Mutual Conquests: Ceylon and the Making of Western Imperialism in Asia, 1506-1598

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The principal aim of this project is to complete a research monograph on a central but under-explored chapter in the making of European imperialism in Asia. The book proposal was recently accepted by the University of Notre Dame Press for a renowned series on the History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds. The submission of the final manuscript is expected in July 2012. Based on research conducted in Spanish, Portuguese, British, Indian and Sri Lankan archives for an unpublished dissertation written in Portuguese (2006), the book aims to make a major contribution to the field of Early Modern History by exploring (and clarifying) the emerging "connected histories" paradigm. This paradigm stipulates that it is possible to analyse European and Asian historical processes in connection with each other following the idea that, despite all cultural differences, the parts involved were able to establish historically relevant dialogues. Recent scholarship - including the research that has fed into the present project - suggests that European imperialism did not arrive in Sri Lanka as a sudden shock wave entirely generated in distant places. It grew slowly over a long period of time, and it was to a significant extent produced within the island rather than outside of it. Local ideas of imperial unification, deeply rooted in South Asian traditions of hierarchical kingship and Empire, were transfused into the Iberian sphere through a complex set of communicational channels before they unfolded, in the minds of Iberian imperial administrators, their full transformative potential. These findings are important not only in the context of British academia, where both South Asian and Iberian History have long-standing traditions of excellence. A new reading of the sixteenth century is equally important in Sri Lanka where the instrumentalisation of colonial history by radical nationalists is reaching an all-time high in the wake of the government's military victory over the LTTE in 2010. Manichean logics that demonise things non-Sinhalese in the past as well as the present are being deployed systematically with disastrous consequences for the social and cultural tissue of the country. To argue that European power in the island was not exclusively the result of exogenous historical processes does at times stir up emotions - as earlier presentations of my research have done in Colombo in 2005 and 2009 - yet it also serves to return historical agency to certain sectors of the colonized society, an indispensable condition for an open and critical debate about the roots of imperial domination.The book will also contribute to a critical reassessment of imperial history in Britain, Spain and especially in Portugal, where a tendency to minimise the impacts of expansion and to over-emphasise the "friendly" nature of the early imperial encounters has become palpable in recent years. By offering a nuanced analysis of the transformations that Iberian policies overseas underwent four centuries ago, the proposed work constitutes a cornerstone in the critique of simplistic evaluations of two European countries' imperial past, which may in its turn add to its relevance to the core debates on British imperialism itself.