Embassies, ritual and cross-cultural encounters between Europe and Southeast Asia (1500-1800)

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The project examines diplomatic contacts between Europe and Southeast Asia from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth century. During this period, economic, political and religious interactions between the two regions have increased remarkably. Before the rise of European imperialism in the nineteenth century, however, Europeans in Southeast Asia were not in a position to act as conquerors, but largely depended on political negotiation and the goodwill of Asian kings and courts. At the same time, trade relations within Southeast Asia intensified to a previously unknown extent and made diplomacy an important tool for political and economic intercourse between the kingdoms and principalities in the region. Diplomatic missions were crucial instruments for regulating Europe-Asia relations and are therefore at the centre of this project. Embassies and royal audiences provided opportunities for kings, courtiers and companies to negotiate political hierarchies, economic interests and cultural conflicts in public, representing competing political claims expressed in symbolic gestures and languages. The case studies selected for this study cover different regions of Southeast Asia, where Dutch, English, and French trading companies maintained diplomatic contacts during the period under concern: present-day Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The project aims at describing the complex diplomatic interactions between Europe and Southeast Asia and seeks to capture some of their essential characteristics. First, it considers the ideological foundations of European-Asian diplomacy by tracing the different political cosmologies and concepts of world order involved in diplomatic negotiations. Secondly, it offers a comparative perspective on the different visual languages, rituals, state ceremonies and other ways of symbolic communication that informed political intercourse between Southeast Asia and Europe. Thirdly, the project will deal with cultural intermediaries, their personal networks and modes of perception of other cultures. The study aims at intertwining European and Asian perspectives and demonstrating how European and Asian concepts of power interacted in diplomatic intercourse. It deals with both European missions to Southeast Asia and the rarer cases of Asian travels to Europe, which are still understudied today. The project thus fills a gap in historical scholarship and broadens our understanding of the deep history of intercultural contacts between Southeast Asia and Europe. By doing so, it provides a clearer picture of the political conditions on which pre-modern global processes were based.