On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century
Author(s): SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
Source: Representations, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Summer 2005), pp. 26-57
Published by: University of California Press
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SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM
On World Historians
in the Sixteenth Century
No Boundure stands,
new Walls by Towns in foreign Lands
are rais’d; the pervious World in’ts 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 specific sense of past traditions of historical writing) has returned with a vengeance in the past two decades,
often coupled, however, with a rather peculiar understanding of its relationship to
the history of modernity. For many scholars today, in particular those who favor a
location 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 unambiguously
‘‘European’’) or in that proposed by the Renaissance-influenced writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 It was European expansion and, above all, the
process of the colonization of the non-West by the West that created the possibility
of history as a form of knowledge in the non-West. Everywhere then, as European
colonial empires engaged in enterprises not only of material conquest and exploitation but of epistemological subsumption and subjugation, non-Western peoples
came to learn of history and then hesitantly to practice it. Thus it was with the
Malays of Melaka and Perak, the Bengali elite of Calcutta and Burdwan, or the
inhabitants of the Swahili coast of East Africa. In all these locations, history was
simply 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
26
histories that were written on a world scale in the sixteenth century. It argues that such works were far
more widely dispersed than has been hitherto suspected, and they were by no means a strictly European
phenomenon; examples from Mexico, the Mughal empire, the Ottoman domains, and Poland all find their
place in the discussion. Further, such histories formed part of a sphere of circulation of textual and visual
materials on the scale of the planet. Finally, the relationship between such histories and the earlier tradition
of ‘‘universal histories’’ is explored, showing the distinctions between them. / R            91.
Summer 2005 䉷 The Regents of the University of California.     0734–6018, electronic     1533–
855X, pages 26–57. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article
content to the University of California Press at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
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the non-West, which had been content to wallow until then, it would seem, in the
happy certainties of myth.
A veritable chorus of academic voices has now arisen to assert this position
time and again with minor variants, while at the same time more or less subtly
condemning history itself as a discipline today—calling it no more than a complicit
handmaiden of the Enlightenment—and then seeking a return to some more
wholesome, and no doubt more holistic, understanding that the non-West possesses
still, concealed under its unfortunate layers of mimicry and self-abnegation. A decade ago, participating in a symposium in the journal History and Theory, appropriately on ‘‘World History and Its Critics,’’ the postcolonial theorist Ashis Nandy
chided ‘‘the elites of the defeated societies [who were] . . . usually all too eager to
heed the plea,’’ to discover the practice of history in societies where he, like G. W. F.
Hegel much before him, was quite confident there was none. Anthropologists such
as Gananath Obeyesekere were sternly rapped on the knuckles by him for not wishing to embrace an undifferentiated 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 ahistorical culture is so in its own unique style.’’3
Such views are now commonplace, ironically providing much succor and comfort to exceptionalist scholars of Western history, who are no doubt all too happy
to learn from the mouths and pens of scholars of the non-West that Hegel and the
Hegelians were indeed perfectly right. Thus we learn from Dipesh Chakrabarty
that ‘‘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 discipline
of History.’’4 How then did residents of Mughal India in the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and eighteenth centuries—celebrated intellectuals such as Abul Fazl ibn Mubarak,
Mumhata Nainsi, or Bhimsen—represent the past? Chakrabarty admits grudgingly that ‘‘Muslim rulers had brought certain traditions of history-writing to India
and added them to other traditions of chronicling that existed in the country,’’ but
he tends to be quite cavalier in regard to the nature or content of such ‘‘traditions
of history-writing.’’ Rather, he suggests that—as with modernity itself, equally seen
in this vision as a uniquely Western product that the non-West must willy-nilly
negotiate within the bounds of colonialism—history is really singular, essentially
Western, and thus alien to most of the world until the early nineteenth century.
The present essay takes a radically different point of departure than that espoused by this new orthodoxy. It takes it as obvious that history, and even historywriting, 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 difficulty in comprehending.5 It also builds on the
argument I presented in another work (Textures of Time, written in collaboration
with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman) that history is not a single genre but
On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century
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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 François Hartog.6 Yet, as we
have argued in Textures of Time, I shall continue to insist in this essay too that there
are many modes of perceiving the past in any society, and not all of them are historical. 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 as
Castile’s in the sixteenth century, there were those who viewed the past historically
and others who did not, both groups living side by side within the same cultural
complex and producing different texts and narratives.7
The issue that is to be explored in this essay, then, is not at all one of the simple
existence or nonexistence of history in various parts of the world in the early modern period. Rather, it concerns what I perceive as a major and significant transformation in general historiographical practice in the course of the sixteenth century,
which is presented here as an explosive conjunctural moment in relation to the
changing conventions of history-writing. What makes this period significant, in my
view, is the rise to prominence of the innovative form of ‘‘world history,’’ which is
to say history-writing on a world scale. Such history-writing, I will argue, differs
from various kinds of nonlocal history (themselves often with ‘‘universal’’ pretensions) that had existed in the earlier centuries, along with forms of local and particularistic histories. At the same time, what I term ‘‘world history’’ here should not be
confounded with the Hegelian notion of Weltgeschichte, which has a quite distinct
meaning and intellectual trajectory. Indeed, my argument situates itself at the very
antipodes 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 at
times totally insignificant) role in a history of modernity, deriving in turn from Hegel’s idea that ‘‘the deeds of the great men who are the individuals of world history’’
are essentially the acts of Europeans. My own argument here is of a piece with
earlier essays and writings, where I have argued that the history of modernity is
itself global and conjunctural, not a history in which Europe alone first produces
and then exports modernity to the world at large.8
II
We may begin with some examples of typical situations of the sixteenth
century. On 10 December 1574, having received news of military reverses in both
the Netherlands and the Mediterranean, as well as rumors of an impending tax
revolt in Castile, the Habsburg ruler Philip II wrote to his secretary Mateo Vázquez, ‘‘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 Christendom.’’9 These gloomy, politic, and rather bloody-minded words of that Most
Catholic Monarch show clearly enough that some humans in the late sixteenth
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century, at least, had little difficulty in moving from the scale of a kingdom such as
Castile, to that of Spain, to that of an empire, to that of Christendom, and eventually to that of ‘‘the whole world.’’ Philip II, like his father Charles V, used the words
‘‘Castile,’’ ‘‘Spain’’ (usually in the sense of Iberia), and ‘‘the Empire,’’ but he also
famously made use in the 1580s of the Latin legend Non sufficit orbis (The world
is 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 titles such as Jahangir (World-Seizer), Shahjahan (World-Emperor), and Alamgir
(World-Seizer) to denote that the world barely sufficed for them either.11 In the
Habsburg view, at least, the world was a concrete entity made up of both compatible
and opposed parts, of which Christendom was merely one; and these parts had a
concrete reality such that one could not move smoothly from the level of the individual to that of the universal without encountering forms of resistance in both action
and thought. Philip II clearly did not hold to an older religious tradition (say, that
of the Mishna) that had argued that ‘‘a single human being was created by God to
teach you that if anyone destroys a single soul, Scripture charges him as though he
had destroyed an entire world and whoever rescues a single soul, Scripture credits
him 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 rubble,’’ as certain counterculture gurus of the 1960s might have had it. If we oppose—
as I intend to do in this essay—the ‘‘universal’’ to the ‘‘global,’’ we might well say
that Philip II, who was of course no historian, had a better sense of the global than
the 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 later
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries too. If some historians, influenced perhaps by the deep ‘‘methodological individualism’’ of certain other social sciences,
have enthusiastically supported the view that ‘‘microhistory’’ can capture the macrocosm, others have wanted a greater representation for diversity, whether through
the older route of ‘‘area studies’’ or the newer one of ‘‘postcolonial studies.’’ A third
solution, which seems to cast doubt on the possible universality of the existential
dilemmas of Martin Guerre or Menocchio while also shying away from the ghettoizing approach of ‘‘area studies,’’ has come to be crystallized of late under the rubric
of ‘‘world history.’’ The category called ‘‘world history’’ has, in recent years, taken
firm root in several institutions, especially in North America, where courses on
the subject are routinely taught in both universities and liberal arts colleges. Some
universities 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 say
nothing of the inevitable internet discussion group called H-World. Yet, looking at
the rather diverse set of materials treated by different instructors and practitioners
under ostensibly the same rubric, one is entitled to ask a first question: Is there even
a vague consensus on what world history is today? The answer provided by the
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Hawai’i-based Journal of World History, which presumably must reject a certain number of perfectly interesting submissions on the grounds that they are not world history, 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 influences across cultures and civilizations.’’ The sorts of exemplary
themes that are mentioned include large-scale population movements and economic fluctuations; cross-cultural transfers of technology; the spread of infectious
diseases; 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 exhaustive. Over the past decade and more, others have suggested the need for another
quite distinct category, namely that of ‘‘global history.’’ According to some of these
protagonists, such as Bruce Mazlish, the essential difference between ‘‘world history’’ and ‘‘global history’’ would lie in the overly large and vague coverage of the
former, compared to the aggressive (and positively valorized) presentism (or Whig
viewpoint) of the latter. Global historians would thus ‘‘consciously begin from the
present’’ and would be preoccupied specifically with the issue of ‘‘the globalization
proceeding apace today,’’ whereas ‘‘world historians’’—amongst whom Mazlish
numbers the historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein as well as Fernand
Braudel—would 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 Mazlish’s presentist agenda and find even the
Journal of World History insufficiently materialist for their tastes.
My position, then, is the exact opposite of that defended by the ‘‘presentists.’’
