B4928 - Europe and the East in the Modern Era (1) (LM)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course students will be aware of the global dimension of Early Modern economy and society and, more specifically, of how geographical discoveries, colonialism, and capitalist expansion created a web of connections between Europe and the East. They will also show an understanding on how these relationships gave rise to - and were affected by - forms of representation that eventually came to be known as Orientalism. At the end of the course students will be able to independently engage in the critical analysis of historical sources of various kinds and to apply their analytical and critical skills in professional activities associated with the historical disciplines.

Course contents

What did "Europe" and "the East" mean before either existed as we know them? This course examines the encounters between European powers and the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires -- as well as South Asia, China, Japan, and Africa -- from the mid-fifteenth to the late seventeenth century, a period in which none of the participants knew who would come to dominate, and most would have bet differently than history turned out.

These encounters were anything but neutral: they involved violence, trade, faith, betrayal, friendship, and above all the effort to make sense of a world that constantly unsettled what was thought to be certain. But they were also — and this is the course's central claim — the workshop in which some of our most durable categories were manufactured. "Europe," "the East," "civilization": each of these words has a history, and much of that history runs through the encounters we will study. Rather than using these categories as frameworks, the course treats them as objects of inquiry, asking when they were coined, by whom, against whom.

The method is inductive. We start from cases: individual lives, objects, letters, images, single encounters. We will will read conversion narratives, travel accounts, diplomatic letters, Qur'an translations, and courtly chronicles; we will look at maps, miniatures, medals, and folding screens. Knowledge did not move in one direction only. Encounters with Chinese philosophy, Indian ethics, and Islamic cosmologies — with other ways of praying, classifying, and treating plants and animals — unsettled European ideas about nature, truth, and divine order, sometimes dismantling them. Our tools come from connected history, global history, microhistory, and the critical study of orientalism.

The course moves in four stages. First, a set of openings through objects and lives. Second, the rival universalisms of the great empires — Habsburg, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal — each claiming the world entire. Third, the go-betweens: dragomans, converts, captives, merchants, scholars, and the practices of dissimulation, translation, and brokerage that made contact possible. Fourth, the making of knowledge about the "East" in Europe, from Arabic studies to the first printed Qur'ans, ending with a genealogy of the idea of civilization itself, from its eighteenth-century coinage to its twentieth-century afterlives.

Throughout, we will try to hear the voices — sometimes loud, sometimes faint — of those who moved between worlds: travelers, missionaries, dragomans, captives, converts, and librarians. Their experiences formed a fragile and complex early modern conversation about how human beings relate to each other, to the divine, and to the living world around them.

By the end of the course, students will be able to: read a primary source against the grain of its rhetoric; situate a single encounter within competing imperial projects; reconstruct how knowledge about other religions and cultures was produced, transmitted, and distorted; and treat analytical categories — "Europe," "the East," "civilization" — as historical artifacts with dates, authors, and politics.

Above all, they will have gained a sharper sense of how stories about civilizations are made, transmitted, contested — and sometimes lost

Week 1 - Openings: Objects, Lives, and Uncertain Worlds. We start with three objects: a Japanese folding screen, a merchant's letter from India, the story of a Muslim diplomat who became a Christian author. Each one opens a question that will run through the course. Then we set the stage: what did the world look like around 1500, seen not from Europe but from Istanbul, Delhi, or Beijing? Why do historians no longer tell this story as the "rise of the West" — and how do they tell it instead?

Week 2 — Rival Universalisms: Empire, Prophecy, and Sacred Kingship. Habsburgs, Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals: four courts, each claiming the world — and heaven — for itself. We compare how they imagined universal rule: crusade and jihad, millennial prophecies, a contested Jerusalem, an emperor who invented his own religious peace. None of these empires thought of itself as "Eastern" — so where does "the East" come from?

Week 3 - Crossers: Converts, Captives, Translators, Go-Betweens. This week follows the people who moved between worlds: converts, captives, dragomans, merchants, missionaries. Some crossed once and never returned; some crossed back and forth for a living; some hid their faith and prayed twice. Hidden Muslims in Spain, hidden Protestants in Italy: dissimulation as a European and an Islamic art. And travelers who came home with stories hard to believe: hospitals for animals, men who refused to kill any living creature.

Week 4 - Living Knowledge: Books, Languages, Plants, and Animals.

