Sanjay Subrahmanyam - On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century

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On World Historians in the Sixteenth CenturyAuthor(s): SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAMSource: Representations, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Summer 2005), pp. 26-57Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2005.91.1.26 .Accessed: 15/03/2011 19:06

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S A N J AY S U B R A H M A N YA M

On World Historiansin the Sixteenth Century No Boundure stands,new Walls by Towns in foreign Lands are raisd; the pervious World ints old place, leaves nothing. Indians the cold Araxis drink, Albis and Rhine the Persians.

Seneca, Medea (trans. Sir Edward Sherburne, 1648). 1

I

T (in the specic sense of past tradi-tions of historical writing) has returned with a vengeance in the past two decades,often coupled, however, with a rather peculiar understanding of its relationship tothe history of modernity. For many scholars today, in particular those who favor alocation in the shifting sands of postcolonial studies, the long-term trajectory of historiography can still be understood in the following fashion: For long centuries

prior to the Enlightenment, Europe alone possessed recognizable forms of history,whether in the conception proposed by Herodotus (here seen as unambiguouslyEuropean) or in that proposed by the Renaissance-inuenced writers of the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries. 2 It was European expansion and, above all, theprocess of the colonization of the non-West by the West that created the possibilityof history as a form of knowledge in the non-West. Everywhere then, as Europeancolonial empires engaged in enterprises not only of material conquest and exploita-tion but of epistemological subsumption and subjugation, non-Western peoplescame to learn of history and then hesitantly to practice it. Thus it was with theMalays of Melaka and Perak, the Bengali elite of Calcutta and Burdwan, or theinhabitants of the Swahili coast of East Africa. In all these locations, history wassimply the poisoned gift with which the West sought to entice and then to enslave

This essay looks at a set of possible genealogies for the notion of world history by reading histories that were written on a world scale in the sixteenth century. It argues that such works were farmore widely dispersed than has been hitherto suspected, and they were by no means a strictly Europeanphenomenon; examples from Mexico, the Mughal empire, the Ottoman domains, and Poland all nd theirplace in the discussion. Further, such histories formed part of a sphere of circulation of textual and visualmaterials on the scale of the planet. Finally, the relationship between such histories and the earlier traditionof universal histories is explored, showing the distinctions between them. / R 91.Summer 2005 The Regents of the University of California. 07346018, electronic 1533 855X, pages 2657. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce articlecontent to the University of California Press at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.


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27On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century

the non-West, which had been content to wallow until then, it would seem, in thehappy certainties of myth.

A veritable chorus of academic voices has now arisen to assert this positiontime and again with minor variants, while at the same time more or less subtly

condemning history itself as a discipline todaycalling it no more than a complicithandmaiden of the Enlightenmentand then seeking a return to some morewholesome, and no doubt more holistic, understanding that the non-West possessesstill, concealed under its unfortunate layers of mimicry and self-abnegation. A de-cade ago, participating in a symposium in the journal History and Theory, appropri-ately on World History and Its Critics, the postcolonial theorist Ashis Nandychided the elites of the defeated societies [who were] . . . usually all too eager toheed the plea, to discover the practice of history in societies where he, like G. W. F.Hegel much before him, was quite condent there was none. Anthropologists suchas Gananath Obeyesekere were sternly rapped on the knuckles by him for not wish-ing to embrace an undi ff erentiated idea of myth more wholeheartedly; Nandy,for his own part, declared in Tolstoyan tones that history itself was impoverishing in nature, since cultures tend to be historical in only one way, whereas each ahis-torical culture is so in its own unique style. 3

Such views are now commonplace, ironically providing much succor and com-fort to exceptionalist scholars of Western history, who are no doubt all too happyto learn from the mouths and pens of scholars of the non-West that Hegel and theHegelians were indeed perfectly right. Thus we learn from Dipesh Chakrabartythat Europeans invented a form of knowledge in the late eighteenth century that

for a long time occupied a position of prestige in Indian, and particularly Bengali,thought of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was the new disciplineof History. 4 How then did residents of Mughal India in the sixteenth, seventeenth,andeighteenthcenturiescelebrated intellectuals such as Abu l Fazl ibn Mubarak,Mumhata Nainsi, or Bhimsenrepresent the past? Chakrabarty admits grudg-ingly that Muslim rulers had brought certain traditions of history-writing to Indiaand added them to other traditions of chronicling that existed in the country, buthe tends to be quite cavalier in regard to the nature or content of such traditionsof history-writing. Rather, he suggests thatas with modernity itself, equally seenin this vision as a uniquely Western product that the non-West must willy-nillynegotiate within the bounds of colonialismhistory is really singular, essentiallyWestern, and thus alien to most of the world until the early nineteenth century.

The present essay takes a radically di ff erent point of departure than that es-poused by this new orthodoxy. It takes it as obvious that history, and even history-writing, can be found in many societies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,a fact that scholars of the Arabic- and Persian-speaking worlds, as well as those of China, will no doubt have little di ffi culty in comprehending. 5 It also builds on theargument I presented in another work ( Textures of Time , written in collaborationwith V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman) that history is not a single genre but


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can be written in many genres, corresponding in some measure to the modes of historicity discussed at length by the French historian Franc ois Hartog. 6 Yet, as wehave argued in Textures of Time , I shall continue to insist in this essay too that thereare many modes of perceiving the past in any society, and not all of them are histori-

cal. It is thus deeply simplistic and ultimately false to divide societies (or cultures)into those that are historical and those that are not; rather, in a society such asCastiles in the sixteenth century, there were those who viewed the past historicallyand others who did not, both groups living side by side within the same culturalcomplex and producing di ff erent texts and narratives. 7

The issue that is to be explored in this essay, then, is not at all one of the simpleexistence or nonexistence of history in various parts of the world in the early mod-ern period. Rather, it concerns what I perceive as a major and signicant transfor-mation in general historiographical practice in the course of the sixteenth century,which is presented here as an explosive conjunctural moment in relation to thechanging conventions of history-writing. What makes this period signicant, in my view, is the rise to prominence of the innovative form of world history, which isto say history-writing on a world scale. Such history-writing, I will argue, di ff ersfrom various kinds of nonlocal history (themselves often with universal preten-sions) that had existed in the earlier centuries, along with forms of local and particu-laristic histories. At the same time, what I term world history here should not beconfounded with the Hegelian notion of Weltgeschichte , which has a quite distinctmeaning and intellectual trajectory. Indeed, my argument situates itself at the veryantipodes of the Hegelian one, which is notable for its determined Eurocentrism

and its relegation of all non-European parts of the world to a secondary (and attimes totally insignicant) role in a history of modernity, deriving in turn from He-gels idea that the deeds of the great men who are the individuals of world historyare essentially the acts of Europeans. My own argument here is of a piece withearlier essays and writings, where I have argued that the history of modernity isitself global and conjunctural, not a history in which Europe alone rst producesand then exports modernity to the world at large. 8

II

We may begin with some examples of typical situations of the sixteenthcentury. On 10 December 1574, having received news of military reverses in boththe Netherlands and the Mediterranean, as well as rumors of an impending taxrevolt in Castile, the Habsburg ruler Philip II wrote to his secretary Mateo Va z-quez, If this is not the end of the world, I think we must be very close to it; and,please God, let it be the end of the whole world, and not just the end of Chris-tendom. 9 These gloomy, politic, and rather bloody-minded words of that MostCatholic Monarch show clearly enough that some humans in the late sixteenth


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century, at least, had little di ffi culty in moving from the scale of a kingdom such asCastile, to that of Spain, to that of an empire, to that of Christendom, and eventu-ally to that of the whole world. Philip II, like his father Charles V, used the wordsCastile, Spain (usually in the sense of Iberia), and the Empire, but he also

famously made use in the 1580s of the Latin legend Non su ffi cit orbis (The worldis not enough) to denote the extent of his ambitions. 10 He was not alone in this,for in the seventeenth century, three successive Mughal emperors in India used ti-tles such as Jahangir (World-Seizer), Shahjahan (World-Emperor), and Alamgir(World-Seizer) to denote that the world barely su ffi ced for them either. 11 In theHabsburg view, at least, the world was a concrete entitymade up of both compatibleand opposed parts, of which Christendom was merely one; and these parts had aconcrete reality such that one could not move smoothly from the level of the individ-ual to that of the universal without encountering forms of resistance in both actionand thought. Philip II clearly did not hold to an older religious tradition (say, thatof the Mishna ) that had argued that a single human being was created by God toteach you that if anyone destroys a single soul, Scripture charges him as though hehad destroyed an entire world and whoever rescues a single soul, Scripture creditshim as though he had saved an entire world. If Christendom were to be destroyed,he wanted the rest of the world to go down with it rather than groove on the rub-ble, as certain counterculture gurus of the 1960s might have had it. If we oppose as I intend to do in this essaythe universal to the global, we might well saythat Philip II, who was of course no historian, had a better sense of the global thanthe universal, unlike the believers in an older tradition that much preferred the