There is to my mind not enough reflection today on the past of ‘‘world history’’
itself. Thus, it may be imagined by some that when they write of the year 1688 as
a moment of world history, or of the Mongol universal empire of Chinggis Khan
as providing a significant conjuncture, this is really an act of their own singular
imagination.13 But is this really the case? What of people in the past, even the quite
distant past, who conceived of large and connected geographical spaces as proper
objects of reflection and went about deploying their ‘‘universal’’ erudition and their
reason 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 more
ancient (and less derivative from a single Anglo-European locale) than the usual
tired list of William McNeill, Lewis Mumford, Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler,
or H. G. Wells? What happens if historians and historiographers take the intellectuals of the past rather more seriously and conjugate the present practice of history
with the serious practice of historiography? What if one accepts and systematically
develops the Africanist Patrick Manning’s throwaway line that ‘‘world history is a
new field, but it is also an old field’’?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, the
great Ottoman historian Mustafa Ali ibn Ahmad ibn Abdullah of Gallipoli (1541–
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1600) was just over fifty years of age. This was the year when he began to write his
text Künh ül-Ahbār (The Essence of History), which was meant to be a history of the
Ottoman Empire and the world. It was a time, writes Ali’s modern biographer
Cornell Fleischer, ‘‘for retrospection, and perhaps introspection’’ for Ali, at a moment when the expected apocalypse of the year 1000 of the Hegiran calendar had
not come.15 A new age had seemingly dawned. And in this new age, Ali considered
it necessary to ‘‘enunciate what he saw as the central, distinguishing features of the
Ottoman system in order to analyze their corrosion and failure.’’ This was only one
of a number of major works that Ali produced. His Nushat üs-Selātı̄n (Counsel for
Sultans) written some ten years earlier in 1581 was a major contribution to ‘‘reform
literature,’’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 to
us. These include the Zübdet üt-Tevārı̄h (The Choicest of Histories), the translation
and adaptation into Turkish of an earlier Arabic text by a certain Qazi Azud alDin dealing with the pre-Islamic prophets, Muhammad himself, his companions
and family, and subsequent figures of the Islamic tradition.
But the Essence of History was different. Fleischer has no hesitation in terming
this work Ali’s magnum opus, and he tells us furthermore that ‘‘ Ali’s great world
history, uncommissioned by any statesman or monarch, had no affiliation with any
sort of official historiography.’’17 What did the historian wish to accomplish then
with this work? In a word, he wished to downplay the political motivations and
insist instead on the cultural and intellectual aspects of the historian’s 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 for
himself. 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 Çelebi (d. 1567), who had authored a text significantly entitled Tabakāt ül-memālik fı̄
derecāt il-mesālik (The Classification of Countries on the Grades of the Ways); and
by Ramazanzade Mehmed Pasha (d. 1571), author of the so-called Tārı̄h-i Nişānci
(Nişanci’s History). He also saw himself as participating in far older and more prestigious Islamic traditions of history-writing dating back more than half a millennium and including such enormously prestigious figures as Ibn Khaldun.18 There
was a tension between these two, for Ali explicitly recognized that no Ottoman
historian was as prominent as those of the Arabs and Iranians. We may thus clearly
discern a competitive element here, between the young Ottoman historiography
and its older cousins.
The Essence of History has two introductions, one general and the other specific
to the Ottoman part. It was written between 1000 and 1006 Hijri (1591 and 1598
CE), and it was made up of four volumes, each one termed a ‘‘pillar’’ (rükn). The
first volume thus deals with cosmology, geography, and creation. The second deals
with pre-Islamic prophets and Islamic history until the time of the Mongols. The
third volume then turns to the Mongol and Turkic dynasties and includes accounts
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of the three other great contemporary states by Ali’s lights—the Uzbeks (or Shaibanids) in Samarqand, the Safavids, and the Indian Timurids or Mughals; he also
incidentally 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 he
was also careful to list all his Turkish, Arabic, and Persian sources. The total work
is conceived of by him as ‘‘the quintessence (zübde) of one hundred and thirty books,
and each of these is the choice extract of other volumes of tales; if these latter are
counted [the Essence] is the essence of six hundred books.’’
Even in the fourth pillar, ostensibly devoted to the Ottomans, Ali’s conception
and vocabulary are often expansive. Thus, his early section on the reign of Murad
III is entitled ‘‘The Disorder of the Age and Perturbations of Space and Time
Which Appeared, One by One, After This Ruler’s Accession, and Which Proved
to be the Cause of the Disruption and Degeneration of the Order of Most of the
World.’’19 A later section refers to the Ottoman campaign against Shirvan and the
appearance of the great comet of 1577 (also observed by Tycho Brahe), which was
traveling from west to east (and hence thought to portend an Ottoman victory over
the Safavids, initially). But it turned out, rues Ali, to presage ten years of war, poverty, and destruction for the Ottomans.
As we shall see presently, while Mustafa Ali was undoubtedly one of the great
intellectuals of his age, he was not alone in having such preoccupations and horizons in the Ottoman Empire. But let us look for a moment somewhat farther afield.
We can thus juxtapose Ali with his slightly later contemporary in Mexico, Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpáhin Cuauhtlehuanitzin (1579–
c. 1650).20 Chimalpáhin—though perfectly familiar with Spanish—wrote in Nahuatl 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 number
the Eight Relations and the Memorial of Colhuacan. The first of his Relations, we may
note is ‘‘the Book of [the creation] of the sky and the earth, and of our first father
Adam, and of our first mother, Eve,’’ thus not entirely dissimilar to Mustafa Ali’s
first pillar. The second Relation has rather more significance for our purposes, for
it contains a section on ‘‘how the lands of the world are divided, beginning with
Europe.’’ Here, Chimalpáhin informs us at the outset that ‘‘all the lands of this
world that have been discovered until now are divided into four parts,’’ namely
Europe, Asia, Africa, and the ‘‘New World’’ (for which he uses the Nahuatl neologism Yancuic Cemanahuac). Furthermore, we are told that ‘‘the principal one of these
four lands is Europe, in which the largest number of great kingdoms and lordships
is to be found, as well as great cities called provincias, such as Spain, France, Italy,
Germany, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland, Norway, which is the ancient
land of the Goths, Flanders, and England—though this province is an island.’’ As
we shall see, Chamlpáhin has a source for all this, but this is not our primary concern 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 the
following section takes him in turn to Asia. This land, he writes, ‘‘has always been
much discussed by writers, because it was here that the first great kingdoms and
lordships 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 mentioned
in the holy scriptures, because it was here that Adam, the first man, was created by
God Our Lord; and in the same way, Christ, Our Savior, was born there, and he
suffered there to save us.’’ The obligatory extended mention of the Old and New
Testaments then takes this member of the native Mexican Chalca elite to how Asia
itself is divided into five parts. The first of these, ‘‘which is completely joined to
Europe’’ is under the rule of the Grand Duke of Muscovy; the second is ruled over
by the Great Khan, Emperor of the Tartars; the third is ruled over by the Turk (and
here Jerusalem may be found); the fourth is ruled over by ‘‘a great king called the
Sofi, King of Persia’’; and ‘‘the fifth and last part of Asia is formed by Portuguese
India and Great China.’’ The Mughals have—alas—disappeared in this process,
but this surely reflects the limited interest that their history held for the Spaniards
as opposed to the Portuguese.
Chimalpáhin does not neglect Africa either, which—so he reports—‘‘the ancients used to divide in many ways, but in our days those who study the heavens
and the earth and who are called geographers only divide into five parts.’’ These
five parts are Berberı́a, ‘‘land of the Moors’’ and facing Spain, which includes Fez,
Tunis, and Tlemcen; then Numidia—a land that is sparsely inhabited and infertile,
with some olive groves and date palms; then Libya, also a flat and mostly deserted
region; in fourth place, ‘‘the land of the blacks’’ that extends for a thousand leagues
along the coast from Cape Verde to the Cape of Good Hope; and finally Egypt,
‘‘which though it is small is the best of all, because it is very fertile’’ on account of
the Nile. Besides these five, our author also mentions in a rather ambiguous way
the fact that in ‘‘the centre of Africa,’’ one finds the great kingdom of Nubia ruled
over by a great king called Prester John; how this relates to the other five is never
quite specified. The section then concludes with a brief notice on the ‘‘New World,’’
which—so he states—is the ‘‘fourth part of the world,’’ and is called such because
‘‘besides the fact that it is separated and at a great distance from the three other
lands, 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 lands
in greatness and riches.’’ A note of American patriotism thus concludes the survey,
before Chimalpáhin returns to more local concerns.
In a recent work entitled Les quatre parties du monde, French historian Serge
Gruzinski has drawn upon the writings of Chimalpáhin to demonstrate how this
author of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries inhabited a world of
enormous horizons.21 Chimalpáhin thus commented on the passage of ambassadors from Tokugawa Japan in Mexico and also wrote knowledgeably of the assassination of Henri of Navarre by François Ravaillac on the streets of Paris in May
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1610. Gruzinski also notes that Chimalpáhin drew periodically for information on
an earlier author also resident in Mexico, namely Henrico Martinez, whose work
Reportorio de los tiempos y historia natural desta Nueva España appeared in 1606.22 Martinez, in fact a German engineer and cosmographer called Heinrich Martin, is
better known for having supervised the project to drain Lake Texcoco in 1607. In
his Reportorio he proposes a vision that goes beyond the world to include celestial
phenomena and the movements of the planets and comets (such as Halley’s Comet,
which made an appearance in 1607), but he also devotes a very large part of his
work to a systematic chronology of intertwined events in the world that he knew.
