Schellinks: Local Milieu and Global Circulation in the Visualization of Mughal India” (Chapter 16), by Jos Gommans and Jan de Hond, offers a compelling account of cultural productions and cross-cultural encounters as they are illuminated in the work of Willem Schellinks, a seventeenth-century Amsterdam painter-cum-poet whose work was inspired by Mughal history and miniatures. As far as we know he was the very first European observer to write about his appreciation of Mughal painting and situate it in a global historical context. This chapter revisits Schellinks’ own engagement with global history as revealed in his recently rediscovered poem on Indian painting and two of his most intriguing Indian works. It begins with an analysis of the historical sources emanating from the global information hub that Amsterdam already was in this period. They include Jesuit reports, VOC intelligence, and personal travel journals. Second, Gommans and de Hond go on to explore the particular milieu of painters, playwrights, and poets in Amsterdam and highlight the importance of the interface between literature and painting in the making of Schellinks’ work. Third, they argue that it is possible to understand Schellinks’ Mughal works only in light of his profound fascination with theater and in particular the type of theater being made in Amsterdam in this period. Through this microhistorical study of Schellinks’ local milieu – in particular, the practice of painting and its relation to poetry and theater – this essay reassesses the general phenomenon of European visual representations of the Orient in this period. The spectacular interplay in these paintings between reality and illusion, between the seen and the unseen, makes Schellinks’ artistic vision surprisingly commensurable with that of his Mughal protagonists, whose artistic vision encouraged an intermingling of Western naturalistic traditions with Islamic art. Finally, while typically Western descriptions of the Mughal court in the early modern period were shaped by English (and Portuguese) accounts, here we are reminded that the Dutch also had a presence in India – albeit fleeting – as they went on to establish their empire farther east.
From artistic production and cultural exchange in Mughal–Dutch relations, we move to an account of the discursive and representational justification of the early English commodification and sale of Africans captured on the Guinea coast by John Hawkins (1562, 1564, 1567–1568). In this essay, titled “Hakluyt’s Books and Hawkins’ Slaving Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the English National Imaginary, 1560–1600” (Chapter 17), Jyotsna G. Singh revisits the life of John Hawkins, often described as a “colorful” denizen of Plymouth and Devon and at other times as an Elizabethan notable, naval commander, and treasurer of the Navy, but who was also considered England’s first “official” slaver. Hawkins’ three slaving voyages to and from West Africa to the West Indies, Hispaniola, and the Mexican coast, where he sold the captives to the Spanish colonials, give a remarkable close-up account of the interactions with the indigenous inhabitants, of raiding battles, seizing of captives, and local logistics and economics – of Africans labeled as “Negroes” by the English when enslaved, “taken,” or bought. Overall, these voyages yield detailed information of their slaving practices: modes of acquisition and sale, including prices, profits, and commodities exchanged. While recognizing that England’s entry into the profitable transatlantic trade was belated compared with other European powers such as the Spaniards and more centrally the Portuguese, this chapter focuses on the Hawkins voyages as an optic for examining the enslavement and trafficking of Africans in the period. Hawkins’ voyages were and continued to be known as recounted and endorsed by Richard Hakluyt in his anthology of travel narratives, Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) and reprinted in a second edition, Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1598–1600. Furthermore, honors received by John Hawkins soon after his voyages further testify to the stakes of the English Crown in his slaving enterprise; in 1565, he received a heraldic coat of arms under royal endorsement, “decorated” by a figure of a bound African “Moor,” euphemistically representing the forced enslavement of Africans as a “victory” over the “Moors” in battle. This chapter aims to critically reassess early English trading and slaving practices, not only as they unfolded “on the ground” but also as they widely permeated and shaped the English national imagination.
The following chapter turns to the twists and turns of Anglo–Ottoman trade. Matthew Dimmock discusses the export of valuable English gun metal and arms and the import of decorative “trifles” in his essay “Guns and Gawds: Elizabethan England’s ‘Infidel’ Trade” (Chapter 18). He examines the often xenophobic anxieties surrounding foreign trade via the famous “Dutch Church Libel” of 1593 – a pamphlet attached to the door of a London Protestant church – that attacks foreigners, specifically Northern Europeans, as parasites who facilitate the export of valuable English goods, “our Lead, our Vittaile, our Ordenance,” and import of “Pedlers” trifles made from English commodities originally and sold in England. This attack on foreigners and foreign trade is set against a backdrop of economic crises in the 1590s coupled with England’s shrinking trade in European markets. Such mercantile pressures and realignments, Dimmock argues, are clearly demonstrated on one hand by the sale of decorative trifles on English streets and on the other by England’s growing exports to the “infidel” Ottomans, especially tin from Cornwall and the scrap, bell metal from the old monasteries.
Defying an edict of the Pope against the sale of weaponry and metals, though downplaying the extent of its trading relationship with the Ottomans, England continued to sell bell metal and guns to the Ottomans (and others) as a part of its arms trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discursively, Dimmock argues, as the centerpiece of his essay, “in the schism of the ongoing Reformation the Protestant English had become the ‘infidels’ of Christendom, increasingly bound together in polemical, mercantile, and symbolic terms with the Muslim ‘infidels’ of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire.” Yet while the English were accused by some of exchanging the “Bible for the Alcoran,” the bells confiscated from monasteries also became the symbols of “Protestant iconoclasm,” reaffirming Elizabeth’s status as a “Protestant idol destroyer.” In sum, objects such as metal and guns acquired an “infidel” character, associated with the enemies of Christendom, yet in a different “regime of value” they enhanced Elizabeth’s power and status.
Next, in an inquiry into the role of the natural world of plants in the global colonizing forays of the period, Edward M. Test follows the physical journey of a plant, amaranth, from Mesoamerica to Renaissance gardens throughout Europe, in his essay “Seeds of Sacrifice: Amaranth, the Gardens of Tenochtitlan and Spenser’s Faerie Queene” (Chapter 19). And, in doing so, he also charts the two systems of signification in which the amaranth accrues differing meanings. For the Mesoamerican Mexica (the pre-Columbian name for the Aztec people) the amaranth was integral to their diet, ecosystem, and most importantly (in terms of this essay) to rituals of human sacrifice. An enormous interest in alien flora – brought by the explorers and merchants who crossed the seas – underpinned the great age of Renaissance gardens and herbal literature in which an interest in botany implied a new scientific curiosity. But, according to Test, these new gardens also had religious associations with Paradise and Spenser’s “Garden of Adonis” in The Faerie Queene, drawing on both contexts: of early modern gardeners planting, grafting, mixing foreign and native seeds, and evoking the Genesis where God provides “every herb bearing seed.”
Spenser’s term “sad Amaranthus” suggests that he knew of the plant’s association with Mexica ritual sacrifice but here, as Test argues, “the sacred plant of extreme religious devotion in ancient Mexico is transformed into a symbol of devotional love in England.” While pointing to the cross-cultural transference of a range of associations, Test also adds a twist in order to reverse the Eurocentric template: while the Mexica used their sacrifice rituals “for ritual and regeneration” of the earth, the Europeans used brutal public torture as rituals of imposing order. Second, the gardens of Mesoamerica “propelled the study of botany in Europe,” and thus, the supposedly “primitive” New World aided in “the development of the early modern world.”
English xenophobia regarding foreign