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Explorations in ConnectedHistory: From the Tagus tothe Ganges, by SanjaySubrahmanyam (2004)By Ben Breen 

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is a historian ofremarkable erudition and imagination. Hispersonal itineraries over the years—fromthe New Delhi School of Economics tothe École des Hautes Études in Paris, andfrom Oxford to UCLA, where he currentlyholds an endowed chair in history—mirrorthose of the early modern travellers whofrequently take center stage in hishistorical work. The book reviewed here(the second volume of Explorations inConnected History, which includes acompanion volume called Mughals andFranks) is a collection of eight incisiveessays penned by Subrahmanyambetween 1993 and 2003.

As Subrahmanyam notes in hisintroduction, these essays “had a rather

complex evolution.” The �rst chapter, a previously unpublished re�ection on the scope of“Indian history” as a �eld of study, began life as a lecture at the University of Oxford.Chapter two, on Asian perspectives on the Portuguese colonies in the Indian Ocean, is atranslation from an edited volume published in Portuguese, while the third chapterpreviously appeared in an edited collection on the Bay of Bengal. Other chaptersoriginally appeared in a range of scholarly journals. Although these chapters rangeextremely widely, they are bound together by Subrahmanyam’s methodological concernwith what he calls “connected histories.”

The notion of “connected histories” is, for Subrahmanyam, a necessary corrective to atleast three distinct historiographic trends. First, it seeks to move away from whatSubrahmanyam regards as an overly simplistic, isolated, and “mechanistic” frameworkfor writing global histories that has prevailed in the past: comparative history. Second,Subrahmanyam’s connected history methodology seeks to expand the geographic andthematic scope of what we mean by “the early modern period.” The societies thatexisted in the Old and New World prior to European imperial hegemony, he suggests,were participants in a nascent modernity that was taking place organically andchaotically on a global level, rather than being engineered by European states. And�nally, Subrahmanyam marshals the notion of connected histories to challenge what heconsiders to be a submerged form of “exoticism” at work in post-colonial studies.Subrahmanyam, never one to shy away from a scholarly confrontation, takes specialaim at the Subaltern School, which he critiques for “see[ing] the Indian role as one oflargely reacting and adapting to European initiatives.”

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A panorama of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, Georg Braun and Franz Hogenbergs atlas Civitates orbis terrarum,1572.

What, then, does a connected history methodology offer in place of comparative history,early modern European history, or post-colonial studies? Subrahmanyam is that rarehistorical writer who is equally skilled at intervening in big-picture historiographicdebates and digging deeply in di�cult archives and specialist bodies of knowledge. Thework on display here amply demonstrates the promise of his methodology.Subramanyam engages closely with Portuguese chronicles of Indian conquest and therather myopic Lusophone historiography that has built up around them, showing that acareful attention to alternative narratives—like texts written in Malay, Arabic, and Farsi—can challenge many of our prevailing assumptions about European colonialism.Crucially, Subramyam differentiates between the various imperial powers in the IndianOcean—not only the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, but also non-European polities. Thissets his work apart from other big-picture studies of what was once called “the Age ofExpansion” (like Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient or Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before EuropeanHegemony), which suffer from a tendency to sort the region’s actors into overly binary“European” and “non-European” camps.

Departure from Lisbon for Brazil, the East Indies and America, engraving from c.1592 by Theodor de Bry (Flemish,1528-1598), illustration in America Tertia Pars. Location- Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes.

Although the essays in this book focus on south Asia, Subrahmanyam makes clear thatthe problems of Indian historiography—what he calls “an extravagant nationalism andcrude ‘presentism’”—are not unique. From France to Java, historians have tended to reifycontemporary distinctions between regions as if they were immutable historical facts.But if part of Subrahmanyam’s aim is to “complicate” (that favorite verb of historians)our understanding of nation and place in the early modern world, he also seeks to clarify.Subramanyam’s connected history approach, which shares a family resemblance toJorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s “entangled empires” and Joseph Fletcher’s “integrativehistory,” is not a totalizing effort to explain all of world history à la Toynbee. But it isambitious in both its geographic and linguistic scope. Marshaling his remarkablypolyglot erudition, Subrahmanyam argues that the early modern world must beunderstood as a porous network of regions and local communities rather than as apatchwork of well-de�ned states. Although this framework demolishes facilecomparisons between, say, “French” and “Indian” mentalities or cultural practices, it alsoallows us to think in a more theoretically well-de�ned way about the connectionsbetween the societies and regions of the early modern world.

Detail of India, from a 1630 Portuguese map of Asia, entitled General tables of all the navigation, dividedand corrected by D. Jeronimo de Ataide, with all the ports and conquests of Portugal delineated by Joao

Teixeira, cosmographer of His Majesty, Year 1630.

The advantages of such an approach are apparent in Chapter Five of this volume, whichadvances the startlingly original thesis that a “millenarian conjuncture… operated over agood part of the Old World in the sixteenth century.” In other words, a set of apocalypticbeliefs and concerns were shared between both Portuguese mariners and the SouthAsian merchants and courtiers with whom they interacted. Fears about portents, omensand signs, no less than currencies and gems, �owed between Europe and the IndianOcean in this period. Although scholars of Reformation-era Christianity have writtenextensively on the apocalyptic currents of this era, Subrahmanyam’s mastery of Persian,Turkish, and South Asian sources allows him to connect this historiography to what hecalls the “messianic pretensions” of the Persian ruler Isma’il, to various strands of Su�mysticism, and to the medieval Alexander legends. It is a bravura display of learning thatalso sets up a bold new framework for thinking about religion as a factor in early modernglobalization.

Portrait of Shah Ismail I of Persia (1487-1524) by an unknown Venetian artist. The original rendering is kept in theU�zi Gallery museum in Florence, Italy.

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One potential objection to Subramanyam’s connected histories framework arises fromhis own erudition. The promise of such an approach is obvious in his own work. But thiswork depends upon a mastery of a dozen languages and the kind of deephistoriographic knowledge that takes decades to amass. Who else, besides SanjaySubrahmanyam, is capable of working in the framework he advocates? History needsmore historians who are able to cross national and linguistic boundaries, yet the NorthAmerican and British academies continue to require historians to specialize on areastudies or nationalist historiography. Scholars with the polymathic knowledge on displayhere are rare, and producing more of them may well require a new approach to how wetrain young historians.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to theGanges, (Oxford University Press, 2004)

 

 You may also like:Bradley Dixon, Facing North From Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and RewritingAtlantic HistoryChristopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in EnglishLiterature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)Jorge Esguerra-Cañizares discusses his book Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing theAtlantic, 1550-170 (Stanford University Press, 2006) on Not Even Past.Christopher Rose recommends The Ottoman Age of Exploration (University of OxfordPress, 2011) by Giancarlo CasaleRenata Keller discusses Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in theAmericas, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2007) by J.H. ElliottChristina Marie Villarreal recommends Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and VisualCulture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012) by DanielaBleichmar 

   

 All images via Wikimedia CommonsPosted November 12, 2014

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