Martinez’s view of the world thus embraced the Ottomans, whose destruction (accompanied by the victory of the Habsburgs) he saw as quite inevitable. What is
particularly remarkable however was the way he reasoned. Such an event was
bound to happen, he argued (in the fifth treatise of his work), ‘‘since it is also what
the Turks themselves say, and hold as a tradition from their ancestors; thus they say
that 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 readers
to understand that his notion of the Ottomans comes from more than mere prejudice or casual ethnography; rather, he implies that even if the Ottomans are adversaries of the Habsburgs, he does have access to their ‘‘traditions,’’ and perhaps even
to their histories.
Let us resume the argument so far. If we take the historiographical context of
each of the historians we have discussed so far—Mustafa Ali, Chimalpáhin, and
Martinez—we clearly need to consider two axes: that of contemporaries and competitors, and that of predecessors and sources. To take the case of Martinez: he
would surely have known of other more or less official chroniclers and historians
writing in Spanish, including those who had held the office of cronista del Rey in
Castile after 1450. He would have known and read writers such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, or Francisco López de Gómara, who were concerned with the history of Spanish power in America; he is less likely to have read or had sympathy
for Prudencio de Sandoval’s 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 the
writing of history on various scales, from royal histories to ‘‘chorographies,’’ which
is to say, histories intended to ‘‘constitute a detailed description of a particular
place.’’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 beginning with that king’s accession in 1559.24 One can see Herrera’s logic clearly
enough: since Philip II ruled over so much of the world, any account of his reign
became willy-nilly a sort of world history. We thus come to a crucial point, namely
the relationship between the peculiar circumstances of the sixteenth century, and
the forms of historiography that they encouraged.
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III
Looking back at the centuries before 1500, there is little doubt that they
too produced some histories of a very general nature. We need not go back as far
as the Chronicon and other works of the seventh-century Isidore of Seville for this
purpose; we may consider a relatively late (thirteenth-century) example in Persian
such as Juwaini’s Tārı̄kh-i Jahān-gushā (The History of the World Conqueror), or
the even more ambitious and slightly later work of Rashid al-Din, Jāmi al-Tawārı̄kh
(The Compendium of Histories), which includes a history not only of the Mongol
and Turkish tribes but of various other peoples living on the fringes of the Mongol
world, 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 materials, especially when it came to the exotic sections of his work. The annalistic section of his Tārı̄kh-i Afranj (History of the Franks), which is a separate portion of his
general history, derives in large measure from the account of the Dominican writer
Martinus Polonus, but his work also contains a geographical and political description of Europe. Some recent authors have expressed disappointment at the rather
meager materials that this resident of Tabriz presents about Europe, compared to—
for example—what Marco Polo tells us of China; but this is scarcely the point.
What is of significance for us are his universal ambitions, ambitions that run to
discussing all the peoples that are significant for his world and that nevertheless run
considerably short of writing a history on a world scale. For Rashid al-Din is not
only 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 ‘‘universal
history.’’ But can he be thought to be writing history on a global scale? This matter
is made rather clearer if we take into account an anonymous Persian work entitled
Hudūd al-ālam (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 geographical rather than historical, yet it is important in two aspects: the fact that it claims
to cover the whole known world, and the fact that it was designed to accompany a
map that concretized this knowledge in a particular way. The Hudūd al-ālam was
thus ‘‘universal’’ in its ambitions, yet it also admitted of incompleteness. This is a
rather different claim from that made by later texts that begin to appear in the late
sixteenth century in Persian with titles such as Haft iqlı̄m or Haft aqālı̄m (The Seven
Climes, by Amin Ahmad Razi), which go beyond the claim of circumscribed universality to one of literal completeness (however contestable that claim may be in
our eyes).27
In this sense, the sixteenth century represents a global historical opportunity
and not simply one for Europe. Side by side with histories that are traditionally
dynastic in orientation, or chorographies that tell the history of Tabriz or Bruges
in detail, or histories of a specific 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 works
on geography and cartography) gradually emerges. Some of this work is by translators (though translation itself is no self-evident task) or compilers like the Italians
Montalboddo 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 transmission—but also transformation. How did it happen that a few decades
after Christopher Columbus’s and Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleets landed on the
shores of America, the Ottoman admiral Piri Reis was able to include information
on the subject in his Kitāb-i Bahriye? We cannot rule out the tantalizing suggestion
by Georg Schurhammer that Antonio Pigafetta, member and chronicler of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition, wound up in Istanbul in the later years of his life and
was the conduit of some such information.28 In a similar vein, João de Barros, official chronicler of Portuguese deeds in Asia, could produce a potted history of the
city of Kilwa on the east coast of Africa in his first Década (book 8, chapter 6), treating ‘‘how the city of Quiloa was founded, and the Kings that it had until it was
taken by us,’’ only because—as he himself writes—he had access to ‘‘a chronicle of
the Kings of this City,’’ which has been tentatively identified as an early version of
the Arabic text entitled al-Akhbār al-sulwa fı̄ tārı̄kh Kilwa.29
How then does one distinguish the new ‘‘world history’’ of the sixteenth century
from the older ‘‘universal history’’? It appears clear that two separate features of
history-writing can help us make this distinction. In the first place, the genre of
‘‘universal history’’ is based upon a template where symmetry is crucial. The universe 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 reference
to the existence of the complementary zone, as indeed is the case in most dynastic
histories, or histories of spatial units such as Christendom or the Islamic lands. Universal 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 differs from universal history, for world history is based
on the recognition of the need for completeness, for full coverage—as it were—of
the world. This is also what motivates the second feature of world history in the
early modern period, namely its adherence to a set of aesthetic criteria distinct from
those proposed by the writers of universal histories. In a word, where universal histories are symmetrical and well ordered, world histories are accumulative in character, often disordered, and certainly not symmetrical in nature. Its authors are always
tempted to add on yet another chapter, and still another one, substituting conjunctions for arguments, and rarely articulating a clear notion of what the skeletal structure of their text is. If some were searching in the sixteenth century for ‘‘perfect
history’’ by reducing the object of history, the world historians who interest us were
enlarging the scope and coverage of history while also rendering it distinctly
‘‘imperfect.’’
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When versions of this argument have been presented before hidebound ‘‘medievalist’’ historians in India, I have frequently been confronted with the counterargument that even if these questions of world history played themselves out between
Iberians and Ottomans, they certainly did not touch South Asia in the sixteenth or
seventeenth centuries. Conventional wisdom has it that the great chroniclers of the
Mughals in that period, whether it was the orthodox minded Abdul Qadir Badayuni or the polymath Shaikh Abul Fazl, knew little and cared even less for the world
outside of India, Iran, Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire. True, the Mughal
emperor Akbar did ask one of his courtiers, a certain Abdul Sattar, to collaborate
with the Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier, to produce a work on Europe, one of the titles of
which is the Ahwāl-i Firangistān (Account of the Frankish Lands).30 Yet this work is
more concerned with the history of ancient Rome, the classical past of Europe and
its philosophical traditions, as well as with the life of Christ, than with contemporary conditions that obtained there. Still, one cannot help suspecting that modern
Indian historiographers have thrown up their hands rather too easily. A littleknown and quite fascinating counterexample to this prejudice is the text entitled
Rauzat ut-Tāhirı̄n (The Garden of the Immaculate), authored by one Tahir Muhammad ibn Imad ud-Din Hasan ibn Sultan Ali ibn Haji Muhammad Husain Sabzwari.31 Begun before 1011 Hijri (1602–3) and completed in 1015 Hijri (1606–7),
this massive work is in five books (qism), which are initially conceived within the
framework of a universal history of the pre-1500 variety. Yet, having quite competently covered the expected ground of Creation and the prophets, Indian traditions
from the Mahābhārata epic, early Islamic history, and the history of the great kingdoms of West and Central Asia that preceded the rise to power of the Mughals in
India, Tahir Muhammad is not content. He then launches into a history of the
Mughals themselves, and their conquests, whether in Gujarat to the west or in Bengal to the east. It is here, having described the resistance of various Afghan dynasties
in 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-Tāhirı̄n that claims
to 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 Tahir
Muhammad tells us that he had had access to materials from one of the Mughal
administrators in Bengal, a certain Khwaja Baqir Ansari, that had helped him
considerably in his particular task.
The section begins, then, with a reference to Ceylon, which—so it is stated—
is ‘‘under the control of Hindustan.’’ The main feature of this island is that traders
come there and fill their ships up with cinnamon, since in the jungles both cinnamon (dār-chı̄nı̄) and cloves (qaranfal ) may be found in quantities. Tahir adds, referring 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 numerous elephants, they are resisting the entry of the Firangis, and as a result the supply
of cinnamon has come down.’’ It is further noted that when the Portuguese had
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first arrived on the island, the ruler there did not have the strength to resist the
Franks, and they could fill their ships easily with cinnamon. But in more recent
times, he has consolidated his forces, and begun to resist them. A subsequent passage 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 know
of neither gold nor silver, and everything is transacted in terms of cloves, which are
exchanged for imported cloth and rice that are taken there in ships. Tahir further
notes that in the past three years ships from Bengal have begun going to the Moluccas, but the voyage is somewhat dangerous.
I shall not follow Tahir’s text in its every detail, since that would be rather tedious. Suffice it to say that he next has an extended passage on the subject of Pegu
in Burma, where the king has five white elephants, and the way of life is different
from that of both Muslims and Hindus (az tarı̄qa-i Musalmānān-o-Hindūān alahida
ast). Tahir is fascinated by reports concerning the holy men in the region, and holds
forth at great length on the ceremonies that are held at the death of such men, who
he notes are called rāwali. 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 that
they are cast wholly from gold. This is a town that is unmatched in the whole world
despite the fact that its moral standards are dubious, as illustrated by the fact that
there brothers and sisters commonly marry each other. When they are reproached
for 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 latesixteenth-century Burma, around the Toungoo Dynasty. He notes that in the Hijri
year 1001, foreigners had invaded the area, and though initially repulsed had eventually gained a victory in the next year. In the aftermath of this, many people had
been killed in the town in a huge general massacre (qatl-i khalaiq) and others enslaved. The new ruler had been so severe that a great famine resulted. However, on
his death, and by the time of the writing of the Rauzat, the country had once more
come to be settled, and cultivation had begun afresh.