universal to the global.The problem has been faced in another incarnation by historians in the latertwentieth and early twenty-rst centuries too. If some historians, inuenced per-haps by the deep methodological individualism of certain other social sciences,have enthusiastically supported the view that microhistory can capture the mac-rocosm, others have wanted a greater representation for diversity, whether throughthe older route of area studies or the newer one of postcolonial studies. A thirdsolution, which seems to cast doubt on the possible universality of the existentialdilemmas of Martin Guerre or Menocchio while also shying away from the ghetto-izing approach of area studies, has come to be crystallized of late under the rubricof world history. The category called world history has, in recent years, takenrm root in several institutions, especially in North America, where courses onthe subject are routinely taught in both universities and liberal arts colleges. Someuniversities have in fact created World History Centers, and there is even a World History Association, founded in 1982 to promote the study of global history, to saynothing of the inevitable internet discussion group called H-World. Yet, looking atthe rather diverse set of materials treated by di ff erent instructors and practitionersunder ostensibly the same rubric, one is entitled to ask a rst question: Is there evena vague consensus on what world history is today? The answer provided by the


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Hawaii-based Journal of World History, which presumably must reject a certain num-ber of perfectly interesting submissions on the grounds that they are not world his-tory, is as follows: It is a form of historical analysis from a global point of view,and involves comparative and cross-cultural scholarship focused on forces that

work their inuences across cultures and civilizations. The sorts of exemplarythemes that are mentioned include large-scale population movements and eco-nomic uctuations; cross-cultural transfers of technology; the spread of infectiousdiseases; long-distance trade; and the spread of religious faiths, ideas, and ideals.But it is evident that this rather rigorously materialist list is not meant to be exhaus-tive. Over the past decade and more, others have suggested the need for anotherquite distinct category, namely that of global history. According to some of theseprotagonists, such as Bruce Mazlish, the essential di ff erence between world his-tory and global history would lie in the overly large and vague coverage of theformer, compared to the aggressive (and positively valorized) presentism (or Whig viewpoint) of the latter. Global historians would thus consciously begin from thepresent and would be preoccupied specically with the issue of the globalizationproceeding apace today, whereas world historiansamongst whom Mazlishnumbers the historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein as well as FernandBraudelwould be too caught up, as it were, with the past. 12 Other protagonists of global history, including the founders of the new London-based Journal of Global History, seem to share a good part of Mazlishs presentist agenda and nd even the Journal of World Historyinsuffi ciently materialist for their tastes.

My position, then, is the exact opposite of that defended by the presentists.

There is to my mind not enough reection today on the past of world historyitself. Thus, it may be imagined by some that when they write of the year 1688 asa moment of world history, or of the Mongol universal empire of Chinggis Khanas providing a signicant conjuncture, this is really an act of their own singularimagination. 13 But is this really the case? What of people in the past, even the quitedistant past, who conceived of large and connected geographical spaces as properobjects of reection and went about deploying their universal erudition and theirreason in order to understand how their own past articulated with their present?In sum, what of world historians of the past who happen to be somewhat moreancient (and less derivative from a single Anglo-European locale) than the usualtired list of William McNeill, Lewis Mumford, Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler,or H. G. Wells? What happens if historians and historiographers take the intellectu-als of the past rather more seriously and conjugate the present practice of historywith the serious practice of historiography? What if one accepts and systematicallydevelops the Africanist Patrick Mannings throwaway line that world history is anew eld, but it is also an old eld? 14

Here is a concrete example of what I have in mind. In October of the Christian year 1591, that is to say, at the start of the year 1000 of the Hegiran calendar, thegreat Ottoman historian Mustafa Ali ibn Ahmad ibn Abdullah of Gallipoli (1541


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1600) was just over fty years of age. This was the year when he began to write histext Ku nh u l-Ahba r (The Essence of History), which was meant to be a history of theOttoman Empire and the world. It was a time, writes Alis modern biographerCornell Fleischer, for retrospection, and perhaps introspection for Ali, at a mo-

ment when the expected apocalypse of the year 1000 of the Hegiran calendar hadnot come. 15 A new age had seemingly dawned. And in this new age, Ali consideredit necessary to enunciate what he saw as the central, distinguishing features of theOttoman system in order to analyze their corrosion and failure. This was only oneof a number of major works that Ali produced. His Nushat u s-Sela t n (Counsel forSultans) written some ten years earlier in 1581 was a major contribution to reformliterature, 16 and other texts by him include a patriotic verse-text on Gallipoli itself,The Luster of a Hundred Jewels, and nearly forty other works that are known tous. These include the Zu bdet u t-Teva r h (The Choicest of Histories), the translationand adaptation into Turkish of an earlier Arabic text by a certain Qazi Azud al-Din dealing with the pre-Islamic prophets, Muhammad himself, his companionsand family, and subsequent gures of the Islamic tradition.

But the Essence of Historywas diff erent. Fleischer has no hesitation in terming this work Alis magnum opus , and he tells us furthermore that Alis great worldhistory, uncommissioned by any statesman or monarch, had no a ffi liation with anysort of offi cial historiography. 17 What did the historian wish to accomplish thenwith this work? In a word, he wished to downplay the political motivations andinsist instead on the cultural and intellectual aspects of the historians task. For him,history was a branch of learning in itself, distinct from other literary endeavors that

he himself participated in. Ali had multiple intellectual genealogies in mind forhimself. He saw himself as continuing a proud Ottoman tradition of history-writing for which the foundations had been laid by writers such as Celalzade Mustafa C el-ebi (d. 1567), who had authored a text signicantly entitled Tabaka t u l-mema lik f dereca t il-mesa lik (The Classication of Countries on the Grades of the Ways); andby Ramazanzade Mehmed Pasha (d. 1571), author of the so-called Ta r h-i Nis a nci (Nisancis History). He also saw himself as participating in far older and more pres-tigious Islamic traditions of history-writing dating back more than half a millen-nium and including such enormously prestigious gures as Ibn Khaldun. 18 Therewas a tension between these two, for Ali explicitly recognized that no Ottomanhistorian was as prominent as those of the Arabs and Iranians. We may thus clearlydiscern a competitive element here, between the young Ottoman historiographyand its older cousins.

The Essence of Historyhas two introductions, one general and the other specicto the Ottoman part. It was written between 1000 and 1006 Hijri (1591 and 1598CE), and it was made up of four volumes, each one termed a pillar ( ru kn ). Therst volume thus deals with cosmology, geography, and creation. The second dealswith pre-Islamic prophets and Islamic history until the time of the Mongols. Thethird volume then turns to the Mongol and Turkic dynasties and includes accounts


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of the three other great contemporary states by Alis lightsthe Uzbeks (or Shai-banids) in Samarqand, the Safavids, and the Indian Timurids or Mughals; he alsoincidentally admits the Sharifs of Mecca and the Crimean Khans in a smaller place.The fourth pillar (about a third of the total in terms of length) is a history of the

House of Osman. Ali worked on the text piecemeal rather than serially, and hewas also careful to list all his Turkish, Arabic, and Persian sources. The total work is conceived of by him as the quintessence ( zu bde ) of one hundred and thirty books,and each of these is the choice extract of other volumes of tales; if these latter arecounted [the Essence ] is the essence of six hundred books.

Even in the fourth pillar, ostensibly devoted to the Ottomans, Alis conceptionand vocabulary are often expansive. Thus, his early section on the reign of MuradIII is entitled The Disorder of the Age and Perturbations of Space and TimeWhich Appeared, One by One, After This Rulers Accession, and Which Provedto be the Cause of the Disruption and Degeneration of the Order of Most of theWorld. 19 A later section refers to the Ottoman campaign against Shirvan and theappearance of the great comet of 1577 (also observed by Tycho Brahe), which wastraveling from west to east (and hence thought to portend an Ottoman victory overthe Safavids, initially). But it turned out, rues Ali, to presage ten years of war, pov-erty, and destruction for the Ottomans.

