jahangir, and of related diplomatic activity between the indigenous Islamic rulers and the Portuguese colonizers. This chapter examines the interconnected stories of a Mughal official, Muqarrab Khan, and a Jesuit missionary, Manuel Pinheiro. Between the 1600s and 1610s, the two men became pivotal actors in the diplomatic exchanges between the Mughal Empire and the Portuguese Estado da Índia. The close association between the Mughal official and the Jesuit missionary led to one of the most curious and enigmatic episodes of Mughal and European exchanges – the secret conversion of Muqarrab Khan (baptized João de Távora) to Catholicism in Goa around 1611. By reconstructing and analyzing the relationship between Pinheiro and Muqarrab Khan, the chapter examines the different strategies adopted by European and South Asian agents involved in cross-cultural diplomatic exchanges, marked by a mutual curiosity about each other’s religion.
While these varied “contact zones,” on sites of different geographical locations, evoke a sense of frontiers, though often shifting, diffuse, and with implications of crossover possibilities, the next essay, “The Queer Moor: Bodies, Borders, and Barbary Inns” (Chapter 10), by Ian Smith theorizes the image of an inn or a hotel as a frontier of a transnational encounter in the early modern period. It begins with the reference in Shakespeare’s Othello to the “Sagittary Inn,” where Othello, early modern traveler par excellence, is lodged. The emblematic name evoked by the figure of “Sagittarius,” the centaur, the half-man, half-horse famous in classical literature, intersects with the title “The Queer Moor” – a term not only referencing Shakespeare’s “peripatetic African” but also identifying, Smith argues, “the persistent construction of the North African, Muslim, or Turk as sodomite in order to examine the ideological value of such an inscription in European dramatic and travel literature.”
Linking images of the Sagittary inn as a place of boundary crossings – sexual, human, bestial, religious, political, cultural – with Leo Africanus’s evocation of Barbary inns in terms of a culture of transvestism and of the Turkish seraglio functioning as a transnational dwelling and site of cultural and sexual reorientations, Smith inflects cross-cultural exchange with racial and gender ideologies in the early modern period. More specifically, he suggests, via the premises of “Queer” theory, that the English (and European) obsession with sodomy among the “infidels” takes “the form of the symbolic construction of the masculine, patriarchal European self under siege by the representative forces of Islam who have, in a manner recalling Iago’s own anxiety, leaped into the driver’s seat.” Global networks of exchange in the Renaissance not only implied commercial and economic transactions but also, as Smith illuminates, refigured European systems of sexual signification, in this instance sodomy, in grappling with new and variable categories of difference evoked by the “others” they encountered.
While global early modernity propelled the English (and Europeans) to seek and imagine “worlds elsewhere” and the rewards of travel were widely touted, especially in terms of commercial profits and national progress, England’s early modern global exposure also produced attendant anxieties about “leaving home,” as elaborated in the next essay in Part II: Andrew Hadfield’s “The Benefits of a Warm Study: The Resistance to Travel before Empire” (Chapter 11). Elizabethans were not as “globally inclined” as we imagine them to be, he argues, and the attraction for commodities, gold, and a desire for adventure and power were countered by fears about the “dangers and cost of imperial expansion.” The source of these anxieties went deeper in the ambivalence – and often hostility – to travel itself per se, which some saw as a threat to the morals, religious values, and the character of the nation, and as somehow unnecessary in the acquisition of true learning that comes from books.
Citing dominant intellectual and cultural figures of the period such as Roger Ascham, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Nashe, and Edmund Spenser, Hadfield addresses their various responses to questions about the problematic relation between representation and reality in terms of the purported value of travel: what can be learned from it and how to acquire knowledge. Considering Ascham’s views in some depth, Hadfield recapitulates the former’s critique of “the sexual beliefs and habits of Italianized Englishmen” and of the English authorities for allowing unrestricted travel, whereby they could destroy the “religious and social fabric” of the nation. The preservation of the post-Reformation Protestant nation was obviously at stake. Montaigne more eclectically calls for unlearned travelers like his servant who can more accurately represent the “raw material of experience” and wonders if travel can provide any real knowledge. The centerpiece of Hadfield’s essay, however, is Thomas Nashe’s provocative The Unfortunate Traveler (1594), which depicts Jack Wilton’s adventures and travels in violent scenarios in France, Germany, and Italy, which in turn refigures Ascham’s complaint about the corrupting effects of an education via foreign travel. Ending with a reflection on the proem to Book II of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Hadfield argues that while many in the Renaissance considered travel knowledge problematic in its truth claims, they also preferred reading the accounts of travelers rather than traveling themselves. Despite their anxieties, they could not escape the worlds elsewhere.
Catherine Ryu’s essay, “The Politics of Identity: Reassessing Global Encounters through the Failure of the English East India Company in Japan” (Chapter 12), considers the global Renaissance from the perspective of seventeenth-century Japan. The East India Company’s venture in Hirado, Japan (1613–1623), ended in failure and insolvency, despite the initial hopes and expectations of the company and in contrast to its success in India and elsewhere. In an attempt to articulate the reasons for this failure, Ryu analyzes the anxiety-ridden relationship between two key actors in this scenario, both Englishmen: John Saris, the first director of the English factory at Hirado; and William Adams (c. 1564–1620), the first Englishman, a pilot, and informal adviser to the Japanese shogun, Tokugaza Ieyasu, in the context of the identity politics of the period. Ryu examines Adam’s network of complex social, commercial, political, and sexual relationships as a lens through which to understand the forces behind his long and prosperous life in Japan, in contrast to the brief existence of the English factory.
In particular, Ryu illuminates the significance of the fiasco of the factory in Hirado, together with England’s subsequent failure to establish trade in Nagasaki, within the intensified identity politics during what is called the end of the so-called Christian Century, immediately followed by a period of sakoku (closed country) until the mid-nineteenth century. But, as Ryu points out, Japan continued to remain connected to the vibrant China-centered economic system of the period, which some historians consider “as the veritable engine behind the world economy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.” In looking beyond the context of England’s nationalistic self-aggrandizement (some of which is apparent in Saris’s attitudes and cross-cultural interactions), this essay reveals how the ill-conceived mercantile venture left the Company members with little flexibility to maneuver. More importantly, in terms of a broader historical perspective, Ryu challenges the “epistemological framework that supported the ‘Rise of the West’ as the metanarrative for the history of all human civilization.” Instead, she presents a fraught “contact zone” – a site that remained resistant to the expanding forces of European mercantile imperialism.
While we typically think of the age of discovery in terms of English (and European) expansion to the West (the New World) and the East (the Old World), the next two essays map the trajectory of England’s commercial and political interests in “contact zones” directed to the North Seas and beyond. Mary C. Fuller’s essay “Placing Iceland” (Chapter 13) examines the shifting perceptions of Iceland in the early modern period. Focusing on The Commentary of Island (or Brevis commentaries de Islandia) by Arngrimur Jónsson, published in both English and Latin in Hakluyt’s multivolume Principal Navigations (1598–1600), Fuller places this narrative