Tahir Muhammad is also the first Mughal writer to give us an extended account
of the sultanate of Aceh in northern Sumatra. His account refers to the copious
production there of pepper and camphor (kāfūr). He notes that the ruler of Aceh
had even sent some of this camphor to Akbar as a gift. The Acehnese, in Tahir’s
view, have a deeply regimented society, in which the warden (or kotwāl ) of the capital city keeps close track of everything and everyone. This degree of surveillance
is shocking to our author, who is used to the far more lax regimen that obtains in
the Mughal territories. It does not escape Tahir that Aceh is a great center of antiPortuguese resistance; and as a consequence, he notes, the Portuguese have made
little progress in gaining control over this country.
Our Mughal author also has some interesting claims concerning the genealogy
of the rulers of Aceh, who he claims were initially Sayyids from Najaf. However, in
about 1590 (that is, in 999 Hijri), there had been a sort of coup d’état and power had
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been seized by another group of Sayyids, this lot having come from Java.32 Still,
this new regime as much as the old one remains concerned with trade, which was
the main resource of the kingdom. Tahir further notes that the Mughal governor
of Bengal had begun to send ships to trade with Aceh. But he found the going rather
difficult because his goods were often seized in a somewhat arbitrary way.
The text touches briefly on a host of other places: Champa, Arakan, the land
of the Bataks, the Andaman islands. One of the most interesting passages, however,
is one that bears the title: ‘‘A brief description of the kingdom of Portugal which is
under the rule of the Emperor of Firang.’’ The passage begins with a brief confusion
between Portugal in general, and the city of Lisbon. We are informed that the frontier of this kingdom touches the land of the Maghrib, and so it was that the ruler
of Portugal entered into conflict with the ruler of Maghrib in the Hijri year 987,
the same year when Tahir Muhammad himself was sent as envoy to the port of
Goa by Akbar. While in Goa, he had gathered the following information. For a
long time, the king of Portugal had wished to conquer the kingdom of Maghrib
until, in that particular year of 987 (1577–78 CE), one of the brothers of the king
of Maghrib had deserted him and come over to the ruler of Portugal, offering him
a plan to conquer the Maghrib. The emperor of Portugal heard his words with great
interest, prepared his ships and sailed off toward the Maghrib. In the meantime,
the ruler of the Maghrib sent one of his confidants to meet his estranged brother
and sent him a message as follows: ‘‘You are a descendant of the Prophet. It is improper that you help in the conquest of a country that has long been under Islamic
rule (tasarruf-i Islām) by the Franks. If they conquer it, the people of the Maghrib
will have to become Christians.’’ He thus made his brother promise that he would
not do this. Meanwhile, the army of Islam had reached the banks of the sea and
the Franks too had reached there. The estranged brother now misled the Franks by
telling them that the army of the Maghrib was small in number and that they could
be easily defeated. The overconfident Franks hence disembarked from the boats,
and the army of the Maghrib began to retreat. The Franks chased them further
and further inland. At this time, the principal force of the Maghrib, mounted on
fine Arab horses, attacked the force of the Franks, who were slaughtered in great
numbers. The emperor of the Franks was trampled and killed, being disfigured to
the point that no one could recognize him. Hence, some of his followers continued
to claim he was still alive and had simply been imprisoned. Presently, his uncle
became ruler. But since he had no heirs, the king of Spain (ray Aspānya), another
powerful king from amongst the Franks, entered Portugal and captured it. When
this news reached Goa, the Franks in the ports of Hindustan without any hesitation
accepted his rule.
What Tahir Muhammad presents in sum is a rapid but broadly accurate picture of the disastrous expedition to North Africa of Dom Sebastião, and his death
in the battle of El-Qasr el-Kebir, as well as the political consequences of this event.
His view throughout is anti-Portuguese, and it is clear that he has much sympathy
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for their opponents, be they the rulers of Kandy, or the Acehnese. His survey of their
activities even takes him to mention the Maldives and St. Helena in the Atlantic, but
we find no mention of Brazil. This broadly uncomplimentary view of the Franks
is crowned by the following passage:
In sum, the community of Franks [tā ifa-i Firang] wear very fine clothes but they are often
very dirty and pimply [chirkı̄n]. They do not like to use water [ba āb muqayyad nı̄st and ].
They bathe very rarely. Amongst them, washing after relieving oneself [tihārat-o-istinjā] is
considered improper. They are very good at using firearms [tufang], and they are particularly 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 the
number of their households. Their principal task is to fight [ghazā ] the Franks. Despite their
weaknesses, 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 in
the Bodleian Library at Oxford), but our prejudices blind us to their existence or
significance.34 Historians of Mughal India have been so convinced that their predecessors in the sixteenth century were wholly uninterested in their neighbors that
they have for the most part willfully ignored such texts. Part of the problem also
lies in the fact that ‘‘world histories’’ in the sixteenth century were often not produced by official historians but by others, sometimes driven by quite different 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 he
produced on his own initiative. It is certainly the case with the intriguing text to
which I shall turn now, the Tratado dos Descobrimentos of António Galvão.35
IV
The author of the Tratado, António Galvão, is a quite fascinating figure
in his own right. He was the author of two substantial texts, the Treatise on the Discoveries, 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 intellectual of rather uneven erudition, Galvão was also—and perhaps principally—a
man 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 in
the 1550s. The high point of his career was a stint as captain of the Portuguese
fortress of Ternate in the Moluccas (that is, eastern Indonesia) in the late 1530s. It
was here that he earned for himself the title of the ‘‘Apostle of the Moluccas,’’ on
account of his untiring efforts to promote the Christianization of those islands. Galvão came from a family with something of an intellectual and historical tradition.
His father, Duarte Galvão, was one of the principal ideologues of the court of the
early-sixteenth-century Portuguese ruler Dom Manuel and authored a major text
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on the founder-king of Portugal entitled Crónica de Dom Afonso Henriques. This text
was written from a rather narrower perspective than was the magnum opus of the
son, António, who may therefore have sought inspiration in the work of another
writer from the early sixteenth century, Duarte Pacheco Pereira, author of the Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis.37 Pereira, who was born in 1460 and died in 1533, served from
an 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 negotiated 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 with
extensively by the Portuguese chroniclers of the period, as has his disgrace at a
somewhat later moment of his life.
The details of the career of Duarte Pacheco Pereira need not concern us further
here. We should merely note two simple facts. The first is that on his return from
India in 1505, he began to compose the Esmeraldo, a book in five parts that was
meant to deal in chronological order with the discoveries of the Portuguese from
the time of the Infante Dom Henrique to the monarch Dom Manuel, which he
abandoned in 1507, without ever developing the fifth part; thus the great Southeast
Asian city of Melaka, and even Ceylon, never find mention in it.38 A second fact is
his relationship to António Galvão, whose sister he married sometime after abandoning the project of the Esmeraldo. We may note then that Pereira had already
taken a step in the direction of a ‘‘world history’’ of sorts by posing Portuguese
expansion as a problem on a world scale. It is a manner of doing world history that
bears some relationship to the slightly later vision of Antonio de Herrera (noted
earlier), or for that matter the Portuguese chroniclers Damião de Góis and Jerónimo de Osório (or indeed, in our times, of authors like A. G. Hopkins)—that is,
imperial history as world history.39 But António Galvão for his part breaks from
this mold in the Tratado dos Descobrimentos. This departure is on two very substantial
counts. The first is chronological, for Galvão makes it clear that he will treat ‘‘the
ancient and modern discoveries that have been made to the year 1550’’ (os descobrimentos antigos e modernos, que são feitos ate a era de mil e quinhentos e cincoenta), and then
goes on to divide his work broadly into two parts, the first extending from ancient
times to the late fifteenth century, and the second from the late fifteenth to the midsixteenth century. The second departure is in the manner in which the years from
1400 to 1550 are treated. For unlike other authors, Galvão organizes his work in
this part as a sort of annal, where the activities of various peoples—and not only
the Portuguese—are treated. Thus, in 1496–97, we get an account of the deeds as
much of Sebastian Cabot as of Christopher Columbus, as of Vasco da Gama. In
the 1510s, the activities of the Portuguese in Southeast Asia are juxtaposed with
the arrival of Hernán Cortés in Mexico; and in the 1530s, the arrival of the Spaniards in the Andes is discussed as part of the same panorama as Galvão’s own presence in the Moluccas. In other words, for Galvão, the history of the discoveries is
a movement by which the Pacific antimeridian defined (but not located) in the
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Treaty of Tordesillas is reached progressively by an expansion in two directions, to
the west and to the east. One may consider this to be a worldview in which the
imagined center lies in fact in the Moluccas, where Galvão 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, in
keeping 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 that
the circumference of the earth is 6200 leagues. Whatever be the case, all of it is now discovered from west to east, more or less following the sun, but it is quite different in the northsouth direction, for to the north not all that much has been discovered beyond 77 or 78
degrees of latitude, making up about 1300 leagues. And to the south, some 900 leagues, for
about 52 or 53 degrees have been discovered, with the Strait through which Magalhães
[Magellan] passed, and together these make up 2200 leagues, and if one subtracts this from
6200, 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 century
to reread Seneca’s Medea and its evocation of ‘‘Thule, the last of the lands.’’ But I
wish also to insist on the particular quality of Galvão’s understanding of this process
of 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 Portuguese discovering other lands, but also of the Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese. Indeed, Galvão appears to have a particular weakness for the
Chinese, 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 have
taken them to New Spain, Peru, Brazil, and the Antilles. This, then, is another
aspect of the text that we must bear in mind, namely, its curious mixture of passages
from the Bible and ancient authors, with Spanish and Portuguese chroniclers such
as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés and Francisco López de Gómara, and
other discussions still that seem to have no textual source. Thus we have a rather
enigmatic passage that runs as follows:
