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In considering the Renaissance in “global” terms and understanding how England and its European competitors developed a geographical imagination, it is also useful to examine the historical spaces of “contact zones” as a way of invoking what Mary Louise Pratt defines as “the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect” (7). Pratt focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travelers in Africa and South America, viewing their interactions with the “natives” of these lands in terms of “colonial encounters,” but nonetheless wishes to “foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of [these] encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by … accounts of conquest and domination” (7). The European exploration and trading activities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not yet a part of a full-fledged colonial global economy that Pratt locates in the eighteenth century, but these early “colonial encounters” nonetheless offer a complex and nuanced perspective on growing expansionist drives exhibited by several nations, as evident in the ten essays in Part II, which examine a range of travel writings, including visual images and cartographic materials. Mapping different “contact zones” in a wide range of geographical locations, these essays involve many different actors: merchants, factors, artists, mariners, ambassadors, religious missionaries captives, soldiers, and free agents, and wives, seeking wealth, fame, and other diverse experiences. The “encounter,” a dominant trope in early modern historiography, is always a useful point of inquiry while also attending to the historical, contextual frameworks within which any encounter is spawned and represented.

One arena in which one can see Europe’s increasingly expansionist global ambitions is in the large archive of travel narratives that were produced and transnationally disseminated in this period. For instance, working within the tradition of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s travel collection Delle Navigationi et Viaggi (1550–1556) and other European geographers and travelers, Richard Hakluyt’s nationalist and emergent colonial promotion of England in Principal Navigations (as mentioned earlier) testifies to this link between travel writing and England’s growing commercial and imperial ambitions. Travelers provided useful knowledge that could be used to promote trading activities and political influence. Furthermore, the commercial imperatives of the new print culture gave a strong impetus to travelers to write about the new worlds, thus making “travel and travel writing mutually generative” (Fuller, 2). And it is on the sites of these “contact zones” that the political, commercial, cultural, religious, social, and aesthetic effects of Europeans’ global forays are most evident.

In her essay “‘Apes of Imitation’: Imitation and Identity in Sir Thomas Roe’s Embassy to India” (Chapter 6), Nandini Das takes us to an intriguing “contact zone” following the interactions between the Emperor Jehangir and King James’s Ambassador (and a representative of the East India Company), Sir Thomas Roe in Mughal India. She begins with the varying accounts of the wager between Roe and Jahangir about whether Roe could correctly identify a copy of an English miniature made by the Mughal court painter. Differing accounts of this episode agree on one thing, namely, that the imitative skills of the Indian artist were exemplary. The responses of Roe and his chaplain, Edward Terry, combining admiration with a certain degree of both conscious and unconscious resistance to Muslim sociocultural negotiations, highlight three issues, according to Das. One is that given the power of the Mughal empire and the English agents’ roles as supplicants, how they negotiated these encounters often led them to consider, via a “self-reflexive turn,” issues of identity and difference between the two cultures, which in turn gives us some idea about “the interactions between the home and the world, the familiar and the foreign, through which both the travelers’ experiences and their resulting texts took shape.” These cross-cultural encounters were inflected in terms of Roe’s frequently inadequate responses to Muslim social, linguistic, and cultural codes and rituals that shaped the Mughal court. Second, the large body of travel advice literature frequently reminds us that the subject of imitation was at the center of Renaissance England’s debate about travel and that imitation posed a moral threat to the gullible traveler, as evident in Ascham’s writings (also mentioned by Hadfield in Chapter 11) and in William Rankins’s tract “The English Ape.” Finally, Das’s analysis of the anxieties about travelers intersects with the literary concept of imitatio, with its emphasis on distinctions between desirable and undesirable imitation. With the extended focus of this essay on Thomas Roe’s struggle between feelings of admiration and contention, and between identity and difference while he is at the Mughal court, her essay illuminates “the fragile correspondences and seminal convergences of ‘systems of meaning’ between the two nations” in a contact zone, which invokes “co-presence, interaction, [and] interlocking understandings and practices” (Pratt, 7).