How did Europeans actually learn about the societies they called Oriental? Rarely from books alone. Arabic, Persian, and Turkish were sometimes taught by captives and converts. Manuscripts could circulate as commercial goods, diplomatic gifts, confiscated objects, or spoils of war. The unit then turns to knowledge of the living world. European travellers and missionaries encountered Indian practices of ahiṃsā, animal hospitals, Islamic institutions of care for animals, unfamiliar medical traditions, and forms of botanical expertise dependent on local practitioners and multilingual nomenclatures. These encounters did not merely add exotic information to an existing European system. They could disturb the hierarchy of the living, the distinction between human and animal, the meaning of compassion, and the relationship between empirical knowledge, theology, and political power. Plants and animals therefore become historical actors in the course: objects of classification, instruments of empire, participants in religious conflict, and points at which different moral and cosmological orders met.

Week 5 - Making “the East”: Oriental Learning, Race, and Civilization.

The final unit asks how scattered encounters became durable categories. We examine the emergence of Oriental learning in libraries, courts, printing houses, missionary institutions, and commercial networks, and the relation between scholarship, polemic, and power. We then trace how distinctions of religion, custom, lineage, and complexion could harden into classifications of peoples and bodies. A concluding genealogical epilogue follows the eighteenth-century term "civilization" and its modern afterlives, asking what civilizational narratives reveal, conceal, and continue to authorize.

Readings/Bibliography

The bibliography below offers a map of the main themes and debates covered in the course. It is not a reading list to be completed in full. Required readings for individual classes will be indicated separately, often as selected chapters or articles. The texts to be prepared for the exam are selected from this bibliography, as explained in the Assessment section. The list may also be used for further reading and independent research.

I.

• Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015. [selected chapt.]
• Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1957. [selected chapt.]
• Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997. [selected chapt.]
• Edward W. Said, Orientalism, London, Penguin, 2003 [Introduction].
• Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia," Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997), pp. 735–762.
• Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World, Waltham, Brandeis University Press, 2011.
• Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750, Oxford University Press, 2019

II.

• Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics, New York, Columbia University Press, 2011. [selected chapters]
• Zoltán Biedermann, (Dis)connected Empires: Imperial Portugal, Sri Lankan Diplomacy, and the Making of a Habsburg Conquest in Asia, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018. [selected chapters]
• Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World (2020) [selected chapters]
• Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Jorge Flores, Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. [selected chapts]
• Cemal Kafadar, “A Rome of One's Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography and Identity in the Lands of Rum”, Muqarnas 24 (2007), pp. 7–25.
• Rajeev Kinra, “Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility: The Global Historical Legacy of Mughal Sulh-i Kull”, The Medieval History Journal 16, no. 2 (2013), pp. 251–295.
• A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam, New York, Columbia University Press, 2012. [selected chapters]
• Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c. 1800, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995.
• Kaya Şahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013. [selected chapters]
• Alan Strathern, "Drawing the Veil of Sovereignty: Early Modern Islamic Empires and Understanding Sacred Kingship”, History and Theory 53, no. 1 (2014), pp. 79–93.
• Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. [selected chapters]

III.

• Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds, New York, Hill and Wang, 2006. [selected chapters]
• Eric R. Dursteler, Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011.
• Mercedes García-Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism, Leiden, Brill, 2013. [selected chapters]
• John-Paul A. Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory”, Past & Present 222, no. 1 (2014), pp. 51–93.
• Tijana Krstić, "Islam and Muslims in Europe", in Hamish Scott (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, vol. I: Peoples and Place, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 670–693.
• Nabil Matar, Mediterranean Captivity through Arab Eyes, 1517–1798, Leiden, Brill, 2021. [Selected chapts.]
• E. Natalie Rothman, The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2021. [Selected chapts.]
• Oumelbanine Nina Zhiri, Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari between Europe and North Africa, Oakland, University of California Press, 2023. [Selected chapts.]

IV.