And in the year 474, the Roman Empire was lost, and after that time the Longobards came
to 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 numbers. 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 Galvão’s first publicist
in English, none other than the celebrated geographer Richard Hakluyt.42 For the
Treatise on the Discoveries had been published in Lisbon soon after Galvão’s death,
and this first edition of 1563 soon acquired some circulation, together with the
chronicles of João de Barros and Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, which though far
more copious were also far narrower in their focus. Hakluyt’s version (based on an
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anonymous translation ‘‘by some honest and well affected 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, especially
by navigation, according to the course of times from the flood 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 sectarian
history in which the boastful Portuguese nation claimed more than its due. Rather
it was a comprehensive history that went beyond the limits of other writers such as
Bishop Osório, whose derivative but successful De rebus Emmanuelis Regis Lusitaniae
had first appeared in 1571 and then went on to be both reprinted and translated
rapidly into French.43 Hakluyt dedicated the work to Sir Robert Cecil, principal
secretary to Queen Elizabeth and chancellor of the University of Cambridge, pointing out that the author was ‘‘one Antonie Galvano, a Portugall gentleman: of whose
Pietie towards God, equitie towards men, fidelity 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 the
Isles of Maluco . . . a large Epistle can well comprehend.’’ Hakluyt urged Cecil to
inform himself of the world as it now stood discovered and also to find a concrete
visual representation thereof, ‘‘if it please your Honour at your convenient leisure
to take a sea card or mappe of the world and carie your eie upon the coast of Africa
from Cape de Non, lying on the mayne in 29 degrees of northerly latitude and
follow the shore about the Cape of Buona Sperança 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 step
‘‘from the Açores 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 the
Occident.’’44
By the 1560s then, or perhaps even earlier, textual materials existed and circulated—both through print and by other means—that permitted not merely ‘‘men
of action’’ such as Galvão or Castanheda but other armchair scholars to try their
hands at writing world histories in Europe. In about 1553, that rather eccentric
polymath Guillaume Postel published his Des merveilles du monde, which claimed in
its subtitle to be an Histoire extraite des écrits tres dignes de foy, and in the work took it
upon himself to reproduce not only a translation of extracts of the correspondence
of the future saint Francis Xavier but also a chapter on what he termed a ‘‘Description de l’isle Giapangri, qui est la plus orientale terre du monde.’’45 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, one of Postel’s acquaintances, had begun putting out his enormous
multivolume compendium of texts on voyages, Delle Navigationi e Viaggi, in the
1550s, 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 little
direct access to manuscript sources on the extra-European world.46 An example of
Ramusio’s influence can be found in the case of the prolific, if controversial, Polish
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historian Marcin Bielski (1495–1575), whose Kronika to iesth Historya swiátá (Chronicle of the Whole World) claimed to treat the history of the world from the earliest
times and was divided into six periods.47 By the time of the second and third editions (respectively of 1554 and 1564), Bielski was able to draw upon information
concerning both Asia and America from Simon Grynaeus, Sebastian Münster, and
Ramusio, a measure of the relative openness of Poland at the time to the circulation
of printed texts from Italy in particular. He was also able to incorporate a cosmographic section, as well as one on islands (that formed part of book 4). A recent
analyst 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 was
that Bielski, like Galvão, was obviously something of an autodidact. He also had
his 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 be
far more interested in the Portuguese in Asia than in the Spaniards in America.
Thus, though the discoveries of Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci figure prominently, the activities of Cortés and Francisco Pizarro are hardly paid any attention.49
In other words, this ‘‘world history’’ written in Poland, though based on existent
materials, nevertheless follows its own logic and seeks to order the world from its
own perspective. Kieniewicz notes, for example, Bielski’s desire to preserve the idea
that the Hindu ruler of Calicut was in fact a Christian, his lack of interest in topographical details, and his strong sense of providentialism, concluding that ‘‘in
relation to his moralizing intentions, the didactic aspect became of secondary
importance.’’
Further, we should not imagine that the circulation, digestion, and regurgitation of Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese materials were limited to the European
world. The first 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 their
authors were, we can be certain that histories like the Tārı̄kh-i Hind-i Gharbı̄ (The
History of the Western Indies) had access to precise sources such as López de Gómara’s chronicle or the texts of Pietro Martir d’Anghiera.50 These texts were able
to recount to an Ottoman readership, which must not have been negligible if we
examine the extent of manuscript dispersion, what the new lands that the Spanish
Crown had found to the west were, and how these discoveries could account for the
silver that was beginning to flow into the Ottoman domains in those very years.
Indeed, the 1570s and 1580s see a vast expansion in Ottoman curiosity and the
demand for a history on a world scale. Thus, a contemporary of Mustafa Ali writing in the 1580s, Seyfi Çelebi, was able in his Kitāb-i Tevārı̄kh-i pādişāhān-i Hindu ve
Khitāy ve Kishmı̄r . . . , (Book of the Histories of the Emperors of Hind and Cathay
and Kashmir) to provide significant 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 commissioned a ‘‘History of the Pādishāhs of France’’ from the Merovingian ruler Faramond to the contemporary Valois king, Charles IX, in order to better comprehend
these new allies of the Porte.52 These materials suggest that the clichéd image that
has too long haunted us, of a Muslim world that was so preoccupied with itself that
it had no curiosity with regard to the exterior, should be disposed of once and for
all. Indeed, the seventeenth-century Ottoman world even produces a grand synthesis on a world scale, in the form of Jihān Numa (Mirror of the World) by Katib Çelebi
(1609–57), which was one of the first Ottoman texts printed in 1729, replete with
maps 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 apparent
that world histories abounded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But was
this true no matter where one was located in the world? However foolhardy it may
appear, I am tempted here to extend my geographical coverage even wider. We
have seen that European authors from António Galvão to Guillaume Postel in the
sixteenth century themselves saw fit to extend the scope of their historical vision
not only to the New World, but to China and Japan. Did Chinese and Japanese
historians 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 remained
resolutely fixed on history in a regional mode, not deigning to look outside a political framework that was given by dynasty? In a recent and remarkable work on Safavid historiography in the sixteenth century, Sholeh Quinn suggests that such was
indeed the case with Iranian writers of the period.54 In her analysis the focus of
writers under Shah Tahmasp and especially Shah Abbas (r. 1587–1629) remained
very much Irān-zamı̄n, the land of Iran, a palpable and deliberate narrowing of the
historian’s object from the time of Juwaini or Rashid al-Din. I cannot contest her
detailed analysis of the work of the great Safavid historian Iskandar Beg Munshi,
but I should caution against assuming that what we may term ‘‘world consciousness’’ did not exist in the Safavid world. Perhaps the key then is not to assume that
it is always history that bears the burden of adapting to transformations in the geographical horizons of a time.55 This may help us to some extent in looking at the
Chinese and Japanese cases.
I cannot do more here than touch the surface of the vast subject that is Chinese
historiography. We are of course aware that historians of the Ming period in China
inherited very strong historiographical traditions from the earlier Song, when it is
claimed 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 classics
in directing human affairs. An important figure for our purposes is Wang Shizhen
(1526–1590), who wrote the Treatise on Classics, History, and Literature (Yanzhou shanren sibu gao), which was further developed by Li Zhi (1527–1602) in his Fenshu (Collected Works) of 1590. The fact that Li Zhi’s somewhat anti-Confucian works were
eventually 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
officialdom.56 It is also generally acknowledged that Ming writers further developed
the Song preoccupation with the individual, who appears more centrally in their
preoccupations, leading thus in late Ming China to a developed ‘‘humanistic’’ history, which has even been termed a sort of ‘‘intellectual revolution’’ in view of the
move 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 histories of different dynasties (called zhengshi—of which the standard history of the
Ming Dynasty, the Mingshi, completed in 1739 under the Qing, is an example), to
the ‘‘universal histories’’ (tongshi), which are broader in scope and scale than dynastic histories.58 We may also narrow the scale toward chorography, in the form of
local gazetteers ( fangzhi), and local histories. This rather rich historiographical
complexity contrasts somewhat with what one finds in the case of Japan, where it
is often claimed that after the fourteenth century, one enters a sort of hiatus, and
that 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 official history would be the work of Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725), and his
Tokushi yoron (Essays on History), as well as the later Tokugawa jikki (True Record of
the Tokugawa). But there are also unofficial scholars, using Buddhist, Confucian,
or Nativist (kokugaku) referents amongst whom we can count the Buddhist scholar
Tenkai (1536–1643) and the Confucian Itō Jinsai (1627–1705).
Did these writers respond in their histories to the new and quite unprecedented
situation in which the Ming and, later, the Tokugawa found themselves, not only
on account of the presence of Europeans on their shores but also because of renewed
contacts 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 terms
of geographical knowledge, and a whole scholarly industry exists, for example, on
the reception in both China and Japan of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s Map of All the
Countries of the World of 1602. In the Japanese case, a scholar of the subject has
written that ‘‘it is no exaggeration to say that almost fifty percent of all world maps
published in Japan during the seclusion were, directly or indirectly, Ricci’s progeny.’’59 Even so, as Jurgis Elisonas and others have persuasively argued, European
knowledge was in the Japanese case eventually turned against the Europeans,
though it is presently unclear to me whether the history of Europe, or the conquest 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 fashion
or the other of what had happened in Mexico, the Andes, and the Philippines, but
the problem lies in finding the concrete textual traces of this knowledge. My limited
readings into Ming Chinese written reflections in a xenological mode also suggest
that 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 or
‘‘universal history’’ to accommodate this knowledge.