Another “contact zone,” farther east to Japan and visited by two travelers and actors from Europe, vividly comes to life in Mihoko Suzuki’s essay, “Early Modern European Encounters with Japan: Luis Frois and Engelbert Kaempfer” (Chapter 7). Frois (1532–1597), a member of the Portuguese Jesuit mission, and Kaempfer (1651–1716), the German scientist who attended the Dutch East India Company, wrote extensive accounts concerning their encounters with Japan. These proto-ethnographic accounts of Japanese society, written a century apart, reflect the different historical circumstances of the European authors and the changing contexts of the Japanese political order in the course of the seventeenth century when the Tokugawa shogunate became firmly established. The comparative analysis of the two writers suggests that Kaempfer’s differences from Frois can be fruitfully understood in terms of two theoretical paradigms: Talal Asad’s “formations of the secular” and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “provincializing Europe.” Thus, the author’s conclusions belie any fixed assumptions and expectations we may ascribe to Europeans in their representations of alterity and difference when they encountered foreigners.

It is generally a given that early modern travelers from the West were typically men, and women often faced cultural prohibitions and restrictions against venturing outside domestic spaces, as can be found in English travel guides that often functioned as admonitory tracts for potential women travelers (Akimie and Andrea 2019, 1–5). However, while the presence and voices of men dominate travel accounts and other related documents, recent scholarship has begun to recognize that women were not entirely missing in the vast apparatus of travel, commerce, cross-cultural contacts, and early colonizing activities emanating from England and Europe. In fact, Akhimie and Andrea’s coedited volume, Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (2019), offers compelling counternarratives that “confirm that a wide range of women and girls engaged in extensive movement within and beyond the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (1). One can extrapolate on these findings to apply to European women who may have traveled in varied roles: voluntary travels as wives and dependents among elites and involuntary travel as “servants and chattel” (3–4).

An account of an exceptional woman traveler encompassing a host of identities across Europe and Asia is the subject of the next essay, by Bernadette Andrea, titled “Other Renaissances, Multiple Easts, and Eurasian Borderlands: Teresa Sampsonia Sherley’s Journey from Persia to Poland, 1608–1611” (Chapter 8). Shortly after her baptism as a Roman Catholic at the Carmelite mission in Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Persian empire, on February 2, 1608, and her marriage to the expatriate Englishman Robert Sherley the same day, 19-year-old Teresa Sampsonia Sherley set off for what would be the first of three extended journeys across the breadth of Asia and into the heart of Europe (Robert Coverte, A True and Almost Incredible Report [London, 1612], 54). Upon her death in 1668, she was laid to rest at the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala in Rome. Her epitaph – “Theresia Sampsonia Amazonitis, Sampsuffi Circassiae Principis filia” [Teresa Sampsonia, from the land of the Amazons, daughter of Sampsuff, a Circassian ruler] – celebrated her impressive lineage and indomitable spirit even as it enshrined her as an exotic acquisition for Western Christendom. Shaped by her Circassian background, Persianate education, and multiple journeys, Teresa Sampsonia’s life accordingly offers unique insights into how early modern women navigated competing religious affiliations and shared patriarchal norms across “East” and “West” as this dichotomy was mapped onto Asia and Europe and projected onto Islamdom and Christendom. In this chapter, Andrea documents a connected history of Teresa Sampsonia’s multiple contacts and crossings to ask how a seventeenth-century Circassian–Persian woman’s journey from Isfahan to Kraków illuminates and unsettles the “East–West” divide that defines “the imaginary of the [early] modern/colonial world system” (Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 23, and The Darker Side of the Renaissance, vii). As this chapter establishes, her travels are overdetermined by, even as they deconstruct, the imaginative geographies of Orientalism and Occidentalism.

