Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World (review)

Honoring the work of James Tracy, the essays collected in this volume show the early modern world as a distinct world, separate from the Middle Ages and modernity. The essays address three distinguishing features forcefully put forward by Charles H. Parker and in Jerry H. Bentley’s historiographical essay. The first is that globalization affected the early modern world “on a previously unprecedented scale.” This was a dynamic world of large-scale migrations, global cultural exchange, and an intensified exploitation of natural environments in a global economy, technological diffusions, and global imperial expansion, affecting states and rural and urban communities around the world (Brady, Rahn Phillips, Phillips, and Catterall). The second feature is the resilience and vitality of traditional institutions, patterns, and associations (religion, citizenship and corporate culture, monastic life, family structures) in new settings because of religious and political change, migration, and imperial expansion (Brady, Van Nierop, and, especially interesting, Rahn Phillips on the Spanish world). Finally, tensions between the individual and the community (Seong-Hak Kim, De Schepper, Karant-Nunn, Van Nierop, and Harreld), the local and the global, and the traditional and the innovative (Strasser, Reyerson, and Vink) supposedly characterized the early modern world.

In considering the concept of an early modern world, two contributions might be of special interest. The first is Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s essay, focusing on the role of the early modern Dutch ethnographer confronted with Asian cultures. He shows how the Dutch Empire changed the way the Dutch acquired reflexive knowledge about the world. He claims that the nature of their knowledge was subtly influenced by the violent nature of their involvement with the peoples and cultures of the Indian Ocean world. Their not so peaceful entrance to the Indian Ocean stage influenced the way others, for example Persian sources, viewed the Dutch. Thus, according to him, logics of violence dominated the logic of the ethnographer. He argues that in Dutch ethnography the supressed have more virtue than those who resist Dutch force. In fact, as he shows, ethnographic texts were written and/or published with political purposes, to defend or explain a war, for example. The question, however, seems to be to what extent and how this violence influenced the observation, other than that it helped the Dutch to engage with the highest state levels rather than local merchant communities.

Subrahmanyan’s analysis of observations penned down by an official of the VOC (Jan Smidt) visiting a Persian prince in the 1620s, does not provide evidence for such a logic of violence in ethnography. Smidt’s voice seems to me less derogatory and far more detached and balanced than Subrahmanyan claims. Men such as Smidt seem to be observing with an ethnographic eye set to relate new (and possibly dangerous) worlds to their own, in search for a language that made these cultures intelligable to them and their readers back home. Subrahmanyan argues that these texts while building on local knowledge and on the legitimacy of local informants went beyond those to produce a metadiscourse to relate these different cultures to their own world. These officials and the VOC certainly adapted this knowledge to their own (often political and probably violent) ends. However, as Subrahmanyam also suggests, they quite likely influenced the emerging field of seventeenth-century Dutch comparative religion as well. Thus, he proposes, the VOC’s ethnographic documentation might have contributed to another fundamental cultural change in the early modern world, the radical Enlightenment.

Michael N. Pearson’s essay shows that not only Westerners entering the Indian Ocean world were in search for a metadiscourse. His study of Muslim reformers in the Indian Ocean shows how the spread of orthodox Islam in Africa and Asia was related to the needs of an emerging cosmopolitan world. In the...