Much work has been devoted to a significant text such as the Zhi fang wai ji, by
Giulio Aleni, produced in the early 1620s, which, though largely concerned with
providing the Chinese literati with a rather idealized picture of Europe, also attempted in passing to cover both the Indian Ocean world, Africa, and even Peru
and Mexico. Yet it has been noted by more than one author that whatever Aleni’s
influence 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 articles on Portugal, Spain, and Holland appear not to be influenced at all by the Jesuit
geographies.’’61 Texts from the first decades of the fifteenth century regarding the
lands of the Indian Ocean littoral were frequently recopied, as we can see from the
history of Fei Xin’s Xingcha shenglan (The Overall Survey of the Star Raft). This text,
associated with the Ming expeditions of Zheng He, was copied into the collection
compiled in the 1520s or 1530s by Zhu Dangmian, then in another version by Lu
Ji (1515–52), and also in a relatively authoritative and widely circulated version by
Shen Jiefu (1533–1601), to say nothing of other copies by Hu Wenhuan, that were
even printed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.62 Thus, early
Ming direct knowledge concerning India, Ceylon, and even Mecca was certainly
not forgotten, but rather constantly reproduced, while materials concerning the
western fringes of China were also gradually being collected. This may be contrasted with the relative indifference shown by Chinese historians to the history of
Europe and, a fortiori, America, an indifference that is shared by Indian vernacular
historians writing in Marathi, Tamil, or Telugu until quite late into the eighteenth
century, or by Burmese historians such as U Kala.63 These historians were quite
capable of running the gamut from chorographies to dynastic histories, and even
produced certain sorts of ‘‘universal histories,’’ but they proved very reluctant to
adopt 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 naturally
open to correction and modification by specialists of different regions of the world)
that individual historiographical traditions—even those that were quite geographically proximate—responded in quite various ways to the problem of ‘‘writing world
history’’ in the sixteenth century. Several traditions did respond actively and yet
came up with solutions that were distinct and which do not necessarily suggest that
there 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 separate
parts of the world in a variety of languages. Further, authors from these traditions
sometimes drew upon one another: an Ottoman author could cite Gómara, and
Postel 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 Vijayanagara
and insert it into his Ásia; just as Tahir Muhammad could attempt to do the same
with the history of the Sultans of Aceh. At the same time, it seems evident to me
that certain historiographical traditions remained distinctly resistant to the idea of
a move from received forms of ‘‘universal history’’ to innovating with ‘‘global history.’’ I myself remain quite skeptical of the idea that has been sustained in the past
by writers such as Jacques Gernet, that this might be the consequence of the radical incompatibility of philosophies of history in such places as, say, China and Europe.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 differences
in order to explain such variation.
A last example may help clarify my reasoning, and this is the Russian case: It
is generally admitted that early modern Russian historiography grows initially out
of medieval monastic chronicling traditions such as the Povest⬘ vremennykh let (Tale
of Bygone Years) from the late eleventh or early twelfth century, which concentrates
on the origins of the eastern Slavs and their unification 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 have
occurred 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 fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, the creation of a powerful Muscovite state encourages new
chronicles.65 It has been argued by some that Muscovy in this period was placed
in the context of ‘‘universal history’’ through the reference to the idea that Moscow
was 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 century
is the so-called Khronograf, a compendium of diverse historical events that draws in
good measure on Byzantine sources. Modern writers often contrast the larger scope
of this text with far more partisan and personal histories such as the Istoriia o velikom
kniaze Moskovskim (History of the Muscovite Grand Prince), from the 1560s—or in
some views early 1570s—written 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 contemporary, the Mughal chronicler Abdul Qadir Badayuni, still uses a heavily Christian
rhetoric, even writing at the end of his work of how ‘‘the frontiers of the Christian
Empire have been extended as far as the Caspian Sea, towns have been founded
in 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 Golden
Horde), whose rulers such as Khan Ahmad had even threatened Moscow itself as
late as 1480. But of the rest of the world we hear little or nothing from him. This
may appear somewhat surprising from a number of viewpoints. For the reign of
Ivan the Terrible (1533–1584) is notable, for example, for that monarch’s dealings
with the English, beginning with Richard Chancellor in 1553 and followed by Anthony Jenkinson. We know that Ivan wrote a letter to Edward VI in February 1554
suggesting ‘‘that you send unto us your ships and Vessels, when and as often as they
may have passage, with good assurance on our part to see them harmlesse.’’68 And
it 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 with
England. Indeed, it has even been claimed that in his fifties Ivan briefly contemplated taking asylum in England and expressed a wish in 1582, through his ambassador Fyodor Andreevich Pisemskii, to marry a lady of the Tudor court, Mary Hastings. Yet, it is not the chronicling tradition that allows us to see this opening to the
world of Western Europe; this opening remains invisible for the most part from the
Russian histories of the period.69
Thus, on the one hand, we can argue quite persuasively that the court of Ivan
IV sees a great expansion in historical writing, the core work being the so-called
Litsevoi svod (Personal Collection) created in the 1570s in the form of a chronicle
with drawings. Of its ten volumes, the first three deal with a form of universal history and draw heavily on the earlier Khronograf, while the succeeding six volumes
treat Russian history from 1114 to 1569, and the last volume eventually deals with
Ivan’s own reign. Yet, on the other hand, this history-writing remains heavily circumscribed, not merely on account of its dependence on Byzantine sources but also
because—unlike the Polish or even Hungarian cases—it would appear that Russian historians of the period remained indifferent to the explicit use of great compendia such as Ramusio’s. Moreover, we cannot assume this to be a generalized
indifference. Valerie Kivelson has found, in the course of her work on cartography,
for example, that even chorographic works consistently describe Muscovy as ‘‘inbetween,’’ with the referents being Europe, Asia and America, or Europe and
China.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 and
filtered. 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 could
thus be refracted through other materials, whether they were maps, stories or
epic poems.
VI
The extended presentation of the problem of the genealogy of world history that I have made here may have struck some readers as an interminable
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49
whistle-stop tour, with short halts in far too many places. It may hence be useful in
the interests of clarity to conclude by referring to the main theses that I have tried
to defend here. It should be obvious in the first place that I, for one, believe that
history-writing on a global scale is not a new phenomenon, though it may be debated whether historians have become better at it over the centuries. Certainly the
sixteenth century—with which I was primarily concerned here—had a number of
world historians, even though these historians did not see themselves as exclusively
practicing world history. This may be a lesson for the world historians of today: for
‘‘world history’’ never has been, and—to my mind at least—never should be, a
monotheistic religion, demanding exclusive allegiance. In the second place, world
history in the sixteenth century was not written from a single standpoint. António
Galvão 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 like
Guillaume Postel or Marcin Bielski took it in differing directions and invested it
with varying cultural resources. So indeed did an author who deserves a far fuller
treatment than can be afforded here, namely Sir Walter Ralegh, who only managed
to finish the first part of his History of the World, which he had initially intended to
be in three vast segments. Ralegh’s preface to his work is a curious one, for he tells
us that even if he had begun with the notion of a history of the world, he had ‘‘lastly
purposed (some few sallies excepted) to confine my discourse within this our renowned island of Great Britain.’’ Far better in his initial view, then, to ‘‘set together
. . . the unjointed and scattered frame of our English affairs, than those of the universal.’’71 Eventually, even this reflection on Britain had to be limited to a few asides,
for Ralegh was unable to go chronologically beyond the Romans, whom he left in
chapter 6 of his fifth book ‘‘flourishing in the middle of the field; having rooted up,
or cut down, all that kept it from the eyes and admiration of the world.’’ Still, while
closing the work, he does hint strongly to us how he might have organized the other
‘‘universal’’ history that he abandoned. Such a history would be oriented for his
times above all in terms of the opposition between the Turk and the Spaniard, for
‘‘there hath been no state fearful in the east but that of the Turk’’ (conveniently
forgetting the Mongols and Timur); counterposing this to the fact that ‘‘nor in the
west 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 eminent
and 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 return
ostensibly to the same schema that animated Mustafa Ali or Martinez. And yet
Ralegh’s history would surely have been a very different one from those others, had
it ever been written.73
A suspicion may remain in some readers’ minds. How does it happen that the
sixteenth century, an age of competing empires, calls up so many world histories?
And is it entirely a coincidence that the academy in the post–Cold War United
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States, itself in the throes of a crise de conscience on the issue of global empire, has
brought this form to the fore once more? My own judgment must be reserved. Many
world historians, both Herrera in the sixteenth century and more recent historians
of the British Empire, are in fact mildly disguised imperial historians. But world
history, or global history, need not be simply imperial history under a different
name. This acknowledgment requires us, I believe, to relativize somewhat, and to
take Mustafa Ali as seriously as we would Jerónimo Osório. This is an uphill task,
but then history-writing was not easy for authors of four centuries ago either, several
of 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 ‘‘a
history of historiography that wanted to get to the heart of the subject would be less
concerned with the facile study of the ideas of each historian and more with an
inventory of his palette.’’74 I am not entirely certain that this rather too-easy opposition between the historian’s ideas and his palette works very well. Nor am I persuaded 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’’ and
above all, western European, writings—with an exception always being made for
the halfway house of the Greeks (and the obligatory genuflection to Ibn Khaldun).