Global travels and cross-cultural encounters continue apace in the next essay, titled “Becoming Mughal, Becoming Dom João de Távora: Friendship, Dissimulation, and Manipulation in Jesuit and Mughal Exchanges” (Chapter 9), by João Vicente Melo. English early modern studies on travel and traffic (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) generally focus on the English travelers to the Mughal Court in India such as Thomas Roe and Edward Terry. A more complex story emerges when we consider the Portuguese presence as a rival European power at the time, with Goa as its first territorial possession and the capital of Portugal’s eastern empire. Crucial to the consolidation of the Portuguese Estado da Índia were the Jesuit missions sponsored by the crown. The Jesuits not only contributed to the territorialization of the Portuguese colonial apparatus but also served as diplomatic mediators between Goa and other Asian courtly centers. And from many accounts across three sources – Mughal, Portuguese (Jesuit), and their English rivals – we learn of the Jesuit influence in the courts of the Mughal emperor Akbar and his son, Jahangir, and of related diplomatic activity between the indigenous Islamic rulers and the Portuguese colonizers. This chapter examines the interconnected stories of a Mughal official, Muqarrab Khan, and a Jesuit missionary, Manuel Pinheiro. Between the 1600s and 1610s, the two men became pivotal actors in the diplomatic exchanges between the Mughal Empire and the Portuguese Estado da Índia. The close association between the Mughal official and the Jesuit missionary led to one of the most curious and enigmatic episodes of Mughal and European exchanges – the secret conversion of Muqarrab Khan (baptized João de Távora) to Catholicism in Goa around 1611. By reconstructing and analyzing the relationship between Pinheiro and Muqarrab Khan, the chapter examines the different strategies adopted by European and South Asian agents involved in cross-cultural diplomatic exchanges, marked by a mutual curiosity about each other’s religion.

While these varied “contact zones,” on sites of different geographical locations, evoke a sense of frontiers, though often shifting, diffuse, and with implications of crossover possibilities, the next essay, “The Queer Moor: Bodies, Borders, and Barbary Inns” (Chapter 10), by Ian Smith theorizes the image of an inn or a hotel as a frontier of a transnational encounter in the early modern period. It begins with the reference in Shakespeare’s Othello to the “Sagittary Inn,” where Othello, early modern traveler par excellence, is lodged. The emblematic name evoked by the figure of “Sagittarius,” the centaur, the half-man, half-horse famous in classical literature, intersects with the title “The Queer Moor” – a term not only referencing Shakespeare’s “peripatetic African” but also identifying, Smith argues, “the persistent construction of the North African, Muslim, or Turk as sodomite in order to examine the ideological value of such an inscription in European dramatic and travel literature.”

Linking images of the Sagittary inn as a place of boundary crossings – sexual, human, bestial, religious, political, cultural – with Leo Africanus’s evocation of Barbary inns in terms of a culture of transvestism and of the Turkish seraglio functioning as a transnational dwelling and site of cultural and sexual reorientations, Smith inflects cross-cultural exchange with racial and gender ideologies in the early modern period. More specifically, he suggests, via the premises of “Queer” theory, that the English (and European) obsession with sodomy among the “infidels” takes “the form of the symbolic construction of the masculine, patriarchal European self under siege by the representative forces of Islam who have, in a manner recalling Iago’s own anxiety, leaped into the driver’s seat.” Global networks of exchange in the Renaissance not only implied commercial and economic transactions but also, as Smith illuminates, refigured European systems of sexual signification, in this instance sodomy, in grappling with new and variable categories of difference evoked by the “others” they encountered.

While global early modernity propelled the English (and Europeans) to seek and imagine “worlds elsewhere” and the rewards of travel were widely touted, especially in terms of commercial profits and national progress, England’s early modern global exposure also produced attendant anxieties about “leaving home,” as elaborated in the next essay in Part II: Andrew Hadfield’s “The Benefits of a Warm Study: The Resistance to Travel before Empire” (Chapter 11). Elizabethans were not as “globally inclined” as we imagine them to be, he argues, and the attraction for commodities, gold, and a desire for adventure and power were countered by fears about the “dangers and cost of imperial expansion.” The source of these anxieties went deeper in the ambivalence – and often hostility – to travel itself per se, which some saw as a threat to the morals, religious values, and the character of the nation, and as somehow unnecessary in the acquisition of true learning that comes from books.

