Intellectual and diplomatic history have to a surprising degree evolved as separate historiographies, but they can be combined through a theme crucial to both: translation. Translation enabled intercultural negotiation but could also bring about inaccuracies, misunderstandings, or consciously skewed representations. This issue argues that a multitude of actors can be understood as “translators,” that the power relations between types of actors, languages, and forms of communication was dramatically asymmetrical, and that gaps between representation and reality had real and dramatic political effects. On-the-ground translation practices thus illustrate how the international political system long rested on local developments and global encounters.
Blog posts from 2021-2022 about the following topics: Diplomacy and the circulation of knowledge, Indigenous agency, Gender and power, Eurasian connections and the transformations of diplomatical processes, The construction of borders and sovereignty, Universality and specificity, Religion and diplomacy, Diplomatic influences from abroad, The role of economy, Tradition and local-foreign policies, Terminology, New avenues for the study of Southeast Asian relations during the colonial period.
This article argues that Taiwan's distinctive historical position-at the centre of multiple overlapping colonial jurisdictions and historiographical traditions-furnishes an important opportunity to consider how indigenous pasts and experiences themselves played a role in disrupting or redirecting historical narratives of global connection. It examines texts by Ming travellers Chen Di (Dongfan ji, 1603) and Zhang Xie (Dong Xi yang kao, 1603); Dominican writers, including Jacinto Esquivel (1632); and later histories of early modern Japanese expansion and the dissemination of the Sinkan Manuscripts (Murakami, 1897, 1933). What all these foreign observers of Taiwan had in common was their struggle to integrate Taiwanese indigenous pasts into their existing grids of historical knowledge. By focusing on this 'historiography of the other', the article challenges commonplace assumptions regarding pre-modern foreign relations and indigenous forms of social organisation, showing how Taiwan can play a role in challenging operating foci of global history.
This essay focuses on the Sulu-Mindanao-Borneo region in the 1830s and zooms in on the Capitulaciones (Spanish) and the Kapiturasyun (Tausug) of a treaty concluded between the Spanish Crown and the Sultanate of Sulu of 1836/37. It compares the different versions of the treaty texts from the perspective of a system of treaties across the region. Uneven historiographical attention has led to myth-building and a controversy over whether the treaty would have established Spanish sovereignty over the Sulu sultanate. To add nuance to this claim, the study examines the specificities of the treaties together with a large set of complementary sources. A deep, comparative reading sheds light on the motivations, and strategies that accompanied the entire process of planning, negotiating, and ratifying of the treaty and the consequences it had both for directly and indirectly participating parties.
The article explores translation processes behind diplomatic negotiations between Japan and the Spanish overseas empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It applies a multi-layered approach that integrates the translations of original diplomatic documents with their re-translation as historiographical source compilations in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Analyzing the different connotations and nuances of friendship as a diplomatic concept, it highlights the impact of translation, both linguistic and cultural, as well as the strategies behind terminological choices, on intercultural encounters.
Manila’s far-reaching connections based on the trade in saltpeter have received little attention in the entangled histories of the Indian Ocean and the China Seas. Military supplies were not only in high demand among parties in conflicts in the Philippines and its surrounding waters but also frequently redistributed overseas. That way saltpeter came to link Manila and the Coromandel Coast around 1700. Spanish colonial accounts not only testify to the importance of the delicate matter of saltpeter imports, but also suggest that after 1640, following the trade rupture with Japan and interruptions with Fujian and Macau, maritime business patterns altered significantly. The example of saltpeter cargoes thus sheds light on maritime dynamics beyond the spheres of Iberian mercantilist control, including the agency of actors of various backgrounds including Armenians and Portuguese New Christians, as well as English, French and Danish company merchants.
This article explores how the Japanese translator-historian Murakami Naojirō created an understanding of the Japanese past that established seventeenth-century Japanese actors as equivalents to western European and overseas Chinese merchants. Creating a historical geography of the Southern Seas and the Pacific, Murakami celebrated Japan's expansionism, not only by stressing the seventeenth-century Japanese presence in South-east Asia, but also, more subtly, by identifying the existence of a progressive spirit in the Japanese individuals involved in it. His narrative strategy included implicit comparisons with the European age of expansion, whose protagonists in South-east Asia relied on the networks and services of both Japanese wakō (‘pirates’) and more complex actors such as the red seal merchant Yamada Nagamasa. The article is a case study for Japan's intellectual imperialism of the 1910s–1940s, which closely intertwined popular discourse and academic history.