I believe that a return to the sixteenth century should help historians—and critics
of history—to realize with greater force that history was not, and still is not, the
monopoly 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’’ historians
of European ideas, who continue to argue with insistence that while the sixteenth
century was a period of very significant change in terms of historiographical practice, this change was entirely produced by an internal dynamic as early modern
Europeans looked to the Biblical and classical pasts.76 In short, however wideranging the transformations might have been, they would have had nothing to do
with the changing contours of the sixteenth century world, the increased pace of
relations between Europe and Asia, or the wholly unprecedented impact of relations between the Americas and Europe on sixteenth-century minds.77 It is clear
that 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 outside
it. It is time perhaps to lay aside our preoccupation with an analysis of an erudite
grand tradition of the European ‘‘history of ideas’’ centering on such figures as
Francesco Guicciardini, Paolo Giovio, and Joseph Scaliger and look to another set
of visions and views—less easily accessible, perhaps, but no less significant, whether
we have in mind the sixteenth century or even today.
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51
No t e s
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
52
I am grateful for comments and suggestions to Muzaffar Alam, Cornell Fleischer, Serge
Gruzinski, Cemal Kafadar, Valerie Kivelson, Anthony Pagden, Geoffrey Parker, Sheldon Pollock, Kapil Raj, R. Bin Wong, and a number of other colleagues. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the University of Chicago, the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the History Department of the University of Delhi,
the meeting of the Historical Society in Boothbay Harbor, the UCLA Faculty Colloquium, and Princeton University.
Sir Edward Sherburne, The Tragedies of L. Annaeus Seneca, the Philosopher (London,
1702), 43–44. For a modern prose translation, see Samuel Lieberman, ed., Roman
Drama (New York, 1964), 360.
Work of scholars in postcolonial studies was thus anticipated in many respects by Shelly
Errington, ‘‘Some Comments on Style in the Meanings of the Past,’’ Journal of Asian
Studies 38, no. 2 (1979): 231–44, who asserted that ‘‘history’’ as a category was inappropriate a priori for a study of sixteenth-century Malay texts, since it was a ‘‘genre’’ that
developed uniquely in ‘‘the Italian city-states of the Renaissance.’’ This view in turn
derived from her reading of Nancy Streuver, The Language of History in the Renaissance:
Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, 1970).
Ashis Nandy, ‘‘History’s Forgotten Doubles,’’ History and Theory 34, no. 2 (1995): 45–
47.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘‘Globalization, Democratization, and the Evacuation of History?’’ in Jackie Assayag and Véronique Bénéı̈, eds., At Home in Diaspora: South Asian
Scholars and the West (New Delhi, 2003), 129.
For example, Grant Hardy, ‘‘Can an Ancient Chinese Historian Contribute to Modern
Western Theory? The Multiple Narratives of Ssu-ma Chi’en,’’ History and Theory 33,
no. 1 (1994): 20–38. Note that Hardy uses the term ‘‘historian’’ to describe Sima Qian
(145 BCE–86 BCE?).
Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time:
Writing History in South India, 1600–1800 (New Delhi, 2001). Also see François Hartog,
Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris, 2003).
For a fascinating example of such competing views of the past, see Mercedes Garcı́aArenal, ‘‘El entorno de los plomos: Historiografia y linaje,’’ Al-Qantara 24, no. 2 (2003):
295–325.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of
Early Modern Eurasia,’’ Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–62; also Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, ‘‘Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400–
1750,’’ Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 75–104.
Cited in Geoffrey Parker, Philip II, 3rd ed. (Chicago, 1995), xvi.
Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, 1998), 4–5.
Jahangir is also well known for having commissioned several portrayals of himself
involving a globe, notably one in which he dreams of embracing the ruler of Iran, Shah
Abbas. See, for instance, Stuart Cary Welch, Imperial Mughal Painting (New York,
1978).
Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds., Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder, Colo.,
1993). D. R. Woolf, ed., A Global Encyclopaedia of Historical Writing, 2 vols. (New York,
1998).
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13. Certainly this seems to be the suggestion in John E. Wills Jr., 1688: A Global History
(New York, 2001).
14. Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York,
2003). A synopsis of the chief arguments in the text that may be found on the website
http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/1.1/manning.html.
15. Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Āli (1541–1600) (Princeton, 1986), 7.
16. Andreas Tietze, ed. and trans., Mustafā Āli’s Counsel for Sultans of 1581, 2 vols. (Vienna,
1978–83).
17. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 241. Also see Jan Schmidt, Mustafā Ālı̄’s Künhül
Ahbār and Its Preface According to the Leiden Manuscript (Istanbul, 1987).
18. See, for example, Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge, 1994); also Chase Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge, 2002).
19. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 295. Ali’s work was incidentally criticized by some
near-contemporaries such as Katib Çelebi (1609–57), who argued that ‘‘it contained
a mass of things both important and unimportant,’’ in the words of Suraiya Faroqhi,
Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge, 1999), 153.
20. Domingo Chimalpáhin, Las ocho relaciones y el memorial de Colhuacan, ed. and trans. Rafael Tena (Mexico City, 1998), 64–70.
21. Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde: Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris, 2004).
22. Henrico Martinez, Reportorio de los tiempos y historia natural de Nueva España, (reprint;
Mexico City, 1981), Treatise 5, chap. 7, 215.
23. Richard L. Kagan, ‘‘Clio and the Crown: Writing History in Habsburg Spain,’’ in
Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Spain, Europe, and the Atlantic World: Essays
in Honour of John H. Elliott (Cambridge, 1995), 85.
24. For a discusssion of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesilla’s work, see Richard L. Kagan,
‘‘Felipe II: El hombre y la imagen,’’ in Felipe II y el arte de su tiempo (Madrid, 1998), 457–
73; for the text, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia general de los hechos de los
castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del mar océano, o, ‘‘Décadas,’’ ed. Mariano Cuesta Domingo, 4 vols. (Madrid, 1991).
25. David Morgan, ‘‘Persian Perceptions of Mongols and Europeans,’’ in Stuart B.
Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (New York, 1994), 201–
17.
26. Vladimir Minorsky, ed., Hudūd al-‘ālam, the Regions of the World: A Persian Geography, 327
A. H.–982 A.D. (Karachi, 1980).
27. Amin Ahmad Razi, Haft iqlı̄m, or, The Geographical and Biographical Encyclopaedia of Amı̄n
Ahmad Rāzı̄, ed. E. Denison Ross and Khan Sahib Maulavi Abdul Muqtadir, 3 vols.
(Calcutta, 1918–1939); also Haft iqlı̄m (The Seven Climes), ed. Javad Fazil, 3 vols. (Tehran, 1960).
28. Georg Schurhammer, ‘‘Una ipotesi sulla fine di Antonio Pigafetta,’’ in Schurhammer,
Gesammelte Studien: Orientalia, ed. por László Szilas (Rome, 1963), 455–61.
29. João de Barros, Da Ásia, Década Primeira, parte segunda, Livro (reprint; Lisbon, 1973),
223–35, ‘‘Como a Cidade Quiloa se fundou, e os Reys que teve té ser tomada per nós:
e como D. Francisco de Almeida novamente fez Rey della a Mahamed Anconij’’; and
for a discussion, Gabriel Ferrand, ‘‘Les Sultans de Kilwa,’’ in Mémorial Henri Basset:
Nouvelles études nord–africaines et orientales (Paris, 1928), 239–60.
30. For a brief discussion of this text, see Gulfishan Khan, Indian Muslim Perceptions of the
West During the Eighteenth Century (Karachi, 1998), 39–40.
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53
31. Rauzat ut-Tāhirı̄n, esp. book 5, chap. 5, fols. 621a–26, Ms. Elliot 314 (Sachau-Ethé No.
100), Bodleian Library, Oxford; also see British Library, London, Ms. Oriental 168,
fls. 698a–700. Work on this section was done jointly with Muzaffar Alam, with whom
I will be publishing a more extensive discussion of the text. Manuscripts of this very
widely read text exist in the National Library (Kolkata), Buhar Collection; the Asiatic
Society of Bengal; the Khuda Bakhsh Library (Patna); the British Library (six manuscripts); in the Majlis Library, Teheran; the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin; and in St. Petersburg. For a brief account of this text, see H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson, The History of India
as Told by its Own Historians, 12 vols. (London, 1867–77), 6:195–201. For an eighteenthcentury discussion of this text, see Mirza Sheikh Itesamuddin, The Wonders of Vilayet:
Being the Memoir, Originally in Persian of a Visit to France and Britain in 1765, trans. Kaiser
Haq (Leeds, 2001), 39–40.
32. The reference here seems to be to the transition between Sultan Alauddin Mansur
Syah (r. 1579–1586) and the ‘‘usurper’’ Sultan Alauddin Riayat Syah al-Mukammil
(the latter being the grandfather of the celebrated Sultan Iskandar Muda, r. 1607–
36). Al-Mukammil is reputed to have killed Mansur Syah, and then ruled as regent
for a time over the ‘‘boy-king’’ Sultan Buyung, before eventually seizing direct power
in c. 1589. It would be useful to compare Tahir’s materials with those in Jorge M. dos
Santos Alves and Pierre-Yves Manguin, O ‘‘Roteiro das Cousas do Achem’’ de D. João Ribeiro Gaio: Um olhar português sobre o Norte de Samatra em finais do século XVI (Lisbon,
1997).
33. For a broader discussion of this passage and related questions, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘‘Taking Stock of the Franks: South Asian Views of Europeans and Europe, 1500–
1800,’’ The Indian Economic and Social History Review 42, no. 1 (2005): 69–100.
