Overview

This book recovers the religious roots of Europe's first global order, by tracing the evolution of a religious vision of empire through the lives of Jesuits working in the missions of early modern Brazil and India. These missionaries struggled to unite three commitments: to their local missionary space; to the universal Church; and to the global Portuguese empire. Through their attempts to inscribe their actions within these three scales of meaning- local, global, universal-a religious imaginaire of empire emerged. This book places cultural encounter in Brazil and India at the heart of an intellectual genealogy of imperial thinking, considering both indigenous and European experiences. Thus, this book offers a unique sustained study of the foundational moment of early modern European engagement in both South Asia and Latin America. In doing so, it highlights the difference between the messy realities of power in colonial spaces and the grandiose discursive productions of empire that attended these activities. This is the central puzzle of the book: how European accommodation to local peoples and their cultures, the experience of give-and-take in the non-European world and their numerous failures, could lead to a consolidation of an enduring vision of cultural and political dominion.

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9780199485086

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Reviews

... the extraordinary intellectual ambition the author has shown in taking up this intercontinental comparative study; the linguistic prowess to interpret vast sources in multiple languages; the in-depth understanding of multiple philosophical, theological and cosmological positions that span three continents, and the capacity to so capably put these elements into dialogue. * Brent Howitt Otto SJ, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu *

Author Information

Ananya Chakravarti is assistant professor of South Asian and Indian Ocean history at Georgetown University. Previously, she was the Abdelhadi H. Taher Professor in Comparative Religion at the American University in Cairo. Her work focuses on the intersection of religion and empire, and global and local historical methods. Her interests lie in early modern South Asia, the Portuguese empire, colonial Brazil, history of religions, the history of emotions and spatial history.

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