As we shall see presently, while Mustafa Ali was undoubtedly one of the greatintellectuals of his age, he was not alone in having such preoccupations and hori-zons in the Ottoman Empire. But let us look for a moment somewhat farther aeld.We can thus juxtapose Ali with his slightly later contemporary in Mexico, Do-

mingo Francisco de San Anton Munon Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin (1579 c. 1650). 20 Chimalpahinthough perfectly familiar with Spanishwrote in Na-huatl and was the author, compiler, copyist, and translator of a number of texts,begun in about 1607 and completed in about 1637, among which we may numberthe Eight Relations and the Memorial of Colhuacan. The rst of his Relations , we maynote is the Book of [the creation] of the sky and the earth, and of our rst father Adam, and of our rst mother, Eve, thus not entirely dissimilar to Mustafa Alisrst pillar. The second Relationhas rather more signicance for our purposes, forit contains a section on how the lands of the world are divided, beginning withEurope. Here, Chimalpahin informs us at the outset that all the lands of thisworld that have been discovered until now are divided into four parts, namelyEurope, Asia, Africa, and the New World (for which he uses the Nahuatl neolo-gism Yancuic Cemanahuac ). Furthermore, we are told that the principal one of thesefour lands is Europe, in which the largest number of great kingdoms and lordshipsis to be found, as well as great cities called provincias , such as Spain, France, Italy,Germany, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, Norway, which is the ancientland of the Goths, Flanders, and Englandthough this province is an island. Aswe shall see, Chamlpahin has a source for all this, but this is not our primary con-cern here; rather, it is the fact that he feels the need to frame his history within a


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broad-ranging discussion of the world as it is known to his contemporaries. So thefollowing section takes him in turn to Asia. This land, he writes, has always beenmuch discussed by writers, because it was here that the rst great kingdoms andlordships that there were in the world existed, and had their beginnings, which were

ruled over by the Assyrians, the Persians and the Medeans. It is also often mentionedin the holy scriptures, because it was here that Adam, the rst man, was created byGod Our Lord; and in the same way, Christ, Our Savior, was born there, and hesuff ered there to save us. The obligatory extended mention of the Old and NewTestaments then takes this member of the native Mexican Chalca elite to how Asiaitself is divided into ve parts. The rst of these, which is completely joined toEurope is under the rule of the Grand Duke of Muscovy; the second is ruled overby the Great Khan, Emperor of the Tartars; the third is ruled over by the Turk (andhere Jerusalem may be found); the fourth is ruled over by a great king called theSo, King of Persia; and the fth and last part of Asia is formed by PortugueseIndia and Great China. The Mughals havealasdisappeared in this process,but this surely reects the limited interest that their history held for the Spaniardsas opposed to the Portuguese.

Chimalpahin does not neglect Africa either, whichso he reportsthe an-cients used to divide in many ways, but in our days those who study the heavensand the earth and who are called geographers only divide into ve parts. Theseve parts are Berber a, land of the Moors and facing Spain, which includes Fez,Tunis, and Tlemcen; then Numidiaa land that is sparsely inhabited and infertile,with some olive groves and date palms; then Libya, also a at and mostly deserted

region; in fourth place, the land of the blacks that extends for a thousand leaguesalong the coast from Cape Verde to the Cape of Good Hope; and nally Egypt,which though it is small is the best of all, because it is very fertile on account of the Nile. Besides these ve, our author also mentions in a rather ambiguous waythe fact that in the centre of Africa, one nds the great kingdom of Nubia ruledover by a great king called Prester John; how this relates to the other ve is neverquite specied. The section then concludes with a brief notice on the New World,whichso he statesis the fourth part of the world, and is called such becausebesides the fact that it is separated and at a great distance from the three otherlands, this land was never known to the Ancients with clear and certain knowledge.This land of the world [he adds] exceeds and outdoes any of the other three landsin greatness and riches. A note of American patriotism thus concludes the survey,before Chimalpahin returns to more local concerns.

In a recent work entitled Les quatre parties du monde , French historian SergeGruzinski has drawn upon the writings of Chimalpa hin to demonstrate how thisauthor of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries inhabited a world of enormous horizons. 21 Chimalpahin thus commented on the passage of ambassa-dors from Tokugawa Japan in Mexico and also wrote knowledgeably of the assassi-nation of Henri of Navarre by Franc ois Ravaillac on the streets of Paris in May


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1610. Gruzinski also notes that Chimalpahin drew periodically for information onan earlier author also resident in Mexico, namely Henrico Martinez, whose work Reportorio de los tiempos y historia natural desta Nueva Espan a appeared in 1606. 22 Mar-tinez, in fact a German engineer and cosmographer called Heinrich Martin, is

better known for having supervised the project to drain Lake Texcoco in 1607. Inhis Reportoriohe proposes a vision that goes beyond the world to include celestialphenomena and the movements of the planets and comets (such as Halleys Comet,which made an appearance in 1607), but he also devotes a very large part of hiswork to a systematic chronology of intertwined events in the world that he knew.Martinezs view of the world thus embraced the Ottomans, whose destruction (ac-companied by the victory of the Habsburgs) he saw as quite inevitable. What isparticularly remarkable however was the way he reasoned. Such an event wasbound to happen, he argued (in the fth treatise of his work), since it is also whatthe Turks themselves say, and hold as a tradition from their ancestors; thus they saythat Mahoma was a Prophet, and that he said that his law would last a thousand years of which only a few now remain. Implicitly then, Martinez wishes his readersto understand that his notion of the Ottomans comes from more than mere preju-dice or casual ethnography; rather, he implies that even if the Ottomans are adver-saries of the Habsburgs, he does have access to their traditions, and perhaps evento their histories.

Let us resume the argument so far. If we take the historiographical context of each of the historians we have discussed so farMustafa Ali, Chimalpahin, andMartinezwe clearly need to consider two axes: that of contemporaries and com-

petitors, and that of predecessors and sources. To take the case of Martinez: hewould surely have known of other more or less o ffi cial chroniclers and historianswriting in Spanish, including those who had held the o ffi ce of cronista del ReyinCastile after 1450. He would have known and read writers such as Gonzalo Fernan-dez de Oviedo, or Francisco Lopez de Gomara, who were concerned with the his-tory of Spanish power in America; he is less likely to have read or had sympathyfor Prudencio de Sandovals Vida y hechos del Emperador Carlos V , published in 1604. As Richard Kagan has reminded us, the Spain of Charles V and Philip II saw thewriting of history on various scales, from royal histories to chorographies, whichis to say, histories intended to constitute a detailed description of a particularplace. 23 Yet, the closest to Martinez in world-embracing ambitions was none of these authors, but the otherwise rather dull and unimaginative Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, author of the Historia general del mundo del tiempo del Rey Felipe II, el prudente , published in two volumes in 1600 and 1606, which covers the period be-ginning with that kings accession in 1559. 24 One can see Herreras logic clearlyenough: since Philip II ruled over so much of the world, any account of his reignbecame willy-nilly a sort of world history. We thus come to a crucial point, namelythe relationship between the peculiar circumstances of the sixteenth century, andthe forms of historiography that they encouraged.


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III

Looking back at the centuries before 1500, there is little doubt that theytoo produced some histories of a very general nature. We need not go back as far

as the Chroniconand other works of the seventh-century Isidore of Seville for thispurpose; we may consider a relatively late (thirteenth-century) example in Persiansuch as Juwainis Ta r kh-i Jaha n-gusha (The History of the World Conqueror), orthe even more ambitious and slightly later work of Rashid al-Din, Ja mi al-Tawa r kh (The Compendium of Histories), which includes a history not only of the Mongoland Turkish tribes but of various other peoples living on the fringes of the Mongolworld, such as the Chinese, the Indians, the Jews, and the Franks. 25 Rashid al-Din,like many of the other authors I shall discuss, used a mix of textual and oral mate-rials, especially when it came to the exotic sections of his work. The annalistic sec-tion of his Ta r kh-i Afranj (History of the Franks), which is a separate portion of hisgeneral history, derives in large measure from the account of the Dominican writerMartinus Polonus, but his work also contains a geographical and political descrip-tion of Europe. Some recent authors have expressed disappointment at the rathermeagermaterials that this resident of Tabriz presents about Europe, compared to for examplewhat Marco Polo tells us of China; but this is scarcely the point.What is of signicance for us are his universal ambitions, ambitions that run todiscussing all the peoples that are signicant for his world and that nevertheless runconsiderably short of writing a history on a world scale. For Rashid al-Din is notonly unable, for rather obvious reasons, to discuss the Americas; much of Southeast

Asia and Africa fall beyond his ken as well.We can certainly include Rashid al-Din amongst the practitioners of universalhistory. But can he be thought to be writing history on a global scale? This matteris made rather clearer if we take into account an anonymous Persian work entitledHudu d al- a lam (The Limits of the World), written in the early 980s for the ruler of Guzganan (in the northwest of Afghanistan). 26 The thrust of this text is geographi-cal rather than historical, yet it is important in two aspects: the fact that it claimsto cover the whole known world, and the fact that it was designed to accompany amap that concretized this knowledge in a particular way. The Hudu d al- a lam wasthus universal in its ambitions, yet it also admitted of incompleteness. This is arather di ff erent claim from that made by later texts that begin to appear in the latesixteenth century in Persian with titles such as Haft iql m or Haft aqa l m (The SevenClimes, by Amin Ahmad Razi), which go beyond the claim of circumscribed universality to one of literal completeness ( however contestable that claim may be inour eyes). 27

