This interview took place at Harvard University, where Kären Wigen, the Frances and Charles Field Professor in History of Stanford University gave the 2015 Reischauer Lectures. This year’s theme was ‘Where in the World? Map-Making at the Asia-Pacific Margin, 1600-1900.’ Carolien Stolte and Rachel Koroloff interviewed Professor Wigen to the tunes of Persian music at the Kolbeh of Kabob restaurant on Cambridge Street.

Jessica Roitman and Karwan Fatah-Black meet Natalie Zemon Davis outside the University Library in Leiden for lunch and an interview. Although Davis is eager to study a Sranan-German dictionary she retrieved from the library, the three of them sit down for an engaging conversation on the historian’s craft, its societal relevance and the future of early modern studies.

Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory, and attachments to community, place, and particular literary cultures. In my essay I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story of the letters’ creation, to think about cultural and religious transformations, the relationship of foreign to local, and the powerful hold certain texts have on the imagination.

Exotic natural objects brought to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mutable and malleable things. They were constructed and assimilated into European world-views in a reciprocal process of change as they moved around early modern Europe. In particular, the provenance of natural objects and the associated rich symbolic resonances were central to their natural histories. The distinctions between Orient and Occident had divided the world since antiquity and were given a range of new senses in this period. The location of these two ‘Indies’, and their relationship to one another, were neither static nor always geographically defined. This article focuses on two rich examples of this natural historical construction in relation to images of the Indies: the Old World pangolin, or scaly anteater, and its New World counterpart, the armadillo. Initially, pangolins were understood as East Indian ‘scaly lizards’, armadillos as West Indian. But from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, their geographical identities and symbolic associations were entangled as these creatures came to embody colonial anxieties and resonances. The ‘India’ of the scaly lizard became the ‘Indies’ of the scaled mammals, both East and West. Examining the reception and treatment of examples such as these in European cabinets and natural histories, offers new insights into European relationships with regions of the world seen as distant and wonderfully bountiful.

Johannes Hoornbeeck (1617–1666) was a Dutch Protestant theologian, generally regarded as a member of the so-called Further Reformation in the Netherlands. He wrote a number of theological works in Latin and in Dutch. Most of his works have a polemical character, defending his orthodox protestant stance against a variety of heretical views. In De conversione Indorum et gentilium, based on disputations with students and published posthumously, he enters into a discussion with the ‘heathens’. To this end he carefully combines biblical and classical scholarship and also reflects on the latest ethnographical information collected by both Protestant and Catholic travellers and missionaries. The book is characterised by great erudition and by an openness for other people’s opinions that necessitates the constant appraisal of one’s own point of view. We argue that such an open engagement with heretical views ultimately carries the danger of a sceptical view of one’s own religion.

The aim to this article is to analyse the judgments and opinions of Africans about Europeans during the early Portuguese expeditions to West Africa in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. While opinions of Europeans about Africans are for that period certified by numerous and varied sources, the opinions of Africans are difficult to examine. Cultures of the West African coast in the fifteen and early sixteen century were illiterate. Local oral traditions do not go back – within the scope of this field of interest – to such distant centuries. There are two types of sources: Firstly, African statements written down in European texts, which require a particularly critical approach; secondly, some Africans expressed their opinions about Europeans in works of Art. These include the statues of Europeans from the area of present-day Sierra Leone (the Sapi people), and from the state of Benin (the Edo people). In this article the author examines: 1) the circumstances in which the Africans expressed their opinions (ad hoc meetings, political negotiations, trade, court ceremonies); 2) the authors (individuals or social and ethnic groups), which were attributed the judgments; 3) the content of speeches; and 4) the motives which guided the Africans. Then author compares individual cases, analyses the common characteristics and the distinct features of judgments and opinions known to us, and discusses the possibility of identification of general traits of Africans’ opinions about Europeans.

This article discusses the early modern Acehnese epic tradition to demonstrate the emergence of an individualized Muslim ethics. From the late seventeenth century onwards, a protracted decline of Acehnese royal power initiated a process of political fragmentation as well as the gradual integration of rural areas in the globalizing economy. This shift coincided with the emergence of local religious teachers as a new and influential social group. Contingent upon these changes, the Acehnese epic tradition shifted from a dominant cosmological model based on ritual hierarchies to a paradigm of reflexive ethics based on individual responsibility to God.

At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch Republic developed a trade empire of global proportions. The Dutch government played a substantial role in building and sustaining merchant enterprises by allowing chartered companies to act on its behalf. In the Mediterranean, however, the authorities relied on a variety of commercial-diplomatic agents to promote commerce. This article argues that Dutch consuls in the western Mediterranean transformed from merchant-consuls into state-representatives and played a crucial role in sustaining diplomatic relations with states in the Maghreb. By comparing the conditions under which consuls liberated captives in Algiers and Morocco during the first half of the seventeenth century, the article examines how consuls continuously had to adjust their mission to the interests of different institutions and individuals. The article concludes that the expansion of Dutch global commerce in the Mediterranean did not evolve according to a standard script but in consuls’ interactions with local conditions and customary practices. The article contributes to the New Diplomatic History that emphasizes how successful diplomatic relations in the early modern world depended on a range of different diplomatic actors who created forms of state diplomacy beyond treaty making and alliances.

