Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History
Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History

Author: Zoltán Biedermann

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2017-06-07

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1911307827

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.

Re-exploring the Links
Re-exploring the Links

Author: Jorge Manuel Flores

Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9783447054904

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The island of Ceilao occupied a permanent and singular place in the political imagination of early modern Portugal. Concurrently, the Portuguese left a strong imprint in the Sri Lankan collective memory of the period. Five centuries later, a group of historians, art historians, anthropologists, and linguists reflect on the multiple dimensions of this phenomenon by rethinking texts and maps, ruined churches and ivory caskets, oral tales and Creole communities. Authored by 15 international scholars, Re-exploring the Links is divided in four parts: "Political Realities and Cultural Imagination"; "Religion: Con. ict and Interaction"; "Space and Heritage: Construction, Representation"; "Language and Ethnicity, Identity and Memory". While published on the occasion of the Portuguese arrival in Sri Lanka five centuries ago, this book is far from being a celebratory piece. Re-exploring the Links does not conform to nationalist models of historical interpretation and refuses both the rhetoric of discovery and the rhetoric of aggression. The aim of the volume is not to celebrate "encounters", but to reinvent an academic debate, independent of any political agenda and concerning a history that is Portuguese and Sri Lankan alike.INTRODUCTORY ESSAYChandra R. de Silva, Portugal and Sri Lanka: Recent Trends in HistoriographyPOLITICAL REALITIES AND CULTURAL IMAGINATION S. Pathmanathan The Portuguese in Northeast Sri Lanka (1543-1658): An Assessment of Impressions Recorded in Tamil Chronicles and Poems Rohini Paranavitana, Sinhalese War Poems and the Portuguese Karunasena Dias Paranavitana The Portuguese Tombos as a Source of Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century Sri Lankan History Rui Manuel Loureiro, The Matter of Ceylon in Diogo do Couto's Decadas da Asia Jorge Flores, Maria Augusta Lima Cruz A 'Tale of Two Cities', a 'Veteran Soldier', or the Struggle for Endangered Nobilities: The Two Jornadas de Huva (1633, 1635)RELIGION: CONFLICT AND INTERACTIONAlan Strathern, The Conversion of Rulers in Portuguese-Era Sri Lanka John Clifford Holt, Buddhist Rebuttals: The Changing of the Gods and Royal (Re)legitimization in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Sri Lanka Ines G. Zupanov, Goan Brahmans in the Land of Promise: Missionaries, Spies and Gentiles in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka Jurrien van Goor, State and Religion under the Dutch in Ceylon, c. 1640-1796SPACE AND HERITAGE: CONSTRUCTION, REPRESENTATIONZoltan Biedermann, Perceptions and Representations of the Sri Lankan Space in Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Texts and MapsHelder Carita, Portuguese-Influenced Religious Architecture in Ceylon: Creation, Types and ContinuityNuno Vassallo e Silva, An Art for Export: Sinhalese Ivory and Crystal in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth CenturiesLANGUAGE AND ETHNICITY, IDENTITY AND MEMORYKenneth David, Jackson Singelle Nona/Jinggli Nona: A Traveling Portuguese Burgher MuseDennis B. McGilvray, The Portuguese Burghers of Eastern Sri Lanka in the Wake of Civil War and Tsunami

The Archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Local Institutions in Batavia (Jakarta)
The Archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Local Institutions in Batavia (Jakarta)

Author: Louisa Balk

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-10-31

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13: 9047421795

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company) was the largest of the early modern European trading companies operating in Asia. Its operations produced not only warehouses packed with spices, coffee, tea, textiles, porcelain and silk, but also shiploads of documents. Data on political, economic, cultural, religious, and social conditions spread over an enormous area circulated between the VOC establishments, the administrative centre of the trade in Batavia, now the city of Jakarta, and the Board of Directors in the Netherlands. The co-operation between the National Archives of Indonesia and the Netherlands resulted in this extensive catalogue of fifteen archives of VOC institutions in Jakarta. The VOC records are included in UNESCO ́s Memory of the World Register.

