Transnational Pasts

Histories of the novel range from the narrow to the unbounded. At one extreme, English-language critics have usefully equated the origin of the form with the first English specimens, such as Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) or Richardson’s Pamela (1740). At the other, the novel can be effectively defined as any extended work of prose fiction, ancient or modern. The present essay falls in between, arguing on historical and formal grounds for a central category of Eurasian fiction that extends back perhaps 2500 years and that has important consequences for the history of drama as well. Having evoked social developments to suggest literary conditions of possibility, it then deploys the comparison of literature East and West to account for those developments. It thus reverses a standard analytical procedure by proposing an expanded role for cultural explanation of large-scale historical change, in this instance the various paths of East and West into capitalist modernity.

The importance of institutions has been at the center of a cluster of major approaches to politics and economics over the past two decades. The impact of these ideas on historians has reached our understanding of the early modern era of world history. Many social science historians believe in the importance of the kinds of institutions pioneered in England for both political effectiveness and economic expansion. This essay affirms the importance of institutions to the political effectiveness and economic expansion in the early modern world as it seeks to extend the range of possible clusters of institutions that prove effective politically and conducive to economic growth. It suggests ways to consider the political and economic roles of both formal and informal institutions in the Qing empire as a particular case that qualifies the generalizations derived from European vantage points generally and English ones specifically.

"Books, Artifacts, and Pictures: Reflections on Doing Comparative Work on the Eighteenth Century"

We are well aware that a commodity known as chinaware or Chinese porcelain circulated globally in the eighteenth century, but we also know that this trade had been going on for centuries, at least long before European countries jumped on the bandwagon of intra-Asian trade. So what is it that made this commodity particularly attractive to the Europeans in the eighteenth century? My essay emphasizes the processes of techno-scientific investigations surrounding porcelain and their implications for understanding the broader currents of intellectual and commercial exchanges of the time. If true porcelain or chinaware was singled out to represent qualitative difference from European pottery according to a new set of scientific criteria (fusibility, vitrification, high temperature kilns, etc.), the criteria themselves became embedded in a hierarchy of social and aesthetic values within which this material artifact began to adopt new meanings in the eyes of collectors, connoisseurs, manufacturers and merchants in the early global economy.

My essay addresses the relationship between Orientalism and slavery in Galland’s translation of The Arabian Nights and the English “Grub Street” version in the early eighteenth century. I first consider transnational aspects of slavery and black globality, contrasting “Eastern” slavery with American chattel slavery, before turning to one of the “orphan” tales, “Aladdin; Or, the Wonderful Lamp,” in which blackness figures significantly. While Black Atlantic slavery differs from Eastern captivity, The Arabian Nights reveals the error in establishing too rigid a border between Arabic and European language sources, between East and West, and even between the present and the past; demarcating such a radical division misleadingly suggests the existence of stable entities, rather than blendings, in determining what is native and what is imported, what is authentic and what is invented.

This paper meditates on the development of transnational methodologies while examining representations of Shah Abbas I’s 1599 embassy to Europe, which features prominently in John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins’s 1607 play, The Travels of the Three English Brothers. Assimilating this historical instance to a prehistory of empire proves particularly problematic when we move beyond English accounts and consider as well continental and Persian narratives of the embassy. I indicate how assertions of a dynamic early modern East denaturalize Western hegemony and challenge us to rethink the question of what allowed early modern Britain to distinguish itself in its innovative rise to empire and industrial nationalism. In addition, I will consider how recent debates in translation studies and comparative literature may modulate and delimit our work in a broader archive.

Tea connoisseurs consider Pu-er tea [普洱茶], grown in the hill country of southern Yunnan near the borders with Burma, Laos and Vietnam, to be one of the highest quality teas that China produces today. Unlike other hill crops – opium, for example – tea has not generated illegal markets, and it has been a source of revenue for local governments. James Scott and Willem van Schendel have called attention to neglected zones that lie beyond and between state control. They call this region “Zomia”, and argue that scholars have neglected the special features of production and social life in these regions, which include Southwest China, Northeast India, and Northern Burma. Do the tea production zones fit the characteristics of Zomia described by Scott and van Schendel? By examining the ecology of tea production and the historical geography of these regions, we may clarify what determines socio-economic life in the hills and how these regions are linked to global markets.

This essay considers how global exchanges and urban diversity were conceptualized in early modern South Asia. Drawing primarily from poetic sources in early Urdu, supplemented by writings of European travellers, I examine two major cities: Surat, the foremost Indian Ocean port, primary entrepôt of the Mughal Empire and base for several European trading companies; and the court city Golkonda-Hyderabad, capital of the Qutb Shah dynasty, who ruled much of the eastern Deccan. By juxtaposing detailed sketches of the court and port, I attempt to characterize divergent urban and political forms and various textual strategies for engaging with diversity. Beyond engaging with key issues in South Asian history and literary studies, the essay raises broader interdisciplinary questions about the articulation between, on the one hand, conceptual frameworks and, on the other, economic flows and political systems in transnationally connected places.

Europe was never more global and transnational than in 1347-9 as pandemic wiped out one third of the populace, from the Asian steppes north and east of the Crimea to Greenland. A comparative literary history beginning here might then uniquely observe cultural regeneration across vast geographical space. Categories of national writing, borrowed from nineteenth-century historiography, are inadequate to this task, but itineraries of interconnected places (Aberdeen to Finistère; Basel to Danzig; Avignon to Naples; Palermo to Tunis; Cairo to Constantinople) suggest the historical movements of people, pilgrims, armies, crusaders, merchandise, books—and disease. Early modern cartography tends towards the emptied abstraction of modern mapping, while yet preserving (as in the itineraries of John Leland) traces of human movement, settlement, and labor. Here, in this tension, the early modern provides, for once, means for the medievalist to think with (rather than to complain about).