• John-Paul A. Ghobrial, "The Archive of Orientalism and Its Keepers: Re-Imagining the Histories of Arabic Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe”, Past & Present 230, suppl. 11 (2016), pp. 90–111.
• Alastair Hamilton, “The Study of Islam in Early Modern Europe”, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 3, no. 1 (2001), pp. 169–182.
• Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, and Charles Burnett (eds.), The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, Leiden, Brill, 2017. [Selected chapts.]
• Mihoko Oka, The Namban Trade: Merchants and Missionaries in 16th and 17th Century Japan, Leiden, Brill, 2021.
• Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. [Selected chapts.]
• Antonella Romano, Impressioni di Cina. Saperi europei e inglobamento del mondo (secoli XVI–XVII), Roma, Viella, 2020. [Selected chapts.]
• Nicolas Standaert, Methodology in View of Contact Between Cultures: The China Case in the 17th Century, Hong Kong, Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. [Selected chapts.]
• Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov, Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (16th–18th Centuries), New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2015. [Selected chapts.]
• Ines G. Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–17th Centuries), Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2005. [Selected chapts.]

V.

• Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
• Urs App, The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy, Wil, UniversityMedia, 2012.
• Riccardo Bavaj, "'The West': A Conceptual Exploration," European History Online (EGO), Mainz, Leibniz Institute of European History, 2011 (
  http://www.ieg-ego.eu/bavajr-2011-en).
• Alexander Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2018. [Selected chapts.]
• Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009. [Selected chapts.]
• Lucien Febvre, "Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas" (1930), in Peter Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, pp. 219-257.
• Joan-Pau Rubiés, "Were Early Modern Europeans Racist?”, in Amos Morris-Reich and Dirk Rupnow (eds.), Ideas of "Race" in the History of the Humanities, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 33-87.

Teaching methods

Teaching is based on seminar-style lectures, combining frontal instruction with collective reading and discussion of primary and secondary sources. Students are expected to engage actively with the weekly material available on the course platform (Virtuale) and to contribute to class discussions.

Close reading, comparative reflection, and historical contextualization will be central to our approach. Whenever possible, sessions will include short presentations or focused group discussions on selected texts, images, or themes.

Assessment methods

The final exam is oral. For students attending classes, it is based on the reading and discussion of two books and three articles or chapters selected from the course bibliography, together with the topics, primary sources, and materials discussed during class.

Non-attending students are required to prepare three books from the course bibliography (instead of two), plus three articles or chapters, and to engage with the broader course themes through the materials available on Virtuale.

All students must agree their reading list with the instructor in advance.

The exam does not test factual recall, but the ability to think historically: to discuss an interpretation, compare different perspectives, and build a coherent argument from the texts read. Students will be evaluated on their command of the course content, their capacity for critical analysis and synthesis, their use of appropriate historical and conceptual language, and their ability to connect themes and readings across the course.

Optional written essay. Students may submit an optional paper of approximately 4,000 words on a topic related to the course. The essay does not replace any of the required exam readings. It will be discussed during the oral exam and may contribute positively to the final grade if it presents a clear research question, a coherent argument, and a critical use of sources and scholarship. The topic and bibliography must be agreed upon with the instructor in advance.

Grading scale:

• 18–19: limited knowledge of the course topics; analytical capacity emerging only with guidance; adequate language.
• 20–24: adequate knowledge of the main topics; some independent analytical capacity; correct language.
• 25–29: broad knowledge of the course topics; independent critical analysis; good command of historical vocabulary.
• 30–30L: comprehensive and nuanced knowledge; strong independent critical thinking and ability to connect themes; full command of disciplinary language and argumentation.

Artificial intelligence. The use of AI is not permitted during the exam. Any use constitutes a violation of academic integrity.

Students with disabilities or learning differences (DSA) are encouraged to contact the relevant university office in advance (https://site.unibo.it/studenti-con-disabilita-e-dsa/it). Any adaptations proposed must be submitted to the instructor at least 15 days before the exam date.

Oral exams are offered every month during the academic year, except August.

Teaching tools

The course makes use of a range of visual and digital materials, including presentations, high-resolution images, historical maps, and short documentary excerpts — used primarily as a support for reading texts and images together in class. Slides and digital tools are kept to a minimum: the course is deliberately low-tech, centered on close reading, discussion, and direct engagement with sources. Selected primary sources and readings are made available through the course platform (Virtuale).

Students are kindly asked not to use AI tools during class sessions. This is a space we would like to keep analogue.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): the course connects to SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), through the historical analysis of Orientalism, colonial hierarchies, and asymmetric cross-cultural encounters, and to SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions), through the study of empire, religious conflict, and the long-term legacies of early modern European expansion.

Office hours

See the website of Chiara Petrolini