Parish Churches in the Early Modern World
Parish Churches in the Early Modern World

Author: Andrew Spicer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1351912763

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Across Europe, the parish church has stood for centuries at the centre of local communities; it was the focal point of its religious life, the rituals performed there marked the stages of life from the cradle to the grave. Nonetheless the church itself artistically and architecturally stood apart from the parish community. It was often the largest and only stone-built building in a village; it was legally distinct being subject to canon law, as well as consecrated for the celebration of religious rites. The buildings associated with the "cure of souls" were sacred sites or holy places, where humanity interacted with the divine. In spite of the importance of the parish church, these buildings have generally not received the same attention from historians as non-parochial places of worship. This collection of essays redresses this balance and reflects on the parish church across a number of confessions - Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Anti-Trinitarian - during the early modern period. Rather than providing a series of case studies of individual buildings, each essay looks at the evolution of parish churches in response to religious reform as well as confessional change and upheaval. They examine aspects of their design and construction; furnishings and material culture; liturgy and the use of the parish church. While these essays range widely across Europe, the volume also considers how religious provision and the parish church were translated into a global context with colonial and commercial expansion in the Americas and Asia. This interdisciplinary volume seeks to identify what was distinctive about the parish church for the congregations that gathered in them for worship and for communities across the early modern world.

The Life of Governor Joan Gideon Loten (1710-1789)
The Life of Governor Joan Gideon Loten (1710-1789)

Author: Alexander J. P. Raat

Publisher: Uitgeverij Verloren

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 832

ISBN-13: 9087041519

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Details Loten's personal history and his professional career as a servant of the Dutch East Indies Company. It contains an inventory of his natural history drawings in the London Natural History Museum and Teylers Museum at Haarlem -- a valuable treasure of eighteenth-century natural history of Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Loten's writings, quoted extensively in this biography, cover early-eighteenth-century narrow-minded, provincial Utrecht in the Dutch Republic, the exotic Dutch East Indies, and cosmopolitan London in the latter part of the century.

Spices, Scents and Silk
Spices, Scents and Silk

Author: James F. Hancock

Publisher: CABI

Published: 2021-08-31

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1789249740

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Spices, scents and silks were at the centre of world trade for millennia. Through their international trade, humans were pushed to explore and then travel to the far corners of the earth. Almost from their inception, the earliest great civilizations - Egypt, Sumer and Harappa - became addicted to the luxury products of far-off lands and established long-reaching trade networks. Over time, great powers fought mightily for the kingdoms where silk, spices and scents were produced. The New World was accidentally discovered by Columbus in his quest for spices. In this book, eminent horticulturist and author James Hancock examines the origins and early domestication and culture of spices, scents and silks and the central role these exotic luxuries played in the lives of the ancients. The book also traces the development of the great international trade networks and explores how struggles for trade dominance and demand for such luxuries shaped the world.

Centres and Cycles of Accumulation in and Around the Netherlands During the Early Modern Period
Centres and Cycles of Accumulation in and Around the Netherlands During the Early Modern Period

Author: Lissa Roberts

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 3643900953

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Netherlands housed a number of widely-known, envied, and emulated centers of accumulation during the early-modern period. Raw and manufactured goods passed through Dutch port cities, linking the country to global cycles of accumulation and exchange. Its institutions of learning and culture similarly served as internationally famous centers of accumulation that furthered knowledge and cultural production, embodied in the form of books, maps, prints, exhibits, and the like. This collection of essays brings together the Dutch histories of manufacture, commerce, and global exchange along with the histories of knowledge and cultural circulation during the 17th and 18th centuries by anatomizing the multi-faceted concept of accumulation. The book explores the processes that led to the formation of concentrated, often hybrid, sites of material, intellectual, and cultural accumulation in the Netherlands and its overseas stations, as well as the concerns and consequences to which the successes and challenges of accumulation gave rise. It will be of interest to historians of science, technology, culture, and economics. (Series: Low Countries Studies on the Circulation of Natural Knowledge - Vol. 2)