Conclusion

The collapse of the inter-imperial dialogue in Sri Lanka calls for further extrapolations regarding the merits and shortcomings of connected history. Do commensurability and the potential for mutual understandings logically increase as societies talk to each other, or can they also decrease? What does the case examined in this book tell us about the interdependence of the global and the local? Does Sri Lanka enrich our understanding of the making of global power dynamics elsewhere? May it be worth engaging more systematically than before in ‘(dis)connected history’—an approach that explores the global connectivity of early modern polities along with the obstacles arising to it? A methodological state of grace would allow us to examine the profound, inextricable intertwinement of deeply contradictory processes of convergence and divergence as a core characteristic of early modernity at large.

Conversion Diplomacy

Chapter 4 explores the ways in which rulers and princes across Sri Lanka followed Bhuvanekabāhu’s initiative and engaged diplomatically with the Portuguese empire. Conversion to Catholicism became a key diplomatic tool during the 1540s. This served the interests of Lankan rulers and princes in the short term, helping them to transfuse imperial ideas into the Portuguese sphere, but also prepared the ground for larger transformations in the longer run, driven by Catholic Universalism. Sri Lanka as a territory of the mind began to emerge among the Portuguese, combining Lankan ideas of the island as a repository of cakravarti emperorship with a novel notion of spiritual conquest. This chapter explores a range of local contexts including diplomacy in Sītāvaka, Kandy, Jaffna, and smaller polities such as Batticaloa. Emphasis is again on local diplomatic agency.

From Allies to Invaders

The clash of legal and political cultures that unfolded as the idea of conquest began to materialize is the subject of Chapter 7. The main question addressed is whether the new policy of conquest supported by the Habsburg administration can be explained in terms of ‘Spanish influence’ on the Portuguese imperial apparatus. It is argued that the Iberian Union of crowns served as an opportunity for Portuguese reformists to change their own empire. Although orders for the conquest of Ceylon were issued in Madrid, an intricate web of communications spanning half the globe was ultimately a more powerful source of political change than any of the central authorities of the Catholic Monarchy. Emphasis is still placed on the commonalities of Iberian and Lankan political culture, on the possibilities of joint empire-building as well as the impossibilities.

Moving into the Native Ground

Much of the second half of the sixteenth century was spent, even after the brutal looting in 1551 of the most sacred site of Lankan Buddhism at Kōṭṭe, in wars during which Portuguese troops followed Lankan orders. If comparisons with the New World can be made, then it is not so much with reference to the ‘Middle Ground’ paradigm coined by Richard White, as to the ‘Native Ground’ identified by historians such as Kathleen DuVal and Pekka Hämäläinen in other parts of North America. The kingdom of Kōṭṭe itself was constantly besieged by rival Lankan forces. In Colombo, an increasingly complex Mestizo society appeared, especially after this city absorbed the royal court of Kōṭṭe in 1565. The new capital remained politically dependent on the old imperial project of Kōṭṭe, but also became a potential breeding ground for plans of conquest—some inspired by Spanish deeds—that could not be controlled indefinitely by the Lankan elite.

The Matrioshka Principle and Its Discontents

Chapter 3 explains on what grounds Lankan rulers remained committed to the idea of co-opting the Portuguese through tributary diplomacy, against the backdrop of a growing regional conflict involving the Muslim Mappilas of South India. Negotiations culminated in 1542 with the reception in Lisbon of an embassy sent by king Bhuvanekabāhu VII of Kōṭṭe to John III of Portugal. In addition to a magnificent ivory casket, significant archival materials survive today to give us a detailed picture of how the inter-imperial deal was imagined in the Lankan capital along the lines of the principle of nesting empires, the ‘Matrioshka principle’. These papers also show the limitations of the conversation. A picture emerges that is at once astounding in the way it contains two very different but commensurable imperial models, and ominous in the way these two models do not quite talk to each other in the way the elite of Kōṭṭe expected.

Translatio Imperii in the Tropics

Chapter 6 analyses the transformations that paved the way, in the 1580s and 1590s, for a policy turn towards an officially sanctioned Iberian conquest of Ceylon. The 1580 donation of Kōṭṭe to the Portuguese crown, which would itself fall into Habsburg hands soon after, emerges as a key moment along with the dramatic military and political developments in other parts of the island. The growth and collapse of the rival empire of Sītāvaka in the interior is shown to have triggered perceptions of opportunity among Portuguese leaders, but wider connections were also essential for change to occur. Crucial new links emerged between Colombo, Malacca, Manila, and Madrid, the imperial capital where, ultimately, conquest orders were issued. Even so, the local initiatives of Luso-Lankan and Sinhalese war-makers remained a driving force.

Introduction

This introductory chapter presents the question at the core of this study: why conquer? The idea of conquering parts of Asia did not come to Europeans spontaneously, but its early history has rarely been explored in much detail. There is a paradox built into ‘connected history’ writing, the dominant form among early modern global historians over the past decades: as agency has been devolved to Asian societies, the European impulses to conquest have lost visibility. The challenge is to redress the imbalance without falling back into a Eurocentric model. The diplomatic reception of a Sri Lankan ambassador by John III of Portugal in Lisbon, in 1542, exemplifies the challenges ahead. The episode is all about the making and workings of connections across cultural boundaries. Yet it also encapsulates signs of a balance of powers that is about to tilt in favour of the European side.

Anatomy of a Divergence

Chapter 8 argues that the final years of the sixteenth century and the first decade of the seventeenth century brought about one of the great misunderstandings of the early modern period: the reading of Kōṭṭe’s suzerainty-based imperial project, by the Habsburg authorities, as a project of sovereignty-oriented conquest. The resulting wars that dragged on during the following decades resulted largely from this widening gap in political culture. Key to an understanding of this gap is the emerging European notion of territory as a fundament of the dynastic state. To illustrate this, two maps are explored with a view to the underlying conceptions of political space. The shift from ‘Native Ground’ to colonial ground had a major impact both on the local political system and the global empire.

Lords of the Land, Lords of the Sea

Chapter 2 highlights the early obstacles to the unfolding of a Lankan-Portuguese inter-imperial dialogue. It dwells on the contrast between the lack of curiosity shown by early Portuguese agents of empire in Ceylon, and the vivid interest taken by the Lankan elites in the Portuguese. While Ceylon disappeared from the Portuguese imperial imagination, in a process that is most visible in the development of Portuguese cartography, the elite of the kingdom of Kōṭṭe, which operated on grounds of the concept of tributary overlordship, attempted to entice Portuguese leaders into visiting the island. This inverts the logic of traditional narratives of the first encounter. Requests were soon made to the reluctant Portuguese for the establishment of a military base at Colombo, which, it was hoped, would help consolidate the authority of the ruler of Kōṭṭe in a highly unstable political environment, against the fierce competition of other Lankan rulers, and amidst internal, factional strife.

(Dis)connecting Empires

Chapter 1 drafts a roadmap for a critical connected history of empires in the early modern world. It asks where exactly ‘connections’ sit with regard to the global and the local. For an understanding of global connections, local contexts remain key. There, we can seek out the ‘cultural history of the political’ and examine the role played by communication and translation. The notion that unfolding European-Asia dialogues can be sliced up into rigid ‘phases’ (e.g. ‘commerce’ to ‘conquest’) is reductive. At the heart of all interactions is the possibility of violence. Violence is not a monopoly of states in the modern sense of the word, but of polities that entertain a complex relationship with space, through layered suzerainties translatable across Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. The ‘Imperial Theme’ identified by Frances Yates calls to be made to work across the globe. It could foment the formulation of a general theory of the imperial in the early modern world.