Citing dominant intellectual and cultural figures of the period such as Roger Ascham, Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Nashe, and Edmund Spenser, Hadfield addresses their various responses to questions about the problematic relation between representation and reality in terms of the purported value of travel: what can be learned from it and how to acquire knowledge. Considering Ascham’s views in some depth, Hadfield recapitulates the former’s critique of “the sexual beliefs and habits of Italianized Englishmen” and of the English authorities for allowing unrestricted travel, whereby they could destroy the “religious and social fabric” of the nation. The preservation of the post-Reformation Protestant nation was obviously at stake. Montaigne more eclectically calls for unlearned travelers like his servant who can more accurately represent the “raw material of experience” and wonders if travel can provide any real knowledge. The centerpiece of Hadfield’s essay, however, is Thomas Nashe’s provocative The Unfortunate Traveler (1594), which depicts Jack Wilton’s adventures and travels in violent scenarios in France, Germany, and Italy, which in turn refigures Ascham’s complaint about the corrupting effects of an education via foreign travel. Ending with a reflection on the proem to Book II of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Hadfield argues that while many in the Renaissance considered travel knowledge problematic in its truth claims, they also preferred reading the accounts of travelers rather than traveling themselves. Despite their anxieties, they could not escape the worlds elsewhere.

Catherine Ryu’s essay, “The Politics of Identity: Reassessing Global Encounters through the Failure of the English East India Company in Japan” (Chapter 12), considers the global Renaissance from the perspective of seventeenth-century Japan. The East India Company’s venture in Hirado, Japan (1613–1623), ended in failure and insolvency, despite the initial hopes and expectations of the company and in contrast to its success in India and elsewhere. In an attempt to articulate the reasons for this failure, Ryu analyzes the anxiety-ridden relationship between two key actors in this scenario, both Englishmen: John Saris, the first director of the English factory at Hirado; and William Adams (c. 1564–1620), the first Englishman, a pilot, and informal adviser to the Japanese shogun, Tokugaza Ieyasu, in the context of the identity politics of the period. Ryu examines Adam’s network of complex social, commercial, political, and sexual relationships as a lens through which to understand the forces behind his long and prosperous life in Japan, in contrast to the brief existence of the English factory.

In particular, Ryu illuminates the significance of the fiasco of the factory in Hirado, together with England’s subsequent failure to establish trade in Nagasaki, within the intensified identity politics during what is called the end of the so-called Christian Century, immediately followed by a period of sakoku (closed country) until the mid-nineteenth century. But, as Ryu points out, Japan continued to remain connected to the vibrant China-centered economic system of the period, which some historians consider “as the veritable engine behind the world economy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.” In looking beyond the context of England’s nationalistic self-aggrandizement (some of which is apparent in Saris’s attitudes and cross-cultural interactions), this essay reveals how the ill-conceived mercantile venture left the Company members with little flexibility to maneuver. More importantly, in terms of a broader historical perspective, Ryu challenges the “epistemological framework that supported the ‘Rise of the West’ as the metanarrative for the history of all human civilization.” Instead, she presents a fraught “contact zone” – a site that remained resistant to the expanding forces of European mercantile imperialism.

While we typically think of the age of discovery in terms of English (and European) expansion to the West (the New World) and the East (the Old World), the next two essays map the trajectory of England’s commercial and political interests in “contact zones” directed to the North Seas and beyond. Mary C. Fuller’s essay “Placing Iceland” (Chapter 13) examines the shifting perceptions of Iceland in the early modern period. Focusing on The Commentary of Island (or Brevis commentaries de Islandia) by Arngrimur Jónsson, published in both English and Latin in Hakluyt’s multivolume Principal Navigations (1598–1600), Fuller places this narrative within a network of discourses and practices: commercial, historical/mythical, religious, cultural, and cartographic.