In this sense, the sixteenth century represents a global historical opportunityand not simply one for Europe. Side by side with histories that are traditionallydynastic in orientation, or chorographies that tell the history of Tabriz or Brugesin detail, or histories of a specic kingdom or set of kingdoms, the new world


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history or history on a world-scale (which is usually also accompanied by workson geography and cartography) gradually emerges. Some of this work is by transla-tors (though translation itself is no self-evident task) or compilers like the ItaliansMontalboddo and Giovanni Battista Ramusio. But such histories also begin to pop

up in unexpected places, and each of them carries within it a story of translation,of transmissionbut also transformation. How did it happen that a few decadesafter Christopher Columbuss and Pedro A lvares Cabrals eets landed on theshores of America, the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis was able to include informationon the subject in his Kita b-i Bahriye ? We cannot rule out the tantalizing suggestionby Georg Schurhammer that Antonio Pigafetta, member and chronicler of Ferdi-nand Magellans expedition, wound up in Istanbul in the later years of his life andwas the conduit of some such information. 28 In a similar vein, Joao de Barros, o ffi -cial chronicler of Portuguese deeds in Asia, could produce a potted history of thecity of Kilwa on the east coast of Africa in his rst De cada (book 8, chapter 6), treat-ing how the city of Quiloa was founded, and the Kings that it had until it wastaken by us, only becauseas he himself writeshe had access to a chronicle of the Kings of this City, which has been tentatively identied as an early version of the Arabic text entitled al-Akhba r al-sulwa f ta r kh Kilwa .29

How then does one distinguish the new world history of the sixteenthcenturyfrom the older universal history? It appears clear that two separate features of history-writing can help us make this distinction. In the rst place, the genre of universal history is based upon a template where symmetry is crucial. The uni- verse of universal history is made up of two complementary zones, the inner core

(namely the area to which the author usually belongs) and its outer counterpart.The history of the inner core could of course be written without explicit referenceto the existence of the complementary zone, as indeed is the case in most dynastichistories, or histories of spatial units such as Christendom or the Islamic lands. Uni- versal history then extends the domain by also explicitly recognizing the history of the complementary zone, as we see in the case of Rashid al-Din mentioned earlier.Here is where world history di ff ers from universal history, for world history is basedon the recognition of the need for completeness, for full coverageas it wereof the world. This is also what motivates the second feature of world history in theearly modern period, namely its adherence to a set of aesthetic criteria distinct fromthose proposed by the writers of universal histories. In a word, where universal his-toriesare symmetrical andwell ordered, world histories are accumulative in charac-ter, often disordered, and certainly not symmetrical in nature. Its authors are alwaystempted to add on yet another chapter, and still another one, substituting conjunc-tions for arguments, and rarely articulating a clear notion of what the skeletal struc-ture of their text is. If some were searching in the sixteenth century for perfecthistory by reducing the object of history, the world historians who interest us wereenlarging the scope and coverage of history while also rendering it distinctlyimperfect.


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When versions of this argument have been presented before hidebound medi-evalist historians in India, I have frequently been confronted with the counterar-gument that even if these questions of world history played themselves out betweenIberians and Ottomans, they certainly did not touch South Asia in the sixteenth or

seventeenth centuries. Conventional wisdom has it that the great chroniclers of theMughals in that period, whether it was the orthodox minded Abdul Qadir Baday-uni or the polymath Shaikh Abu l Fazl, knew little and cared even less for the worldoutside of India, Iran, Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire. True, the Mughalemperor Akbar did ask one of his courtiers, a certain Abdul Sattar, to collaboratewith the Jesuit Jeronimo Xavier, to produce a work on Europe, one of the titles of which is the Ahwa l-i Firangista n (Account of the Frankish Lands). 30 Yet this work ismore concerned with the history of ancient Rome, the classical past of Europe andits philosophical traditions, as well as with the life of Christ, than with contempo-rary conditions that obtained there. Sti ll, one cannot help suspecting that modernIndian historiographers have thrown up their hands rather too easily. A little-known and quite fascinating counterexample to this prejudice is the text entitledRauzat ut-Ta hir n (The Garden of the Immaculate), authored by one Tahir Muham-mad ibn Imad ud-Din Hasan ibn Sultan Ali ibn Haji Muhammad Husain Sabz-wari. 31 Begun before 1011 Hijri (16023) and completed in 1015 Hijri (16067),this massive work is in ve books ( qism ), which are initially conceived within theframework of a universal history of the pre-1500 variety. Yet, having quite compe-tently covered the expected ground of Creation and the prophets, Indian traditionsfrom the Maha bha rata epic, early Islamic history, and the history of the great king-

doms of West and Central Asia that preceded the rise to power of the Mughals inIndia, Tahir Muhammad is not content. He then launches into a history of theMughals themselves, and their conquests, whether in Gujarat to the west or in Ben-gal to the east. It is here, having described the resistance of various Afghan dynastiesin Bengal to the armies of Akbar, that he eventually makes the leap into a sort of world history. This is in a section of book 5 of the Rauzat ut-Ta hir n that claimsto deal inter alia with the wonders of the islands and ports near Bengal, including an account of Ceylon, Pegu, Arrakan, Kuch Bihar, and Portugal; the author TahirMuhammad tells us that he had had access to materials from one of the Mughaladministrators in Bengal, a certain Khwaja Baqir Ansari, that had helped himconsiderably in his particular task.

The section begins, then, with a reference to Ceylon, whichso it is stated is under the control of Hindustan. The main feature of this island is that traderscome there and ll their ships up with cinnamon, since in the jungles both cinna-mon ( da r-ch n ) and cloves ( qaranfal ) may be found in quantities. Tahir adds, refer-ring to the wars of the 1590s between the Portuguese and the rulers of Kandy:These days, now that the people there have got together large armies and numer-ous elephants, they are resisting the entry of the Firangis, and as a result the supplyof cinnamon has come down. It is further noted that when the Portuguese had


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rst arrived on the island, the ruler there did not have the strength to resist theFranks, and they could ll their ships easily with cinnamon. But in more recenttimes, he has consolidated his forces, and begun to resist them. A subsequent pas-sage makes a brief reference to the Moluccas, where plenty of cloves are to be had,

making it the main source of revenue. The people here are Muslims. They knowof neither gold nor silver, and everything is transacted in terms of cloves, which areexchanged for imported cloth and rice that are taken there in ships. Tahir furthernotes that in the past three years ships from Bengal have begun going to the Moluc-cas, but the voyage is somewhat dangerous.

I shall not follow Tahirs text in its every detail, since that would be rather te-dious. Su ffi ce it to say that he next has an extended passage on the subject of Peguin Burma, where the king has ve white elephants, and the way of life is di ff erentfrom that of both Muslims and Hindus ( az tar qa-i Musalma na n-o-Hindu a n alahida ast ). Tahir is fascinated by reports concerning the holy men in the region, and holdsforth at great length on the ceremonies that are held at the death of such men, whohe notes are called ra wali . His informants have told him that the town of Pegu itself has twenty-eight doors made of brass and gilded over, which gives the illusion thatthey are cast wholly from gold. This is a town that is unmatched in the whole worlddespite the fact that its moral standards are dubious, as illustrated by the fact thatthere brothers and sisters commonly marry each other. When they are reproachedfor this, they say that they all descend from Adam and follow him in this matter.Tahir Muhammad also provides us some details of the political revolutions in late-sixteenth-century Burma, around the Toungoo Dynasty. He notes that in the Hijri

year 1001, foreigners had invaded the area, and though initially repulsed had even-tually gained a victory in the next year. In the aftermath of this, many people hadbeen killed in the town in a huge general massacre ( qatl-i khalaiq ) and others en-slaved. The new ruler had been so severe that a great famine resulted. However, onhis death, and by the time of the writing of the Rauzat , the country had once morecome to be settled, and cultivation had begun afresh.

Tahir Muhammad is also the rst Mughal writer to give us an extended accountof the sultanate of Aceh in northern Sumatra. His account refers to the copiousproduction there of pepper and camphor ( ka fu r ). He notes that the ruler of Acehhad even sent some of this camphor to Akbar as a gift. The Acehnese, in Tahirs view, have a deeply regimented society, in which the warden (or kotwa l ) of the capi-tal city keeps close track of everything and everyone. This degree of surveillanceis shocking to our author, who is used to the far more lax regimen that obtains inthe Mughal territories. It does not escape Tahir that Aceh is a great center of anti-Portuguese resistance; and as a consequence, he notes, the Portuguese have madelittle progress in gaining control over this country.