The Portuguese were keen slave traders on the west central coast of Africa in the early modern period, but governors in Angola appear to have been increasingly unhappy about certain aspects of enslavement in relation to debt, and in particular that of children. Slavery for debt was uncommon in early modern Europe, where three arguments, drawn from Roman law, were usually cited by way of justification: birth; war; and self-sale. Cavazzi, an Italian Capuchin missionary travelling around Angola between 1654 and 1665, suggested several similarities between the legal justifications for slavery in Africa and Europe, but also pointed up a major difference: while in Angola in the early modern period enslavement could result from a number of instances of default, in Portugal at the same time - and in Europe more widely – debtors tended to find themselves imprisoned if they defaulted on a payment, rather than enslaved. This paper will consider the nature of debt enslavement in Angola in the early modern period, and how it impacted on the transatlantic slave trade.

In 1643, a Moluccan mestizo soldier named Alexo de Castro was arrested by the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the multicultural Manila barrio of Binondo. Suspected of secretly observing the Muslim faith in Manila, Castro faced inquisitorial investigations that culminated in his trial and punishment in Mexico. Based on evidence from Philippine, Mexican, and Spanish archives, this article examines Castro’s inquisition trial in the broader context of the seventeenth-century Hispano-Asian Pacific world that stretched from Mexico to Manila and the Moluccas. Within its permeable and shifting maritime boundaries, this transpacific cosmopolis was shaped by notions of Catholic universalism and orthodoxy present both in Spanish imperial ideology and in local adaptations. This article draws upon the Castro trial to reveal the tensions of this expanding world. On the one hand, Alexo’s mestizo genealogy and conversion to Catholicism, his work as a go-between in the Moluccas, and long career as a soldier for Spain and Portugal all reveal, on an intimate scale, the innumerable transits that interconnected this seventeenth-century world. On the other, Castro’s trial exposes the political-religious anxieties of Manila’s inquisitors, who saw in Castro a global threat posed by cosmopolitan New Christians – the moriscos, conversos, and indigenous converts whose adaptability and mobility helped to build this transpacific cosmopolis but also seemed to undermine it. By juxtaposing Alexo’s court arguments with those of his inquisitors, this study explores the limits of pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and exclusivism on this volatile seventeenth-century Pacific frontier.

This forum discusses the utility of ‘corporate constitutionalism’ as a category of historical analysis. Corporate constitutionalism privileges the constitutional activities of international trading corporations to understand the cross-cultural dynamics at work in European expansion. William A Pettigrew sets out the possibilities of corporate constitutionalism in the first essay which defines the concept, makes the case for viewing trading corporations as constitutional entities at home and abroad, signals some possible interpretive benefits for historians of empire, corporate historians, global historians, and constitutional historians, before offering an illustrative case study about the Royal African Company. Leading thinkers in international history (David Armitage), legal history (Paul Halliday), constitutional theory (Vicki Hsueh), and corporate history (Thomas Leng and Philip J Stern) offer their reflections on the possibilities of this new approach to the international activities of trading corporations. Although the Forum focuses on seventeenth century English trading corporations, it proposes to start a discussion about the utility of corporate constitutionalism for other European corporations and for periods both before and after the seventeenth century.

Africa has often been seen as a barrier between oceanic systems, and a dividing line within English imperial activity – with colonialism a key strategy to the west and trading favoured to the east of the continent. This article will consider English plans for colonisation on the islands of Madagascar and Assada on the east African coast and question how these can help us understand how the English thought about Africa as a geographical and imagined space within England’s developing imperial activities. This, in turn, will support an argument that English activities overseas operated within an environment where information was carefully controlled, created and disseminated to support the aims of the commercial community.

The idea that the African Atlantic world was populated by Atlantic Creoles who crossed cultural divides with relative ease is appealing, and it lends itself well to studies of identity formation that highlight the talents and opportunities that emerged from processes of cultural blending. Yet an examination of how travelling Africans ascribed meaning to their spatial and emotional groundings underlines that creolization in the African Atlantic was less smooth than suggested by the figure of the Atlantic Creole. For Frederik Svane and Christian Protten, two Euro-African men born on the Gold Coast in the early eighteenth century, Creole conditions resulted in identity practices that ranged from the complete rejection of African culture to a celebration and redefinition of the significance of African origins in the Atlantic world.

This article analyses four accounts of mutinies and wrecks of Dutch East India Company ships: those of the Nieuw Hoorn, Batavia, Blydorp and Nijenburg. These stories can be read as worst-case survival manuals, which support the Company’s discourse of discipline. They advise readers that the best option in the event of disaster is to obey the officers’ orders and the Company’s rules, linking this advice to moral and religious ideas of endurance and divine providence that were common in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The accounts also link shipboard spatial protocols with proper social order. The stories present the Indies as a dangerous physical and moral testing ground, from which the ship provides a vital protective barrier, but only if the crew acts with disciplined solidarity and shows seamanlike virtues of cohesion and perseverance. Disorder among the crew, especially the breaching of spatial boundaries between officers and men, invites the dangers of the Indies to penetrate the safe space of the ship. Such breaches threaten all the boundaries on which the lives of the ship and crew depend: between the ship and the sea, between moral and immoral behaviour, and between Europeans and the non-European world. Where spatial boundaries break down, the stories show chaos and calamity following. Where the stories have ‘happy endings’, these are brought about by the re-establishment of proper spatial and social hierarchies.