34. This text, incidentally, is not noticed in a rather hasty dismissal of Mughal xenology
by Simon Digby, ‘‘Beyond the Ocean: Perceptions of Overseas in Indo-Persian Sources
of the Mughal Period,’’ Studies in History, n. s., 14, no. 2 (1999): 247–59.
35. António Galvão, Tratado dos Descobrimentos, ed. Visconde de Lagoa and Elaine Sanceau,
4th ed. (Oporto, 1987).
36. Hubert Jacobs, ed., A Treatise on the Moluccas (c. 1544), Probably the Preliminary Version of
António Galvão’s Lost ‘‘História das Molucas’’ (Rome, 1971).
37. See Jean Aubin, ‘‘Les frustrations de Duarte Pacheco Pereira,’’ in Le Latin et l’Astrolabe,
vol. 1, Recherches sur le Portugal de la Renaissance, son expansion en Asie et les relations internationales (Paris, 1996), 111–32.
38. Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de situ orbis, ed. Damião Peres (Lisbon, 1988).
39. A. G. Hopkins, ‘‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History,’’ Past
and Present 164 (1999): 198–243.
40. Galvão, Tratado dos Descobrimentos, 299.
41. Ibid., 189–90.
42. On Richard Hakluyt, see for example Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992).
43. The first French version from 1581 is Histoire de Portugal contenant les entreprises, navigations et gestes mémorables des Portugallois . . . depuis l’an 1496 jusques à l’an 1578 . . . comprinse
en vingt livres, dont les douze premiers sont traduits du latin de Jérosme Osorius . . . , nouvellement
mise en françois par S. G. S., followed by a number of other editions from Geneva. The
first English translation dates from far later, for which see The History of the Portuguese
during the reign of Emmanuel, containing all their discoveries from the coast of Africk to the farthest
parts of China . . . , including also their discovery of Brazil and their wars with the Moors, written
originally in Latin by Jerome Osorio, trans. James Gibbs, 2 vols. (London, 1742).
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44. Richard Hakluyt, ‘‘The Epistle Dedicatorie,’’ in António Galvão, The discoveries of the
world, from their first original unto the year of Our Lord 1555, by Antonio Galvano, governor of
Ternate. Corrected, quoted, and published in England, by Richard Hakluyt (1601), reprinted
with the original Portuguese text and ed. Vice-Admiral C. B. Bethune (London, 1862),
iii–vi.
45. Henri Bernard-Maitre, ‘‘L’orientaliste Guillaume Postel et la découverte spirituelle du
Japon en 1552,’’ Monumenta Nipponica 9, no. 1–2 (1953): 83–108; also see the more
recent discussion in Jurgis S. Elisonas, ‘‘An Itinerary to the Terrestrial Paradise: Early
European Reports on Japan and a Contemporary Exegesis,’’ Itinerario 20, no. 4 (1996):
25–68.
46. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e Viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi, 6 vols. (Turin,
1978–88).
47. Marcin Bielski, Kronika: tho iesth, Historya swiátá (Warsaw, 1976).
48. Jan Kieniewicz, ‘‘Nouvelles et merchandises: La perspective polonaise des découvertes
portugaises au XVIe siècle,’’ in Jean Aubin, ed., La Découverte, le Portugal, et l’Europe
(Paris, 1990), 331–45.
49. For a somewhat larger perspective on these questions, see E. Iglói, ‘‘Die ersten polnischen, ungarischen und russischen Berichte über die Entdeckung Amerikas,’’ Slavica:
Annales Instituti Philologiae Slavicae Universitatis Debreciniensis 4 (1964): 121–30.
50. Thomas D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of ‘‘Tarih-i Hind-i
Garbi’’ and Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden, 1990).
51. Joseph Matuz, ed. and trans., L’ouvrage de Seyfı̄ Çelebı̄, historien ottoman du XVIe siècle
(Paris, 1968).
52. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, trans., La première histoire de France en turc ottoman: Chroniques des padichahs de France, 1572 (Paris, 1997).
53. See Gottfried Hagen, ‘‘Überzeitlichkeit und Geschichte in Katib Celebis Gihannüma,’’
Archivum Ottomanicum 14 (1995–96): 133–59.
54. Sholeh A. Quinn, Historical Writing During the Reign of Shah Abbas: Ideology, Imitation,
and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles (Salt Lake City, 2000). A broadly similar position is
expressed in Rudi Matthee, ‘‘Between Aloofness and Fascination: Safavid Views of the
West,’’ Iranian Studies 31, no. 2 (1998): 219–46.
55. For a development of this idea, see Denys Lombard, ‘‘Les Luisades comparées à deux
autres ‘visions’ de la fin du XVIe siècle: Le Xi Yang Ji et le roman malais d’Alexandre,’’
in Artur Teodoro de Matos and Luı́s Filipe F. Reis Thomaz, eds., As Relações entre a
Índia Portuguesa, a Ásia do Sueste e o Extremo Oriente: Actas do VI Seminário Internacional de
História Indo-Portuguesa (Macau-Lisbon, 1993), 173–85.
56. Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley,
1998), 170–71.
57. W. B. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank, eds., Historians of China and Japan (London,
1961).
58. On these tongshi, see Rafe De Crespigny, ‘‘Universal Histories,’’ in Donald Leslie, Colin
Mackerras, and Wang Gungwu, eds., Essays on the Sources for Chinese History (Canberra,
1973), 64–70.
59. Shintaro Ayusawa, ‘‘Geography and Japanese Knowledge of World Geography,’’ Monumenta Nipponica 19, no. 3–4 (1964): 275–94. For a more general discussion, see Marcia
Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan: Space, Place, and Culture in the Tokugawa Period,
1603–1868 (Berkeley, 2003).
60. For a translation of this text, see George Elison [ Jurgis Elisonas], Deus Destroyed: The
Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 319–47.
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61. Bernard Hung-kay Luk, ‘‘A Study of Giulio Aleni’s Chih-fang wai chi,’’ Bulletin of the
School of Oriental and African Studies 40, no. 1 (1977): 58–84.
62. See Fei Hsin, Hsing-Ch’a Sheng-Lan [Xingcha shenglan]: The Overall Survey of the Star
Raft, trans. J. V. G. Mills, ed. Roderick Ptak (Wiesbaden, 1996), 9–11.
63. For this text, see for instance Victor Lieberman, ‘‘How Reliable is U Kala’s Burmese
Chronicle? Some New Comparisons,’’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 17, no. 2 (1986):
236–55.
64. This would appear to be the direction of analysis espoused in Jacques Gernet, L’intelligence de la Chine: Le social et le mental (Paris, 1994), 313–45.
65. Jakov S. Luria, ‘‘Fifteenth-Century Chronicles as a Source for the History of the Formation of the Muscovite State,’’ in Medieval Russian Culture, vol. 2, ed. Michael S. Flier and
Daniel Rowland (Berkeley, 1994), 47–56.
66. Daniel B. Rowland, ‘‘Moscow: The Third Rome or the New Israel,’’ The Russian Review
55 (1996): 591–614.
67. Prince André Kourbski, Histoire du règne de Jean IV (Ivan le Terrible), trans. M. Forstetter,
introduction by Alexandre V. Soloviev (Geneva, 1965).
68. George Vernadsky et al., A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, 3
vols. (New Haven, 1972), 1:131–52, citation on 150. Also see Basil Dmytryshyn, Medieval Russia: A Source Book, 850–1700, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth, 1991), 294–305.
69. For a general reflection, see Edward L. Keenan, ‘‘The Trouble with Muscovy: Some
Observations upon Problems of the Comparative Study of Form and Genre in Historical Writing,’’ Medieval Historiography, ed. Paul Maurice Clogan (Denton, Tex., 1974),
103–26.
70. Private communication from Valerie Kivelson, University of Michigan. This would
presumably call into question the presuppositions in certain earlier studies such as
Mark Bassin, ‘‘Russia Between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space,’’ Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (1991): 1–17.
71. Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World in Five Books, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1820), 1:i.
Also see John Racin, Sir Walter Ralegh as Historian: An Analysis of ‘‘The History of the
World’’ (Salzburg, 1974).
72. Ralegh, The History of the World, 6:368–69.
73. For a sense of the matrix of possibilities, also see the work of Ralegh’s exact contemporary, Sir Anthony Sherley, in Le ‘‘Peso polı́tico de todo el mundo’’ d’Anthony Sherley: ou, un
aventurier anglais ou service de l’Espagne, ed. Xavier-A. Flores (Paris, 1963).
74. Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire: Texte intégral (Paris, 1996).
75. Such a move gains support today, ironically enough, from ‘‘subalternist’’ historians,
anxious to claim that only Europeans possessed a historical sensibility until the nineteenth century. See, for example, Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History
(New York, 2002), whose ostensibly anti-Hegelian agenda contrasts sharply with the
actual complicity of the text with many aspects of Hegel’s own conception.
76. This tradition derives in some measure from such writings as Eric Cochrane, Historians
and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981), but also see such works as
T. C. Price Zimmermann, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century
Italy (Princeton, 1995); and Mark Phillips, Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft
(Toronto, 1977). Also see the earlier work by George Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History:
Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Urbana, 1970), which
also sees this sixteenth-century problem as a purely European (indeed Western European) one. For a recent variation, still within an ‘‘internalist’’ European mode, see Con-
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stantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago, 2004), focusing on the seventeenthcentury figure of Hermann Conring.
77. Ironically, Joseph Scaliger, one of the exemplars of such historiography, was wrestling
in the later years of his life with problems posed by Chinese and Mexican historical
traditions. Cf. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2, Historical Chronology (Oxford, 1993), 394–459.
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