Sanjay Subrahmanyam > Quotes

“The VOC was interested in Sri Lanka because of its cinnamon production and strategic location, since control of Sri Lanka implied an improved ability to check navigation between the western Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. In”
― Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History

“It is an uncomfortable fact that the sources on which historical writings are based do not always confirm the historian in his or her prejudices. And prejudices surely abound in writings on the Portuguese in Asia, both in the histories written by nationalistic Portuguese historians and others, whether Asians, Africans, or Anglo-Saxons. Some of these views can be summarily dismissed, based as they are on either an uncritical acceptance of the “universal mission” of the Portuguese in the pursuance of transcendent aims and values, or alternatively of an anachronistic tracing back of modern international tensions to the sixteenth century. But”
― Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History

“The term casado then, even when applied to Asian inhabitants of the Estado, obviously preserved a sense in which it indicated a claim to bourgeois status, and in this manner was also a precursor to the category of burgher that the Dutch were to employ in Sri Lanka.”
― Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History

“A facile approach to this underside of the Portuguese presence in Asia would be to dismiss it as little more than a generalization of the phenomenon later celebrated by Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim: of the European “going native.” It is the contention in this chapter that such an approach is false, because it imposes on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the judgements and categories of a later period, judgements that were crucially related to changed attitudes towards miscegenation, and the “proper” place of the European in Asia.”
― Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History

“Designated mouros or Moors, in view of their association with Mauritania (the Roman name for the Maghreb), these antagonists became the “straw men” for Portuguese nationalist ideologues for many centuries. For, in a sense, the mouros were the midwives attendant on the birth of the nation of Portugal, and once in adolescence the nation still felt the need to define its identity in contradistinction to them.”
― Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History