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"Flores, Jorge Manuel, 1964-"
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Empire of Contingency
Explores the information and communication practices of
the Portuguese empire in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
India Empire of Contingency explores the
information and communication practices of the Portuguese empire in
late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India-a period during which
Portuguese imperial ambitions were struggling for survival, while
the Mughal empire was at the height of its power and influence.
Jorge Flores uncovers the tenuous but ingenious apparatuses of
intelligence through which the Estado da Índia (the \"State of the
Indies,\" the name given to the Portuguese political administrative
unit in the region between the Cape of Good Hope and East Asia)
endeavored to survive in a vast Indo-Persian world shaped by the
influence and power of the Mughal empire. Detailing the complex
relations that the officials of the Portuguese empire, particularly
in Goa, the capital of the Estado da Índia, maintained with the
Mughal empire as well as the sultanates of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur
in the Deccan region-through information gathering, record-keeping,
interpreting, and diplomatic correspondence-the book demonstrates
how the Portuguese territories along the western coast of India
were substantially incorporated into the vast Persianate cultural
sphere spanning from Iran to Southeast Asia. The process of
empire-building on the fringes of the Persianate world and the
prolonged interaction with the Mughal empire, Ahmadnagar, and
Bijapur, Flores argues, led to the irregular, non-linear, and
incomplete assimilation of the Portuguese empire into Persianate
India. Overturning teleological narratives that portray the
workings of (European) empire as the unilateral imposition of power
dynamics by a dominant, omniscient actor, Flores reveals how
Portuguese imperial administrators were vulnerable participants in
a network of relations involving multiple political
powers-relations that required enormous bureaucratic and diplomatic
effort to understand and successfully navigate. Showing how a
European empire was drawn into the political practices and rituals
of the Indo-Persian world, Flores decenters the lenses
conventionally used to observe the Portuguese empire in Asia and
helps us rethink its nature while questioning the boundaries of the
Indo-Persian world.
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