In the early seventeenth century people of Mindanao apparently “helped those of Sulu in their piratical excursions, frequently invading the beaches of our islands, destroying their fields and forests, burning their villages, forcing them into a fortress or to flee into the mountainous region of the interior.” These lines were not recorded by contemporaries, however, rather they were penned by a nineteenth-century Spanish historian of military background, Pio de Pazos y Vela Hidalgo (1841−1913), who personally participated in an expedition against Mindanao rebels in 1866. They were part of a chronological account of what he called a Military History of Jolo. It is an apt introductory quote reflecting both the key topoi and muddled chronologies of the history of piracy in the Spanish Philippines.
The main goal of this chapter is to highlight the discursive power of piracy and coastal raids in Spanish colonial reports produced in the Philippines between 1570 and 1800, with the key focus on roughly the first hundred years. The chapter focuses on the margins of the South China Sea or the waters and coasts of what is nowadays referred to as the Philippine, Sulu, and Indonesian seas. Discourses of external threat played an important role in both establishing sovereignty and in creating a sense of common political interest among different subordinate groups. For maritime Southeast Asia, non-European understandings of maritime violence and the relationship between those who talked and wrote about it and those who were accused of committing it are essential yet remain understudied. Approaching the theme through the lens of concurrent concepts of piracy can contribute to nuance long-held misconceptions of either religiously motivated raiding or spontaneous acts by opportunist seafarers.
This book offers a new perspective on the connected histories of Spain, China, and Japan as they emerged and developed following Manila’s foundation as the capital of the Spanish Philippines in 1571. Examining a wealth of multilingual primary sources, Birgit Tremml-Werner shows that crosscultural encounters not only shaped Manila’s development as a “Eurasian” port city, but also had profound political, economic, and social ramifications for the three premodern states. Combining a systematic comparison with a focus on specific actors during this period, this book addresses many long-held misconceptions and offers a more balanced and multifaceted view of these nations’ histories.
This article explores the dynamics behind global diplomacy and knowledge in Asian maritime empires in the late eighteenth century. The short-lived diplomatic exchange between the Kingdom of Mysore and the Spanish Philippines in 1776-7 provides a rich resource for an analysis of how global diplomatic agents coproduced material objects, images, and written records which in turn impacted politics and trade relations. The article makes at least four important interventions in the burgeoning field of new diplomatic history. First, it sheds light on certain aspects of growing research on Asian diplomatic encounters connecting the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia; second, it offers insights into the manifold actors involved in creating and negotiating knowledge; third, it highlights the epistemological importance of the visual and material archives for the study of global diplomacy in the early modern period; and fourth, it challenges narratives of cross-cultural foreign relations which tend to overemphasise asymmetrical and confessional explanations.
This special issue has been motivated by the drive to contextualize the role of individuals of various backgrounds in early modern foreign relations. All contributions cover a broad geographic scope and stress the impact of non-European practices and stages for the study of early modern foreign relations. Four thematic articles follow diverse diplomatic actors, ranging from non-elite envoys to chartered companies, Catholic friars and ministers on ships, to foreign courts, and behind their desks. They provide insights into these individual actors’ functions and achievements and raise questions about social belonging and knowledge channels. The introduction below portrays the development of an actor-oriented research angle in the field of New Diplomatic History over the past decades and addresses blurring concepts and over-generalizations. It attempts to redefine the heterogeneous group of early modern diplomatic actors as products of their involvement in political and material struggles, both at home and abroad.
Gifts and tribute have become a mainstay of scholarship on early modern diplomacy, particularly in studies of intercultural contacts. While New Diplomatic History has shown that a much wider and more global range of actors participated in shaping diplomatic contacts than was traditionally assumed, we still remain some distance removed from a truly global account of the interactive development of diplomatic norms and practices. This introduction situates the contributions in the special issue on “Gifts and Tribute in Early Modern Diplomacy: Afro-Eurasian Perspectives” within a survey of recent literature. It suggests that future scholarship on early modern diplomacy ought to focus on the ways in which global entanglements affected the structures, norms, and practices of inter-polity relations on a global scale. To achieve such an integrated account, future research will need to draw on an expanded range of voices, languages, concepts, and sources, as well as more concerted scholarly collaborations.