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

该项目考察了从16世纪末到18世纪欧洲和东南亚之间的外交联系。在此期间，两个地区之间的经济、政治和宗教交往显著增加。然而，在19世纪欧洲帝国主义兴起之前，在东南亚的欧洲人并不能扮演征服者的角色，而是在很大程度上依赖于政治谈判以及亚洲国王和宫廷的善意。与此同时，东南亚内部的贸易关系达到了前所未有的程度，使外交成为该地区王国和公国之间政治和经济交往的重要工具。外交使团是调节欧亚关系的重要工具，因此是这个项目的中心。大使馆和王室观众为国王、朝臣和公司提供了在公共场合谈判政治等级、经济利益和文化冲突的机会，代表着用象征性的手势和语言表达的相互竞争的政治主张。本研究选择的案例研究涵盖了东南亚的不同地区，荷兰、英国和法国的贸易公司在研究的时期保持着外交联系：今天的印度尼西亚、泰国和越南。该项目旨在描述欧洲和东南亚之间复杂的外交互动，并试图捕捉它们的一些基本特征。首先，它通过追踪外交谈判中涉及的不同政治宇宙论和世界秩序概念来考虑欧亚外交的意识形态基础。其次，它提供了不同的视觉语言，仪式，国家仪式和其他象征性沟通方式的比较视角，这些方式为东南亚和欧洲之间的政治交往提供了信息。第三，该项目将涉及文化中介，他们的个人网络和对其他文化的感知模式。本研究旨在将欧洲和亚洲的观点交织在一起，并展示欧洲和亚洲的权力概念如何在外交交往中相互作用。它既涉及到欧洲人前往东南亚的使团，也涉及到亚洲人前往欧洲的罕见案例，这些案例至今仍未得到充分研究。因此，该项目填补了历史学术的空白，拓宽了我们对东南亚和欧洲之间跨文化接触的深刻历史的理解。通过这样做，它提供了一幅关于前现代全球进程所基于的政治条件的更清晰图景。

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.