Our Mughal author also has some interesting claims concerning the genealogyof the rulers of Aceh, who he claims were initially Sayyids from Najaf. However, inabout 1590 (that is, in 999 Hijri), there had been a sort of coup de tat and power had


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for their opponents, be they the rulersof Kandy, or the Acehnese. His surveyof theiractivities even takes him to mention the Maldives and St. Helena in the Atlantic, butwe nd no mention of Brazil. This broadly uncomplimentary view of the Franksis crowned by the following passage:

In sum, the community of Franks [ ta ifa-i Firang ] wear very ne clothes but they are often very dirty and pimply [ chirk n ]. They do not like to use water [ ba a b muqayyad n st and ].They bathe very rarely. Amongst them, washing after relieving oneself [ tiha rat-o-istinja ] isconsidered improper. They are very good at using rearms [ tufang ], and they are particu-larly brave on ships and in the water. But in contrast to this, they are not so brave on land.The Malabari community, who live near Ceylon, and are Muslims, are about 5000 in thenumber of their households. Their principal task is to ght [ ghaza ] the Franks. Despite theirweaknesses, they overcome the Franks. 33

My purpose in dilating so long over this text has been to suggest that often materials

exist, even in major collections (the text used here of the Rauzat may be found inthe Bodleian Library at Oxford), but our prejudices blind us to their existence orsignicance. 34 Historians of Mughal India have been so convinced that their prede-cessors in the sixteenth century were wholly uninterested in their neighbors thatthey have for the most part willfully ignored such texts. Part of the problem alsolies in the fact that world histories in the sixteenth century were often not pro-duced by o ffi cial historians but by others, sometimes driven by quite di ff erent motivations. This is the case with Tahir Muhammad, as it is with Henrico Martinez,as it is with Mustafa Ali, whose world history was one of the few texts that heproduced on his own initiative. It is certainly the case with the intriguing text to

which I shall turn now, the Tratado dos Descobrimentos of Antonio Galvao. 35

IV

The author of the Tratado, Anto nio Galva o, is a quite fascinating gurein his own right. He was the author of two substantial texts, the Treatise on the Discov-eries , which is our principal concern here, and an important Treatise on the Moluccas ,which was long considered lost but was rediscovered in recent decades. 36 An intel-lectual of rather uneven erudition, Galvao was alsoand perhaps principallyaman of action and, hence, saw action on more than one occasion in Portuguese Asia, from the early 1520s onwards, before dying in the poor hospital in Lisbon inthe 1550s. The high point of his career was a stint as captain of the Portuguesefortress of Ternate in the Moluccas (that is, eastern Indonesia) in the late 1530s. Itwas here that he earned for himself the title of the Apostle of the Moluccas, onaccount of his untiring e ff orts to promote the Christianization of those islands. Gal- vao came from a family with something of an intellectual and historical tradition.His father, Duarte Galvao, was one of the principal ideologues of the court of theearly-sixteenth-century Portuguese ruler Dom Manuel and authored a major text


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on the founder-king of Portugal entitled Cro nica de Dom Afonso Henriques . This textwas written from a rather narrower perspective than was the magnum opus of theson, Antonio, who may therefore have sought inspiration in the work of anotherwriter from the early sixteenth century, Duarte Pacheco Pereira, author of the Es-

meraldo de Situ Orbis .37

Pereira, who was born in 1460 and died in 1533, served froman early age in North Africa and then on the coast of Guinea. His knowledge of both practical matters and cosmography meant that he was one of those who nego-tiated the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 for the Portuguese. He also served in India,most notably in the defense of Cochin in 1504, an episode that has been dealt withextensively by the Portuguese chroniclers of the period, as has his disgrace at asomewhat later moment of his life.

The details of the career of Duarte Pacheco Pereira need not concern us furtherhere. We should merely note two simple facts. The rst is that on his return fromIndia in 1505, he began to compose the Esmeraldo, a book in ve parts that wasmeant to deal in chronological order with the discoveries of the Portuguese fromthe time of the Infante Dom Henrique to the monarch Dom Manuel, which heabandoned in 1507, without ever developing the fth part; thus the great Southeast Asian city of Melaka, and even Ceylon, never nd mention in it. 38 A second fact ishis relationship to Antonio Galvao, whose sister he married sometime after aban-doning the project of the Esmeraldo. We may note then that Pereira had alreadytaken a step in the direction of a world history of sorts by posing Portugueseexpansion as a problem on a world scale. It is a manner of doing world history thatbears some relationship to the slightly later vision of Antonio de Herrera (noted

earlier), or for that matter the Portuguese chroniclers Damiao de Gois and Jeron-imo de Osorio (or indeed, in our times, of authors like A. G. Hopkins)that is,imperial history as world history. 39 But Antonio Galvao for his part breaks fromthis mold in the Tratado dos Descobrimentos . This departure is on two very substantialcounts. The rst is chronological, for Galvao makes it clear that he will treat theancient and modern discoveries that have been made to the year 1550 ( os descobri-mentos antigos e modernos, que sa o feitos ate a era de mil e quinhentos e cincoenta ), and thengoes on to divide his work broadly into two parts, the rst extending from ancienttimes to the late fteenth century, and the second from the late fteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. The second departure is in the manner in which the years from1400 to 1550 are treated. For unlike other authors, Galvao organizes his work inthis part as a sort of annal, where the activities of various peoplesand not onlythe Portugueseare treated. Thus, in 149697, we get an account of the deeds asmuch of Sebastian Cabot as of Christopher Columbus, as of Vasco da Gama. Inthe 1510s, the activities of the Portuguese in Southeast Asia are juxtaposed withthe arrival of Hernan Cortes in Mexico; and in the 1530s, the arrival of the Span-iards in the Andes is discussed as part of the same panorama as Galva os own pres-ence in the Moluccas. In other words, for Galvao, the history of the discoveries isa movement by which the Pacic antimeridian dened (but not located) in the


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Treaty of Tordesillas is reached progressively by an expansion in two directions, tothe west and to the east. One may consider this to be a worldview in which theimagined center lies in fact in the Moluccas, where Galvao had spent four years of his life. The text thus ends on the following note:

From all this, what I have arrived at is that the globe [ a redondeza ] is of 360 degrees, inkeeping with its geometry, which the ancients claimed were 17 and a half leagues each,which makes a total of 6300. The moderns state that the degree is 16 and two-third leagues,which gives us 6000 leagues in all. However, I hold that a degree is 17 degrees wide, so thatthe circumference of the earth is 6200 leagues. Whatever be the case, all of it is now discov-ered from west to east, more or less following the sun, but it is quite di ff erent in the north-south direction, for to the north not all that much has been discovered beyond 77 or 78degrees of latitude, making up about 1300 leagues. And to the south, some 900 leagues, forabout 52 or 53 degrees have been discovered, with the Strait through which Magalhaes[Magellan] passed, and together these make up 2200 leagues, and if one subtracts this from6200, one can say that 4000 leagues remain to be discovered. 40

Thus we are not quite at the tired moment when nothing is left to be discovered,that moment of anxiety that led so many European authors of the sixteenth centuryto reread Senecas Medea and its evocation of Thule, the last of the lands. But Iwish also to insist on the particular quality of Galvaos understanding of this processof the discovery of the world, which permits a history on a world scale to be written.In his understanding, this is a process not simply of the Spaniards and the Portu-guese discovering other lands, but also of the Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians, In-dians, and Chinese. Indeed, Galvao appears to have a particular weakness for theChinese, whom he sees as the greatest discoverers of all peoples in the history of the world, attributing to them a grand capacity for navigation that may even havetaken them to New Spain, Peru, Brazil, and the Antilles. This, then, is anotheraspect of the text that we must bear in mind, namely, its curious mixture of passagesfrom the Bible and ancient authors, with Spanish and Portuguese chroniclers suchas Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and Francisco Lopez de Gomara, andother discussions still that seem to have no textual source. Thus we have a ratherenigmatic passage that runs as follows:

And in the year 474, the Roman Empire was lost, and after that time the Longobards cameto Italy, and in that time demons walked the earth so freely that they took on the form of

Moses and the Jews who were misled by this drowned themselves in the sea in great num-bers. And the Arian sect prevailed. And Merlin lived in England in this time. And in the year 711, there was Muhammad and those of his sect, who took Africa and Spain by force. 41

Passages such as these may have somewhat embarrassed Galvaos rst publicistin English, none other than the celebrated geographer Richard Hakluyt. 42 For theTreatise on the Discoveries had been published in Lisbon soon after Galvaos death,and this rst edition of 1563 soon acquired some circulation, together with thechronicles of Joao de Barros and Fernao Lopes de Castanheda, which though farmore copious were also far narrower in their focus. Hakluyts version (based on an


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anonymous translation by some honest and well a ff ected marchant of our nation)thus appeared in London in 1601 under the title: An Excellent Treatise of Antonie Galvano, Portugal, containing the most ancient and modern discoveries of the world, especiallyby navigation, according to the course of times from the ood until the Year of Grace, 1555.

