Connected Histories in the Early Modern World
About the Book Series
Connected Histories in the Early Modern World contributes to our growing understanding of the connectedness of the world during a period in history when an unprecedented number of people—Africans, Asians, Americans, and Europeans—made transoceanic or other long distance journeys. Inspired by Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s innovative approach to early modern historical scholarship, it explores topics that highlight the cultural impact of the movement of people, animals, and objects at a global scale. The series editors welcome proposals for monographs and collections of essays in English from literary critics, art historians, and cultural historians that address the changes and cross-fertilizations of cultural practices of specific societies. General topics may concern, among other possibilities: cultural confluences, objects in motion, appropriations of material cultures, cross-cultural exoticization, transcultural identities, religious practices, translations and mistranslations, cultural impacts of trade, discourses of dislocation, globalism in literary/visual arts, and cultural histories of lesser studied regions (such as the Philippines, Macau, African societies).
Performing India in Early Modern England 1575-1642: Commerce, Spectacle, and the Formation of the East India Company
1st Edition
By Amrita Sen
March 31, 2026
Situating itself against the transitional moment of first direct contact of English merchants with the Indian subcontinent, this book examines what it might have meant to perform as Indian in distinct economic and political spaces in early modern England. Turning to the years leading up to and ...
The Good Shepherd Rockery from Portuguese India, 1570s to 1650s: Emulation and Dissimulation in a Case of Missionary Art
1st Edition
By Francesco Gusella
March 27, 2026
The composite ivory carvings of the Good Shepherd Rockery visually capture the intricate network of connected histories from the Portuguese colonial empire in the Indian Ocean. The sophisticated interplay between missionary patrons and local agents resulted in the creation of these unique works, ...
Bodies and Narrativity Across the Early Modern World
1st Edition
Edited
By Vitus Huber
January 10, 2026
This book explores the intricate connections between the body and narrative across the early modern world. It examines how bodily aspects shaped the creation of stories and vice versa. The writing, telling, or interpreting of a story is inherently tied to corporeal acts and is, to varying degrees, ...
Lives in Transit in Early Modern England: Identity and Belonging
1st Edition
Edited
By Nandini Das
January 10, 2026
What did it mean to be a 'go-between' in the early modern world? How were such figures perceived in sixteenth and seventeenth century England? And what effect did their movement between languages, countries, religions and social spaces – whether enforced or voluntary – have on the ways in which ...
Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England
1st Edition
By Nandini Das, João Vicente Melo, Lauren Working, Haig Smith
January 09, 2026
What did it mean to be a stranger in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England? How were other nations, cultures, and religions perceived? What happened when individuals moved between languages, countries, religions, and spaces? Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility analyses a selection ...
Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia: Shells, Bodies, and Materiality
1st Edition
By Anna K Grasskamp
December 01, 2025
During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, ...
Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World: The Practice and Experience of Movement
1st Edition
Edited
By Paul Nelles, Rosa Salzberg
December 01, 2025
This book offers a panorama of movement, mobility, and exchange in the early modern world. While the pre-modern centuries have long been portrayed as static and self-contained, it is now acknowledged that Europe from the Middle Ages onwards saw increasing flows of people and goods. Movement also ...
Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines: Literature, Law, Religion, and Native Custom
1st Edition
By John Blanco
December 01, 2025
In Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines, the author analyzes the literature and politics of “spiritual conquest” in order to demonstrate how it reflected the contribution of religious ministers to a protracted period of social anomie throughout the mission provinces between the 16th-...
Early Modern Women's Mobility, Authority, and Agency Across the Spanish Empire
1st Edition
Edited
By Anne Cruz, Alejandra Franganillo Álvarez
December 01, 2025
The new parameters of a global world in the early modern period gave rise to an expansion of movement that facilitated spatial and social mobility for women of different social ranks. Through their reexamination of archival documents and travel narratives, these essays investigate the opportunities...
Indigenous and Black Confraternities in Colonial Latin America: Negotiating Status through Religious Practices
1st Edition
Edited
By Javiera Jaque Hidalgo, Miguel Valerio
December 01, 2025
Employing a transregional and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores indigenous and black confraternities –or lay Catholic brotherhoods– founded in colonial Spanish America and Brazil between the sixteenth and eighteenth century. It presents a varied group of cases of religious ...
Sense and Spectacle in the Age of Philip IV: Performing Empire in Word, Music, and Image
1st Edition
By Mary Quinn
December 01, 2025
This book accounts for the outpouring of celebrations in the Habsburg Empire upon the 1657 birth of Felipe Próspero, heir to Philip IV of Spain. These celebrations allow us to interrogate the shifting uses of performance in the empire’s center and periphery. Such spectacles could work to contain ...
The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources
1st Edition
Edited
By Christina Lee, Ricardo Padrón
December 01, 2025
The Spanish Pacific designates the space Spain colonized or aspired to rule in Asia between 1521 - with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan - and 1815 - the end of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route. It encompasses what we identify today as the Philippines and the Marianas, but also Spanish ...