Paper short abstract:

I will investigate, with a selection of original documents, the discourse concerning Venetian travellers in Maritime Asia during the Early Modern Age. They provided an important perspective for global history, in which the Republic of Venice played a vital, but often underestimated, role.

Paper long abstract:

The topic of Venetian travellers along the "Spice Route" between 16th and 17th century is a truly global moment of the history of the "Repubblica Serenissima". Some of these travellers such as De Conti, Balbi, Federici, were real pioneers in the description of many of the most remote regions of maritime Asia, such as Indonesia, the 'spice islands' and Burma. Some travellers and their accounts are well know, others much less so. Pioneers in many fields, Venetian travellers were moving through a network of traders and goods on the maritime route of Asia. Without any colonial intentions, they created fruitful cultural exchanges between two worlds: Asia and Europe.

I have investigated this complex cultural period having consulted a unique 18th century Venetian map, the traveller's first-hand accounts and some unpublished material.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the moment in 1609, when Jesuit missionaries presented Emperor Jahangir with a book of Advice on Kingship in Persian. The book's imagined geographies shed light on a period of intensifying collaboration, even as hopes for conversion faded.

Paper long abstract:

In 1609, three decades after their arrival at the Mughal court, Jesuit missionaries presented emperor Jahangir with a book of Advice on Kingship in Persian (Adab al-Saltanat). Written by the head of the mission, Jerome Xavier, the book followed a period of intensifying Mughal-Jesuit artistic and literary collaborations, even as Jesuit hopes for conversion faded. Produced by a mission struggling for relevancy at an Indo-Islamic court, and for an emperor in search of ever new ways to symbolically assert his pretensions of universal rule over territories far beyond the 'borders' of the empire, the text's imagined geographies shed new light on our understanding of this cross-cultural encounter.

Paper short abstract:

Looking at the conception of, and debates surrounding, an 1834 exhibition of fireworks at Calcutta, this paper highlights a major turning point in a long-running debate surrounding the status of the "public" in British India.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores a major transition in imperial ideology and governance through an unlikely but revealing lens: the "Grand Exhibition of Fire Works" held in Calcutta on 10 January, 1834, for an audience of tens of thousands. This was perhaps the largest, most expensive, and most discussed civic gathering in British Asia during the 1820s-30s, a high-water mark for the popular political involvement of the "age of reform." But it was also a turning point in a long-running debate surrounding the status of the "public."

In a series of contestations in the 1820s, The East India Company had defended its despotic mode of governance on the grounds that there was no public in India capable of supporting representative institutions. Reformers, in response, had argued that it was only the Company's despotism that prevented a nascent public from emerging. In negotiations over the renewal of the Company's political functions in 1833, the framers of the new Charter forged a middle-ground, arguing that despotism in the present was the route to liberty in the future. In this view, an as-yet inarticulate "public mind" would, over time, and with the proper cultivation, become a public, displacing despotism and perhaps British rule altogether. These were views with which Governor-General Bentinck agreed: the charter celebration in Calcutta was his attempt to communicate them and garner popular assent. The failure of this attempt, on both counts, would have important consequences, shattering the momentary illusion of a liberal consensus.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses and compares Russian and Chinese uses of geopolitical terms having to do with the self-definition of both countries in the early 20th century.

Paper long abstract:

This paper compares two historically unrelated clusters of polemical language. One is critical uses of the term "Asian" in Russian political discourse in the 1900s and 1910s. The other is Chinese usage, mostly in the 1920s, of the Japanese term "Shina", a denomination for "China" which was by then increasingly perceived as injurious to Chinese pride. I will argue that in both cases political and cultural critique was expressed partly by recourse to geography and by adopting an outsider's perspective - that of the foreigner, who would classify Russia as an "Asian" country and call China "Shina". There were also differences between the two sets of terminologies, however, having to do with different understanding by speakers in Russia and China of their country's place in the world and relation to its neighbours.