How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? In Religion and Empire in Portuguese India, Ângela Barreto Xavier examines these questions through a reading of the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twin drives of conversion and colonization in Portuguese India resulted in a variety of outcomes, ranging from negotiation to passive resistance to moments of extreme violence. Focusing on the rural hinterlands rather than the city of Goa itself, Barreto Xavier shows how Goan actors were able to seize hold of complex cultural resources in order to further their own projects and narrate their own myths and histories. In the process, she argues, Portuguese Goa emerged as a space with a specific identity that was a result of these contestations and interactions. The book de-essentializes the categories of colonizer and colonized, making visible instead their inner-group diversity of interests, their different modes of identification, and the specificity of local dynamics in their interactions and exchanges—in other words, the several threads that wove the fabric of colonial life.

The Portuguese encounter with the peoples of South Asia and Brazil set foundational precedents for European imperialism. Jesuit missionaries were key participants in both regions. As they sought to reconcile three commitments—to local missionary spaces, to a universal Church, and to the global Portuguese empire—the Jesuits forged a religious vision of empire. Ananya Chakravarti explores both indigenous and European experiences to show how these missionaries learned to negotiate everything with the diverse peoples they encountered and that nothing could simply be imposed. Yet Jesuits repeatedly wrote home in language celebrating triumphal impositions of European ideas and practices upon indigenous people. In the process, while empire was built through distinctly ambiguous interactions, Europeans came to imagine themselves in imperial moulds. In this dynamic, in which the difficult lessons of empire came to be learned and forgotten repeatedly, Chakravarti demonstrates an enduring and overlooked characteristic of European imperialism.

The state of Goa on India's southwest coast was once the capital of the Portuguese-Catholic empire in Asia. When Vasco Da Gama arrived in India in 1498, he mistook Hindus for Christians, but Jesuit missionaries soon declared war on the alleged idolatry of the Hindus. Today, Hindus and Catholics assert their own religious identities, but Hindu village gods and Catholic patron saints attract worship from members of both religious communities. Through fresh readings of early Portuguese sources and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study traces the history of Hindu-Catholic syncretism in Goa and reveals the complex role of religion at the intersection of colonialism and modernity.

This book explores the process of knowledge production in and about South Asia during the late medieval and early modern periods. Disseminated through the global networks of the early modern Portuguese empire (16th-18th centuries), this process was inextricably connected to the expansion of Catholicism and was geared to perpetuate political ambitions and cultural imaginary of the early modern Catholic protagonists and their communities in South Asia and beyond. As an integral part of the Portuguese imperial 'information order' established in Asia, Catholic Orientalism was responsible for creating an epistemic tool box, in which several significant concepts were first tested and developed: such as "caste," "Brahmanism," "paganism," "the torrid zone," "oriental despotism," and many others. However, from the mid-18th century, the British empire changed the map of knowledge about South Asia and in the process Catholic Orientalism was both assimilated and discarded as tainted by unreasonable Catholicism and too close to equally unreasonable "native" Indian point of view. Through a series of case studies, this book chronicles the rise and the decline of the Catholic knowledge of South Asia which had not been, at any point, only and simply "Portuguese." Multiple sources, polyglot archives and actors moving ever more swiftly through space and time, with divided loyalties, often disregarding "national" divisions and wearing many different hats are at the heart of the narrative which starts at the turn of the 16th century and ends by the end of the 18th.

A wide-ranging consideration of early modern Muslim and Christian empires, covering the Iberian, Ottoman, and Mughal worlds, including questions of political economy, images and representations, and historiography. Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800 uses the innovative approach of “connected histories” to address a series of questions regarding the early modern world in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. The period between 1500 and 1800 was one of intense inter-imperial competition involving the Iberians, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the British, and other actors. Rather than understand these imperial entities separately, Sanjay Subrahmanyam reads their archives and texts together to show unexpected connections and refractions. He further proposes, in this set of closely argued studies, that these empires often borrowed from each other, or built their projects with knowledge of other competing visions of empire. The emphasis on connections is also crucial for an understanding of how a variety of genres of imperial and global history writing developed in the early modern world. The book moves creatively between political, economic, intellectual, and cultural themes to suggest a fresh geographical conception for the epoch. “Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the preeminent practitioner of ‘connected histories,’ offers yet another set of fascinating encounters of peoples, objects, ideas, and practices between the Ottoman, Mughal, and British empires. As always, he stays close to the archive, but is nonetheless able to spin a wonderfully imaginative web of pictures and stories. A delightful read.” — Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University

When Portuguese explorers first arrived in India, the maritime passage initiated an exchange of goods as well as ideas. European ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars who followed produced a body of knowledge that shaped European thought about India. Sanjay Subrahmanyam tracks these changing ideas over the entire early modern period.

This is a clear account, written from an Indian point of view, of Portuguese activities in India.