Ananya Chakravarti has just published The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and The Imagination of Empire in Modern Brazil and India with Oxford University Press.
The book, according to the publisher, considers “how European accommodation to local peoples and their cultures, the experience of give-and-take in the non-European world and their numerous failures, could lead to a consolidation of an enduring vision of cultural and political dominion.”
It is through the experiences of Jesuit missionaries in Brazil and India that Chakravati traces “the evolution of a religious vision of empire.” Specifically, the book examines how the Jesuit missionaries “struggled to unite three commitments: to their local missionary space; to the universal Church; and to the global Portuguese empire.” As the missionaries navigated within the local, global, and universal “scales of meaning,” she argues, “a religious imaginaire of empire emerged.”
Among the Jesuit subjects in The Empire of Apostles are José de Anchieta, Thomas Stephens, António Vieira, and Baltasar da Costa.
The book’s table of contents appears below.More information is available at Oxford University Press.
The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodatio and The Imagination of Empire in Modern Brazil and India
Introduction
1. From Contact to ‘Conquest’
PART I: IN SEARCH OF THE INDIES
2. Other Indies
3. The Living Books
PART II: ACCOMMODATIO AND THE POETICS OF LOCATION
4. José de Anchieta and the Poetics of Warfare
5. Christ in the Brahmapuri: Thomas Stephens in Salcete
PART III. RELIGION, ACCOMMODATIO, AND THE IMAGINATION OF EMPIRE
6. Theatres of Empire: António Vieira and Baltasar da Costa in Brazil and India
7. The Empire of Apostles
Epilogue