Contained within A Selection of Curious, Rare and Early Voyages, and Histories of Interesting Discoveries . It was presented with a particular insistence that this was no sectarianhistory in which the boastful Portuguese nation claimed more than its due. Ratherit was a comprehensive history that went beyond the limits of other writers such asBishop Osorio, whose derivative but successful De rebus Emmanuelis Regis Lusitaniae had rst appeared in 1571 and then went on to be both reprinted and translatedrapidly into French. 43 Hakluyt dedicated the work to Sir Robert Cecil, principalsecretary to Queen Elizabeth and chancellor of the University of Cambridge, point-ing out that the author was one Antonie Galvano, a Portugall gentleman: of whosePietie towards God, equitie towards men, delity to his Prince, love to his countrey,skill in sea causes, experience in histories, liberalitie towards his nation, vigilance, valour, wisedome and diligence in restoring and settling the decaied state of theIsles of Maluco . . . a large Epistle can well comprehend. Hakluyt urged Cecil toinform himself of the world as it now stood discovered and also to nd a concrete visual representation thereof, if it please your Honour at your convenient leisureto take a sea card or mappe of the world and carie your eie upon the coast of Africafrom Cape de Non, lying on the mayne in 29 degrees of northerly latitude andfollow the shore about the Cape of Buona Speranc a till you come to the mouth of the Redde Sea, and then follow the Indian Ocean al the south of Asia to the

northeast part of China. By this means, the reader would be carried step by stepfrom the Ac ores and Madera in the West, to the Malucos, the Phillipinas, and Japan in the East, on the one hand, while likewise is to be understood of theOccident. 44

By the 1560s then, or perhaps even earlier, textual materials existed and circu-latedboth through print and by other meansthat permitted not merely menof action such as Galvao or Castanheda but other armchair scholars to try theirhands at writing world histories in Europe. In about 1553, that rather eccentricpolymath Guillaume Postel published his Des merveilles du monde , which claimed inits subtitle to be an Histoire extraite des e crits tres dignes de foy, and in the work took itupon himself to reproduce not only a translation of extracts of the correspondenceof the future saint Francis Xavier but also a chapter on what he termed a Descrip-tion de lisle Giapangri, qui est la plus orientale terre du monde. 45 Giovanni Bat-tista Ramusio, one of Postels acquaintances, had begun putting out his enormousmultivolume compendium of texts on voyages, Delle Navigationi e Viaggi , in the1550s, and this, together with earlier publications such as that of Montalboddo,was to serve as a staple for historians in parts of Europe, such as Poland, with littledirect access to manuscript sources on the extra-European world. 46 An example of Ramusios inuence can be found in the case of the prolic, if controversial, Polish


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historian Marcin Bielski (14951575), whose Kronika to iesth Historya swia ta (Chroni-cle of the Whole World) claimed to treat the history of the world from the earliesttimes and was divided into six periods. 47 By the time of the second and third edi-tions (respectively of 1554 and 1564), Bielski was able to draw upon information

concerning both Asia and America from Simon Grynaeus, Sebastian Mu nster, andRamusio, a measure of the relative openness of Poland at the time to the circulationof printed texts from Italy in particular. He was also able to incorporate a cosmo-graphic section, as well as one on islands (that formed part of book 4). A recentanalyst of this work, Jan Kieniewicz, has remarked that while this Chronicle was very popular to the point of becoming a major source of information for Moscow,it was however not particularly appreciated by savants. 48 The problem here wasthat Bielski, like Galvao, was obviously something of an autodidact. He also hadhis own exacting standards of morality, which meant that he eliminated everything that could be considered obscene from the ethnographic parts of his text. Further,he made what were at times radical decisions to excise materials and appears to befar more interested in the Portuguese in Asia than in the Spaniards in America.Thus, though the discoveries of Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci gure promi-nently, the activities of Cortes and Francisco Pizarroare hardly paid any attention. 49

In other words, this world history written in Poland, though based on existentmaterials, nevertheless follows its own logic and seeks to order the world from itsown perspective. Kieniewicz notes, for example, Bielskis desire to preserve the ideathat the Hindu ruler of Calicut was in fact a Christian, his lack of interest in topo-graphical details, and his strong sense of providentialism, concluding that in

relation to his moralizing intentions, the didactic aspect became of secondaryimportance.Further, we should not imagine that the circulation, digestion, and regurgita-

tion of Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese materials were limited to the Europeanworld. The rst major Ottoman texts on America appear in the 1570s and 1580s,early in the career of Mustafa Ali. Even if we do not know who precisely theirauthors were, we can be certain that histories like the Ta r kh-i Hind-i Gharb (TheHistory of the Western Indies) had access to precise sources such as Lo pez de Go -maras chronicle or the texts of Pietro Martir dAnghiera. 50 These texts were ableto recount to an Ottoman readership, which must not have been negligible if weexamine the extent of manuscript dispersion, what the new lands that the SpanishCrown had found to the west were, and how these discoveries could account for thesilver that was beginning to ow into the Ottoman domains in those very years.Indeed, the 1570s and 1580s see a vast expansion in Ottoman curiosity and thedemand for a history on a world scale. Thus, a contemporary of Mustafa Ali writ-ing in the 1580s, Sey C elebi, was able in his Kita b-i Teva r kh-i pa dis a ha n-i Hindu ve Khita y ve Kishm r . . . , (Book of the Histories of the Emperors of Hind and Cathayand Kashmir) to provide signicant details concerning parts of Asia, such as Aceh,which the Ottomans had known little about in the early sixteenth century. 51 A few


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years earlier, in 1572, the Ottoman historian and administrator Faridun Beg com-missioned a History of the Pa disha hs of France from the Merovingian ruler Fara-mond to the contemporary Valois king, Charles IX, in order to better comprehendthese new allies of the Porte. 52 These materials suggest that the cliched image that

has too long haunted us, of a Muslim world that was so preoccupied with itself thatit had no curiosity with regard to the exterior, should be disposed of once and forall. Indeed, the seventeenth-century Ottoman world even produces a grand synthe-sis on a world scale, in the form of Jiha n Numa (Mirror of the World) by Katib C elebi(160957), which was one of the rst Ottoman texts printed in 1729, replete withmaps of China, Japan, and the Philippines along with other curious information. 53

V

In brief, if one even begins to scratch the surface, it becomes apparentthat world histories abounded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But wasthis true no matter where one was located in the world? However foolhardy it mayappear, I am tempted here to extend my geographical coverage even wider. Wehave seen that European authors from Antonio Galvao to Gui llaume Postel in thesixteenth century themselves saw t to extend the scope of their historical visionnot only to the New World, but to China and Japan. Did Chinese and Japanesehistorians of the same period reciprocate? Can we talk of world histories being produced not simply in Mexico, Paris, Rome, Istanbul, and Hughli but equally in

Fujian or Edo? And were there parts of the world in this period that remainedresolutely xed on history in a regional mode, not deigning to look outside a politi-cal framework that was given by dynasty? In a recent and remarkable work on Sa-favid historiography in the sixteenth century, Sholeh Quinn suggests that such wasindeed the case with Iranian writers of the period. 54 In her analysis the focus of writers under Shah Tahmasp and especially Shah Abbas (r. 15871629) remained very much Ira n-zam n, the land of Iran, a palpable and deliberate narrowing of thehistorians object from the time of Juwaini or Rashid al-Din. I cannot contest herdetailed analysis of the work of the great Safavid historian Iskandar Beg Munshi,but I should caution against assuming that what we may term world conscious-ness did not exist in the Safavid world. Perhaps the key then is not to assume thatit is always history that bears the burden of adapting to transformations in the geo-graphical horizons of a time. 55 This may help us to some extent in looking at theChinese and Japanese cases.