Iceland was “known” in early modern England through multiple histories and through both popular and learned knowledge, yet it remained in important ways unknown and obscure. Hakluyt’s medieval materials made Iceland part of a “legendary, archipelagic greater Britain, first subject to King Arthur” even as they recalled in more fragmentary ways a history of conquest by the Norse. In the practical terms of global long-distance trade, Iceland was the site of a productive English fishery. Yet despite its integration into a network of fisheries that linked ports from Newfoundland to Norway, Iceland seemed infinitely remote to European cosmographers, who represented it as a land of natural and supernatural marvels and of uncultured peoples. Jónsson’s Commentary of Island sets out not to narrate another voyage but to debunk xenophobic theories about Iceland’s geography and culture shaped by its distance from Europe and its northern position. Rather than a land of natural and supernatural marvels and barbarous living, he insisted, Iceland was a land of virtuous austerity and pure Christianity. Alone among the ethnographic materials printed by Hakluyt, Commentary writes back against a European discourse that had framed its culture of origin in exoticized and often xenophobic terms. It educates its Renaissance readers to see Iceland not as a remote and barbarous place, as “other,” but as a Protestant nation closely linked to England.

English explorations of sea routes to the north are also the subject of Gerald MacLean’s essay, “East by Northeast: The English among the Russians, 1553–1603” (Chapter 14). Discovery of new lands and routes to lucrative trade was the key factor that shaped the power alignments among European powers in the global Renaissance, and one such endeavor by the English was to find a northeast passage to Cathay and China. In 1553, a group of merchants, later to form the Muscovy Company, sponsored such an expedition by Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor, during which the former died at sea and the latter famously sailed into the White Sea, discovering the route to Russia. According to MacLean, their voyage and other attempts to discover a northeast passage to China were ultimately given up as being impractical, but they buttressed the “emerging mythology of England’s providential destiny and global importance as an imperial maritime nation” and had the unintended consequence of opening commercial and diplomatic relations with Russia and Persia.

The reports that came out from later travelers to Russia, several published in Hakluyt, according to MacLean, fascinated readers at home and gradually constellated into an “English mythology” about the “relative backwardness” of Russians, which further made it “possible for the English to imagine themselves living amidst greater wealth and civility.” Accounts by Adam Clements, who went on the 1555 expedition; Anthony Jenkinson, who made four voyages to Russia between 1557 and 1572, which were both published by Hakluyt; and other separate books, like Giles Fletcher’s Of the Russe Common Wealth (1591), illustrate how “commercial ambition helped generate imperial fantasy.” These visions, as the author notes, developed in terms of cultural comparisons. Both Ottomans and Russians provided models of existing empires – adjacent Eastern realms governed by Muslim despots and Christian tyrants – but they also confirmed Protestant England’s “God-given right to establish a global maritime empire ….”

As we conclude Part II on “contact zones,” we turn to Persia under the Safavid dynasty (1501–1722) in the context of the wider cultural relations between Safavid Persia and Stuart Britain at the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly during the Sherley brothers’ so-called embassy (1599–1628). Typically, the lens through which early modern Persia and Anglo–Persian relations were later observed and studied has been provided by the likes of the Sherleys: English (European) adventurers, ambassadors, missionaries, travelers, and so on. In “Connected Political Imaginaries: The Shāhnāmah and Anglo-Persian Alliance Building, 1599–1628” (Chapter 15), Masoud Ghorbaninejad argues that the early modern political imaginary under the Safavid dynasty was informed by what was later known as the Persian “national epic,” that is, Firdawsī’s Shāhnāmah (“Book of Kings,” completed 1010 ce). Describing the Shāhnāmah as a popular, formative element of nation-oriented cultures across the Persianate world, Ghorbaninejad places particular emphasis on ‘Abbas I the Great’s (r. 1588–1629) approach to alliance building with James I (r. 1603–1625) and Charles I Stuart (r. 1625–1649). After an introduction historicizing the role of the Persian national epic, the chapter investigates the Shāhnāmah-patterned “Persian attire” in a famous portrait of Robert Sherley (1581–1628), whose exaggerated and well-publicized adventures seem to have partially and implicitly influenced the imaginings of Persia in two Shakespearean plays. Finally, providing a sampling of Safavid royal names, he charts a layered interdynastic correspondence between Ottomans, Safavids, and Stuarts that employs Shāhnāmah shahs and champions to great effect – and as sources for cultural and political mediation in these interrelationships. Allowing for a pluralism of perspectives, this study decenters the otherwise dominant political imaginary (the “Western” or “European” perspective) while offering us a vision of the global early modern that exceeds and repeatedly crosses the boundaries of European history.