Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s research while affiliated with University of California, Los Angeles and other places

The long-term historical demography of India is a highly intractable subject, due to a lack of reliable statistical data. Nevertheless, in recent decades, it has become increasingly common in popular and journalistic circles (including Le Figaro and The New York Times) to resort to the term ‘genocide’ in order to claim that a very large number of people were systematically killed in the process of the Islamic conquest of the area (c. 1000–1800 CE). This short essay examines the fragile basis of this claim, as well as the ideological programs underlying it. Effectively, such an abuse cheapens the term and devalues historical situations when genocide really occurred, including the Shoah.

This book is a revised and reworked translation of a book published by Giuseppe Marcocci in 2016 under the enigmatic title Indios, cinesi, falsari. The author is quite a prolific scholar, who trained at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Like many Italian historians of the early modern period, he has a solid foundation in classical Greek and Latin and reads and researches widely in the Romance languages. He has several book-length publications in Italian and Portuguese, notably on the Inquisition and the Portuguese empire, but none of these has yet been translated into English. This book is thus a very welcome addition to the English-language library of works by Italian scholars. The book is made up of five quite compact chapters, preceded by a brief but essential introduction (16 pages), and followed by a short conclusion (5 pages). It weighs in at just over 200 pages, a modest length for so vast a subject. The study of Renaissance historiography is already an established subject in English. One thinks of the writings of Eric Cochrane and Mark Phillips, but also of the so-called ‘Grafton School’, including Anthony Grafton, Nancy Siraisi and Nicholas Popper. There are also works on France (going back at least to George Huppert), and a growing body of material on imperial Spain, notably under the influence of John Elliott and Richard Kagan. Portugal is less well represented in English, despite the efforts of the late Charles Boxer and Thomas Earle.

The essay reflects on the context of the publication and reception of The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700, a book that first appeared in 1993, and was translated into Portuguese, French and Chinese. It suggests that while some of the principal arguments of the book have gained acceptance, others have been resisted in many quarters. Notably, the book’s plea to insert Portuguese activities in their full Asian and East African historical and historiographical contexts has only been espoused by a minority of historians.

In 1648, the Portuguese Estado da Índia found itself at a crossroads. After nearly five decades of attacks by a variety of adversaries—the Dutch East India Company, the Safavids, the Mughals, the Tokugawa shoguns, and the rulers of Kandy, among others—and in the context of the ‘Restoration’ of the Braganza dynasty in Portugal in 1640 and the separation of Portugal from Spain, a brief respite was offered. This article looks at how the situation was diagnosed by various contemporary authors, both outsiders and consummate insiders, such as the viceroy Dom Filipe de Mascarenhas. It suggests that the heavy constraints placed on the state by external forces as well as by forces of internal dissension compelled it to reinvent itself, a process that eventually began in the 1660s. However, this reinvention was not about simply imitating its great rival, the Dutch East India Company.

If scholars of the early modern Islamic world were asked for a single adjective to describe Suraiya Faroqhi, most might opt for ‘indefatigable’. Now nearing eighty, Professor Faroqhi has had a lengthy research and teaching career divided between Europe (especially Germany) and Turkey, with shorter stints elsewhere. Her impressive list of publications dates back to a handful of essays in German, published in journals like Der Islam in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and her first book to appear in print was Der Bektaschi-Orden in Anatolien (Vienna: Verlag des Institutes für Orientalistik der Universität Wien, 1981). Thereafter, the 1980s proved to be an enormously fecund period for her, as books and essays followed in rapid succession, with a good proportion of them now being in English. Perhaps the best-known of these were Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia (Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Men of Modest Substance (Cambridge University Press, 1987). In a subsequent phase, she has turned to writing books for a largely student and generalist audience, and these include Approaching Ottoman History (Cambridge University Press,1999), The Ottoman Empire and the World Around it (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), as well as a couple of volumes of the edited Cambridge History of Turkey.

This essay examines relations between eastern Africa and western India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in respect to two related sets of problems: the changing regimes of commercial circulation, and more particularly the evolution of patterns of human movement, notably via the slave trade from Ethiopia and the Swahili coast to Gujarat and the Deccan. It argues that over the course of the sixteenth century, commercial relations between Deccan ports such as Goa and Chaul, and the Swahili coast, came to be strengthened through the intervention of the Portuguese and their military-commercial system. At the same time, large numbers of African slaves reached the Muslim states in India, especially in the period after 1530, where they played a significant role as military specialists, and eventually as elite political and cultural actors. The shifting geographical dimensions of the African presence in India are emphasized, beginning in western Gujarat and winding up in the Deccan Sultanates. This contrasts markedly with the African experience elsewhere, where the meaning and institutional context of slavery were quite different.

Danna Agmon, A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion and Scandal in French India, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017, xvi + 217pp. Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, xii + 324pp.

The chapter looks at Jesuit interactions with the Asian world in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in particular at the idea of the exchange and circulation of political models. It focuses on the treatise Ādāb al-Saltanat, written by Jerónimo Xavier (with ‘Abdus Sattar ibn Qasim Lahauri). It shows how the Jesuit attempted to pick and choose examples both from the distant Mediterranean past (Greece, Rome, the Bible and Byzantium), and a more recent one (medieval and early modern Iberia, France, Italy and even England), to provide a certain image of the functioning of politics. While trying to over-emphasise the “idealistic” side of European politics, Xavier was nevertheless unable to prevent his examples from often sliding into a more “realistic” register, thus revealing the influence of Machiavelli.