I cannot do more here than touch the surface of the vast subject that is Chinesehistoriography. We are of course aware that historians of the Ming period in Chinainherited very strong historiographical traditions from the earlier Song, when it isclaimed that more than thirteen hundred historical works were written. Further,they too, like the Song-period writers, seem to have recognized the power of history


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and argued that history-writing was as important as the great Confucian classicsin directing human a ff airs. An important gure for our purposes is Wang Shizhen(15261590), who wrote the Treatise on Classics, History, and Literature ( Yanzhou shan-ren sibu gao ), which was further developed by Li Zhi (15271602) in his Fenshu(Col-

lected Works) of 1590. The fact that Li Zhis somewhat anti-Confucian works wereeventually censored, and that he committed suicide in a Beijing prison, does of course cast some doubt on the acceptability of such innovations in the eyes of Ming offi cialdom. 56 It is also generally acknowledged that Mingwriters further developedthe Song preoccupation with the individual, who appears more centrally in theirpreoccupations, leading thus in late Ming China to a developed humanistic his-tory, which has even been termed a sort of intellectual revolution in view of themove from a state-centered history to one that focuses far more on the individual. 57

Furthermore, Chinese historiography presents us with a complex mosaic of subgenres, ranging from chronicles and annals ( biannian shi ) to the standard histo-ries of diff erent dynasties (called zhengshi of which the standard history of theMing Dynasty, the Mingshi , completed in 1739 under the Qing, is an example), tothe universal histories ( tongshi ), which are broader in scope and scale than dynas-tic histories. 58 We may also narrow the scale toward chorography, in the form of local gazetteers ( fangzhi ), and local histories. This rather rich historiographicalcomplexity contrasts somewhat with what one nds in the case of Japan, where itis often claimed that after the fourteenth century, one enters a sort of hiatus, andthat only the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see a historiographical revival,in the form, however, of a state-centered history, often written in Chinese. Examples

of such offi cial history would be the work of Arai Hakuseki (16571725), and hisTokushi yoron(Essays on History), as well as the later Tokugawa jikki (True Record of the Tokugawa). But there are also uno ffi cial scholars, using Buddhist, Confucian,or Nativist ( kokugaku ) referents amongst whom we can count the Buddhist scholarTenkai (15361643) and the Confucian Ito Jinsai (16271705).

Did these writers respond in their histories to the new and quite unprecedentedsituation in which the Ming and, later, the Tokugawa found themselves, not onlyon account of the presence of Europeans on their shores but also because of renewedcontacts with other parts of the known world such as India, Sri Lanka, or West Asia? There is certainly little doubt about the nature of transformations in termsof geographical knowledge, and a whole scholarly industry exists, for example, onthe reception in both China and Japan of the Jesuit Matteo Riccis Map of All the Countries of the World of 1602. In the Japanese case, a scholar of the subject haswritten that it is no exaggeration to say that almost fty percent of all world mapspublished in Japan during the seclusion were, directly or indirectly, Riccis prog-eny. 59 Even so, as Jurgis Elisonas and others have persuasively argued, Europeanknowledge was in the Japanese case eventually turned against the Europeans,though it is presently unclear to me whether the history of Europe, or the con-quest of America, entered Japanese textual knowledge in materials similar to the


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seventeenth-century Kirishtan monogatari (Tales of the Christians). 60 It is of course very likely that by 1610 high political circles in Japan were aware in some fashionor the other of what had happened in Mexico, the Andes, and the Philippines, butthe problem lies in nding the concrete textual traces of this knowledge. My limited

readings into Ming Chinese written reections in a xenological mode also suggestthat while knowledge of the distant world and its past was available to the literati,they did not choose for the most part to shift the terms of either dynastic history oruniversal history to accommodate this knowledge.

Much work has been devoted to a signicant text such as the Zhi fang wai ji , byGiulio Aleni, produced in the early 1620s, which, though largely concerned withproviding the Chinese literati with a rather idealized picture of Europe, also at-tempted in passing to cover both the Indian Ocean world, Africa, and even Peruand Mexico. Yet it has been noted by more than one author that whatever Alenisinuence on geographers, Chinese historians tended as a rule to regard his work with disdain and suspicion. Thus, it has been argued that in the Mingshi , the arti-cles on Portugal, Spain, and Holland appear not to be inuenced at all by the Jesuitgeographies. 61 Texts from the rst decades of the fteenth century regarding thelands of the Indian Ocean littoral were frequently recopied, as we can see from thehistory of Fei Xins Xingcha shenglan(The Overall Survey of the Star Raft). This text,associated with the Ming expeditions of Zheng He, was copied into the collectioncompiled in the 1520s or 1530s by Zhu Dangmian, then in another version by Lu Ji (151552), and also in a relatively authoritative and widely circulated version byShen Jiefu (15331601), to say nothing of other copies by Hu Wenhuan, that were

even printed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.62

Thus, earlyMing direct knowledge concerning India, Ceylon, and even Mecca was certainlynot forgotten, but rather constantly reproduced, while materials concerning thewestern fringes of China were also gradually being collected. This may be con-trasted with the relative indi ff erence shown by Chinese historians to the history of Europe and, a fortiori , America, an indi ff erence that is shared by Indian vernacularhistorians writing in Marathi, Tamil, or Telugu until quite late into the eighteenthcentury, or by Burmese historians such as U Kala. 63 These historians were quitecapable of running the gamut from chorographies to dynastic histories, and evenproduced certain sorts of universal histories, but they proved very reluctant toadopt any form of world history or global history, even within the generic conventions with which they were comfortable.

What I am suggesting, therefore, is the tentative hypothesis (which is naturallyopen to correction and modication by specialists of di ff erent regions of the world)that individual historiographical traditionseven those that were quite geographi-cally proximateresponded in quite various ways to the problem of writing worldhistory in the sixteenth century. Several traditions did respond actively and yetcame up with solutions that were distinct and which do not necessarily suggest thatthere was any move toward convergence or to the emergence of a single form (let


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alone a genre) called World History, being written homogenously in separateparts of the world in a variety of languages. Further, authors from these traditionssometimes drew upon one another: an Ottoman author could cite Gomara, andPostel could cite Arabic texts by Nasir al-Din Tusi; Barros could attempt to produce

a Portuguese version of a chronicle of the south Indian kingdom of Vijayanagaraand insert it into his A sia ; just as Tahir Muhammad could attempt to do the samewith the history of the Sultans of Aceh. At the same time, it seems evident to methat certain historiographical traditions remained distinctly resistant to the idea of a move from received forms of universal history to innovating with global his-tory. I myself remain quite skeptical of the idea that has been sustained in the pastby writers such as Jacques Gernet, that this might be the consequence of the radi-cal incompatibility of philosophies of history in such places as, say, China and Eu-rope. 64 Considerable variations can be seen even within a relatively small space,and one does not need to take recourse in the idea of vast civilizational di ff erencesin order to explain such variation.

A last example may help clarify my reasoning, and this is the Russian case: Itis generally admitted that early modern Russian historiography grows initially outof medieval monastic chronicling traditions such as the Povest vremennykh let (Taleof Bygone Years) from the late eleventh or early twelfth century, which concentrateson the origins of the eastern Slavs and their unication into the state of Kievan Rus

by the Riurik dynasty. After a long phase of fragmented and localized chronicling in the years from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, a revival is known to haveoccurred in centers such as Novgorod, Pskov, Tver , Rostov, and Moscow, albeit

largely in the form of local histories, which are not much informed by larger events,a good example of which is the First Novgorod Chronicle . Then, in the fteenth andsixteenth centuries, the creation of a powerful Muscovite state encourages newchronicles. 65 It has been argued by some that Muscovy in this period was placedin the context of universal history through the reference to the idea that Moscowwas a Third Rome, but this interpretation has equally, and quite convincingly,been contested. 66 At any rate, it is clear that a crucial text of the sixteenth centuryis the so-called Khronograf , a compendium of diverse historical events that draws ingood measure on Byzantine sources. Modern writers often contrast the larger scopeof this text with far more partisan and personal histories such as the Istoriia o velikomkniaze Moskovskim(History of the Muscovite Grand Prince), from the 1560sor insome views early 1570swritten by Andrei Mikhailovich Kniaz Kurbskii (1528 1583), who defected to the Poles in April 1564. 67

Kurbskii, who may be compared in his antinomian perspective to his contem-porary, the Mughal chronicler Abdul Qadir Badayuni, still uses a heavily Christianrhetoric, even writing at the end of his work of how the frontiers of the ChristianEmpire have been extended as far as the Caspian Sea, towns have been foundedin those lands, altars have been raised and numerous pagans have been converted.The external world is represented for him above all, on the one hand, by Poland


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and, on the other, by the Muslims of the Tatar Khanate (descended from the GoldenHorde), whose rulers such as Khan Ahmad had even threatened Moscow itself aslate as 1480. But of the rest of the world we hear little or nothing from him. Thismay appear somewhat surprising from a number of viewpoints. For the reign of

Ivan the Terrible (15331584) is notable, for example, for that monarchs dealingswith the English, beginning with Richard Chancellor in 1553 and followed by An-thony Jenkinson. We know that Ivan wrote a letter to Edward VI in February 1554suggesting that you send unto us your ships and Vessels, when and as often as theymay have passage, with good assurance on our part to see them harmlesse. 68 Andit is clear from a number of other sources (such as the letters of King Sigismund of Poland) that he wanted not only a commercial but also a political alliance withEngland. Indeed, it has even been claimed that in his fties Ivan briey contem-plated taking asylum in England and expressed a wish in 1582, through his ambas-sador Fyodor Andreevich Pisemskii, to marry a lady of the Tudor court, Mary Has-tings. Yet, it is not the chronicling tradition that allows us to see this opening to theworld of Western Europe; this opening remains invisible for the most part from theRussian histories of the period. 69

