Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity by Carmen Nocentelli (review)

Empires of Love explores the important yet still underexplored topic of sexual relationships between Europeans and the peoples of ‘India’ (primarily the Indian subcontinent, Burma, and Southeast Asia) in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representation. Considering a range of poetic, dramatic, and pamphlet sources alongside private correspondence, travel literature, and administrative documents, Carmen Nocentelli succeeds in illuminating a relatively neglected realm of European literary and cultural history. Her scope is wide and her aims ambitious.

By piecing together sources from English, Dutch, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Spanish exploits in the Indies, Nocentelli seeks to identify changing European perspectives on inter-ethnic intimacy and their role in helping to shape emergent concepts of race. Moreover, she suggests that the increased opportunities for erotic encounters between western men and Asian women during this period of colonial expansion caused Europeans to confront their expectations regarding normative sexuality with new urgency. As Valerie Traub has argued, the era saw the development of a European ideal of ‘domestic heterosexuality’, which shifted justifications for sexual activity from reproduction toward an ideal of marital love and conjugal desire. Nocentelli’s chief addition to sexual historiography is her contention that this shift was influenced by interest in, and ultimately rejection of, inter-ethnic relationships in a process that took place over two centuries and involved multiple forms of literary representation.

The ostensibly transparent terms ‘race’ and ‘sexuality’ are revealed to be not only unstable and in formation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also mutually constitutive. Race, Nocentelli persuasively contends, was in this era ‘less a category of biological difference than a broad spectrum of practices and discourses concerned with religious affiliation, cultural habitus, geographic origin, and humoral composition’. Meanings of sexuality must similarly be rethought for this context, signifying not sexual orientation so much as ‘an interlocking set of marital injunctions and proscriptions against nonreproductive sex’ (p. 5). Racial and sexual concepts thus became interwoven, particularly in colonial contexts where normative sexual marital regimes were challenged not only by observation of practices Europeans found culturally alienating, from penile modification and sodomy to polygyny, but also by erotic and reproductive relationships between western men and Asian women. Nocentelli explores the diversity of European responses to such challenges through her sensitive readings of texts and images, indicating a gradual shift away from promotion of intermarriage towards a hardening of attitudes to cross-ethnic sex within both official and populist representations. While each chapter incorporates examination of several sources, greatest attention is paid in turn to Pigafetta’s Relazione (c. 1526), Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572), Linschoten’s Itinerario (1596), Argensola’s Conquista (1609), Fletcher’s Island Princess (1621), Head’s English Rogue (1665), and Dryden’s Amboyna (1673). The richness of the corpus testifies to the importance of the themes of travel, cross-cultural encounter, and interethnic relationships in the canon of early modern European literature.

There is no Conclusion and so the potentially broader implications of the book’s readings remain underdeveloped. The suggestion that European experiences in Asia and their re-imaginings in literary and dramatic form were instrumental in shaping the ideal of ‘domestic heterosexuality’ remains tantalising yet unresolved. The lack of closure is somewhat frustrating, as is the author’s preference for an at times indirect prose style. Still, there is much to praise in this innovative and highly intelligent study and I hope it may signal a move to greater scholarly interest in premodern European encounters with Asia and their role in reshaping national, ethnic, and sexual boundaries in Western cultures.