Thus, on the one hand, we can argue quite persuasively that the court of IvanIV sees a great expansion in historical writing, the core work being the so-calledLitsevoi svod (Personal Collection) created in the 1570s in the form of a chroniclewith drawings. Of its ten volumes, the rst three deal with a form of universal his-tory and draw heavily on the earlier Khronograf , while the succeeding six volumestreat Russian history from 1114 to 1569, and the last volume eventually deals with

Ivans own reign. Yet, on the other hand, this history-writing remains heavily cir-cumscribed, not merely on account of its dependence on Byzantine sources but alsobecauseunlike the Polish or even Hungarian casesit would appear that Rus-sian historians of the period remained indi ff erent to the explicit use of great com-pendia such as Ramusios. Moreover, we cannot assume this to be a generalizedindiff erence. Valerie Kivelson has found, in the course of her work on cartography,for example, that even chorographic works consistently describe Muscovy as in-between, with the referents being Europe, Asia and America, or Europe andChina. 70 Historians more than others may need to be reminded of this even today,but history was only one form through which knowledge was accumulated andltered. History is simply one set of modes, one group of conventions for dealing with the past and the present. The idea that a larger world existed out there couldthus be refracted through other materials, whether they were maps, stories orepic poems.

VI

The extended presentation of the problem of the genealogy of world his-tory that I have made here may have struck some readers as an interminable


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whistle-stop tour, with short halts in far too many places. It may hence be useful inthe interests of clarity to conclude by referring to the main theses that I have triedto defend here. It should be obvious in the rst place that I, for one, believe thathistory-writing on a global scale is not a new phenomenon, though it may be de-

bated whether historians have become better at it over the centuries. Certainly thesixteenth centurywith which I was primarily concerned herehad a number of world historians, even though these historians did not see themselves as exclusivelypracticing world history. This may be a lesson for the world historians of today: forworld history never has been, andto my mind at leastnever should be, amonotheistic religion, demanding exclusive allegiance. In the second place, worldhistory in the sixteenth century was not written from a single standpoint. Anto nioGalvao wrote it from the Moluccas, and so was happily read by Richard Hakluyt.Tahir Muhammad wrote it from his own Mughal angle of vision, and others likeGuillaume Postel or Marcin Bielski took it in di ff ering directions and invested itwith varying cultural resources. So indeed did an author who deserves a far fullertreatment than can be a ff orded here, namely Sir Walter Ralegh, who only managedto nish the rst part of his History of the World , which he had initially intended tobe in three vast segments. Raleghs preface to his work is a curious one, for he tellsus that even if he had begun with the notion of a history of the world, he had lastlypurposed (some few sallies excepted) to conne my discourse within this our re-nowned island of Great Britain. Far better in his initial view, then, to set together. . . the unjointed and scattered frame of our English a ff airs, than those of the universal.71 Eventually, even this reection on Britain had to be limited to a few asides,

for Ralegh was unable to go chronologically beyond the Romans, whom he left inchapter 6 of his fth book ourishing in the middle of the eld; having rooted up,or cut down, all that kept it from the eyes and admiration of the world. Still, whileclosing the work, he does hint strongly to us how he might have organized the otheruniversal history that he abandoned. Such a history would be oriented for histimes above all in terms of the opposition between the Turk and the Spaniard, forthere hath been no state fearful in the east but that of the Turk (convenientlyforgetting the Mongols and Timur); counterposing this to the fact that nor in thewest any prince that hath spread his wings far over his nest but the Spaniard.Ralegh thus concludes: These two nations, I say, are at this day the most eminentand to be regarded; the one seeking to root out the Christian religion altogether, the other the truth and sincere profession thereof; the one to join all Europe to Asia,the other the rest of all Europe to Spain. 72 Once more then, we returnostensibly to the same schema that animated Mustafa Ali or Martinez. And yetRaleghs history would surely have been a very di ff erent one from those others, hadit ever been written. 73

A suspicion may remain in some readers minds. How does it happen that thesixteenth century, an age of competing empires, calls up so many world histories? And is it entirely a coincidence that the academy in the postCold War United


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States, itself in the throes of a crise de conscience on the issue of global empire, hasbrought this form to the fore once more? My own judgment must be reserved. Manyworld historians, both Herrera in the sixteenth century and more recent historiansof the British Empire, are in fact mildly disguised imperial historians. But world

history, or global history, need not be simply imperial history under a di ff erentname. This acknowledgment requires us, I believe, to relativize somewhat, and totake Mustafa Ali as seriously as we would Jeronimo Osorio. This is an uphi ll task,but then history-writing was not easy for authors of four centuries ago either, severalof whom seem to have died in the poorhouse or the charitable hospital.

Some readers may well recall the injunction of Paul Veyne, who wrote that ahistory of historiography that wanted to get to the heart of the subject would be lessconcerned with the facile study of the ideas of each historian and more with aninventory of his palette. 74 I am not entirely certain that this rather too-easy opposi-tion between the historians ideas and his palette works very well. Nor am I per-suaded that that formidable historian of antiquity has always been helpful to us in view of his stubborn insistence on remaining a prisoner of a body of Western andabove all, western European, writingswith an exception always being made forthe halfway house of the Greeks (and the obligatory genuection to Ibn Khaldun).I believe that a return to the sixteenth century should help historiansand criticsof historyto realize with greater force that history was not, and still is not, themonopoly of a single cultural tradition. Indeed, this view, like the portrait drawn of historiography in this essay, leaves me (as noted at the outset of the essay) swimming heavily upstream against a trend in historiographical studies that one may term

the New Eurocentrism.75

This is the view propounded by internalist historiansof European ideas, who continue to argue with insistence that while the sixteenthcentury was a period of very signicant change in terms of historiographical prac-tice, this change was entirely produced by an internal dynamic as early modernEuropeans looked to the Biblical and classical pasts. 76 In short, however wide-ranging the transformations might have been, they would have had nothing to dowith the changing contours of the sixteenth century world, the increased pace of relations between Europe and Asia, or the wholly unprecedented impact of rela-tions between the Americas and Europe on sixteenth-century minds. 77 It is clearthat such an account is, to my mind, utterly unsatisfactory as an evocation of the very peculiar conditions of the sixteenth century, whether within Europe or outsideit. It is time perhaps to lay aside our preoccupation with an analysis of an eruditegrand tradition of the European history of ideas centering on such gures asFrancesco Guicciardini, Paolo Giovio, and Joseph Scaliger and look to another setof visions and viewsless easily accessible, perhaps, but no less signicant, whetherwe have in mind the sixteenth century or even today.


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N o t e s

I am grateful for comments and suggestions toMuza ff ar Alam, Cornell Fleischer, SergeGruzinski, Cemal Kafadar, Valerie Kivelson, Anthony Pagden, Geo ff rey Parker, Shel-don Pollock, Kapil Raj, R. Bin Wong, and a number of other colleagues. Earlier ver-sions of this essay were presented at the University of Chicago, the Ecole des HautesEtudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the History Department of the University of Delhi,the meeting of the Historical Society in Boothbay Harbor, the UCLA Faculty Collo-quium, and Princeton University.

1. Sir Edward Sherburne, The Tragedies of L. Annaeus Seneca, the Philosopher (London,1702), 4344. For a modern prose translation, see Samuel Lieberman, ed., Roman Drama (New York, 1964), 360.

2. Work of scholars in postcolonial studies was thus anticipated in many respects by ShellyErrington, Some Comments on Style in the Meanings of the Past, Journal of Asian

Studies 38, no. 2 (1979): 23144, who asserted that history as a category was inappro-priate a priori for a study of sixteenth-century Malay texts, since it was a genre thatdeveloped uniquely in the Italian city-states of the Renaissance. This view in turnderived from her reading of Nancy Streuver, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism(Princeton, 1970).

3. Ashis Nandy, Historys Forgotten Doubles, History and Theory34, no. 2 (1995): 45 47.

4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Globalization, Democratization, and the Evacuation of His-tory? in Jackie Assayag and Veronique Bene , eds., At Home in Diaspora: South AsianScholars and the West (New Delhi, 2003), 129.

5. For example, Grant Hardy, Can an Ancient Chinese Historian Contribute to ModernWestern Theory? The Multiple Narratives of Ssu-ma Chien, History and Theory33,no. 1 (1994): 2038. Note that Hardy uses the term hist

Sanjay Subrahmanyam - On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century

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