ACADEMIC CAREER:

1988-1991 B.A. / M.A. in the Modern History Tripos, Cambridge University. Gladstone Memorial Prize for best dissertation submitted in the Social Science Faculties (otherwise II.I degree).

1991-1992. British government scholarship holder at the Johns Hopkins Bologna Center, Bologna.

1992. ICALP scholarship holder at the Instituto Camões, Lisbon.

1993-2000 Ph.D. at the European University Institute, Florence under the Vasco da Gama Programme

2001-2004. Visiting Professor at Brown University, USA to fill Vasco da Gama Chair in the History of Portuguese Expansion, a joint post between the History Department and the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies.

2005-. Lecturer at Swansea University, Department of History and Classics, UK.

2010-. Senior Lecturer at Swansea University, UK.

Autumn 2011. Visiting Professor at Graz University, Department of History.

2013-2024. Associate Professor, Swansea University.

2020-2021 Visiting professor (Wykładowca wizytujący) on the ZIP programme, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Wydział Historii.

 

LIST OF PUBLICATIONS (updated 13.05.2024)

 

1.BOOKS.

1. Global Portuguese, edited with Shihan da Silva, Brill (forthcoming 2024). Issuing from the following conference: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/17819. Table of Contents here: https://www.calameo.com/books/000123869ad4ad9d6a0fd

2. Two late seventeenth-century unpublished missionary accounts from Southeast Asia: Guy Tachard’s Relation de Voyage aux Indes (1690-99) and Nicola Cima’s Relatione Distinta Delli Regni di Siam, Tunchino, e Cocincina (1697-1706). Amsterdam University Press /ARC Humanities, Sept. 2019, ISBN: 978-1641893183.

3. Creolization and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies. The Portuguese World of Ayutthaya, 1640-1720 , Leiden: Brill. Part of the series European Expansion and Indigenous Response, edited by Glenn Ames (University of Toledo). 405 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-19048 -1.

4. Reinterpreting Indian Ocean worlds. Essays in Honour of Prof. K.N. Chaudhuri on his 75th birthday (ed.). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011 (twelve chapters + Bibliography + Selection of Photographs). 305 pp. ISBN:978-1443829311 

5. Portugal and the European Spice Trade, 1480-1580, Ph.D. completed at the European University Institute, Fiesole, May 2001. Thesis published on the digital repository CADMUS: http://hdl.handle.net/1814/5828.

6. Portugal Índico: Essays on the History of the Portuguese Presence in South Asia in the Colonial Period, (ed.). Special Issue of Itinerario, Leiden, 2007, vol. XXXI, no. 2 (224 pages). ISSN: 0165-1153.

2.CHAPTERS IN BOOKS.

1. ‘A paean to free trade? The allegory of Brabo in the (re)construction of the Antwerp Stadhuis, 1540-1565’.  In: Carla Vieira, Nina Vieira, Pablo Sánchez León eds., Espelhos de Mercúrio. A Representação do Comércio nas Monarquias Ibéricas, 1500-1800. Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2024. ISBN: 9789892625706. https://monographs.uc.pt/iuc/catalog/view/433/970/1732-1

2. ‘The trato de Europa of Portuguese spices, 1480-1580: underinvesting in Atlantic shipping’, in Navegação no Atlântico. XVIII Reunião Internacional de História da Náutica, eds. Francisco Contente Domingues & Susana Paula Franco Serpa Silva, Lisbon: CHAM – Centro de Humanidades, ISBN 978-989-33-0132-6, 2019, pp. 211-43.

3. ‘Creolization and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies: the case of Ayutthaya,1640-1720’, in Global Portuguese, eds. Stefan Halikowski Smith and Shihan da Silva Jayasuriya, Brill (2022 forthcoming).

4. ‘For which Company? Guy Tachard S.J.’s unpublished Relation de Voyage aux Indes, 1690-99’, in Guido Meersbergen & Aske Brock eds. In Trading Companies and Travel Writing (London: Hakluyt Society/ Routledge 2021). ISBN 9781032050027

5. ‘Dalmatia in the Venetian Stato da Mar’, in Zbornik Drage Roksandića, ed. Filip Šimetin Šegvic, University of Zagreb (Filozofski Fakultet Press, 2019), pp. 423-435. ISBN 978-953-175-707-2.  Downloadable here: https://openbooks.ffzg.unizg.hr/index.php/FFpress/catalog/view/103/174/7919

6. 'From illicit plant-hunting at the Dutch Cape at the turn of the eighteenth century to recreating the flora of an endangered biotope at home' in Ana Roque, Cristina Brito & Cecilia Veracini eds., Peoples, Nature and Environment. Learning to Live Together (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019). ISBN: 978-1-5275-4131-3.

7. 'Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission (2015) and the prospect of a Muslim France'. In Spain, India, Russia, Centres, Borderlands, and Peripheries of Civilisations, Anniversary Book dedicated to Professor Jan Kieniewicz on His 80th Birthday, ed. Cristina Gonzalez Caizan (Warszawa: Fakultet ‘Artes Liberales’, 2018), pp. 469-479. ISBN: 978-83-65886-60-6.

8. 'The unquiet religious backdrop to European East Indies trade: Christian polemical literature and the first Portuguese translation of the Bible, 1642-1694' (with Luis Henrique Menezes Fernandes)., in Pius Malekandathil (ed.), The Indian Ocean in the making of Early Modern India, Manohar, New Delhi, 2016, pp. 236-260. ISBN: 978-1138234826.

9. ‘Carta de el-Rei D. Manuel ao Rei Catholico narrando-ilhe as viagens portugezas à India desde 1500 até 1505’,  in: Bibliography of Christian-Muslim Relations 1500 - 1900, General Editor David Thomas, vol. 6.1 (2014) . Consulted online on 23 January 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2451-9537_cmrii_COM_26243

10. `Globalisation before globalisation: the case of the Portuguese world empire, 1415-1808’, in World and Global History: Research and Teaching, Pisa University Press: 2011, pp. 25-47.

11. `A fresh look at what went wrong with the Eurasian spice trade, c. 1550-1800’, (in Ernestine Carreira, The Mediterranean as a Pathway to India. Skills, Memory, Imagination, Networks, Aix-en-Provence: Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme, 2011 ??).

12. ‘Diplomatic relations between Ayutthaya and Macao over the eighteenth century. The case of the 1721 embassy´, in Laura Pang ed. Luso-Asian Legacies, 1511-2011 Cengage: 2011.

13. `Seventeenth century population movements in the Portuguese Indian Ocean and the birth of a Portuguese `tribe', in The Portuguese in the Orient, ed. Gaston Perera (ICESKY: Sri Lanka, 2010), pp. 195-243.

14. `European National Libraries and Digitization in History’, in Contemporary History in the Digital Age (PIE Peter Lang, Brussels, 2013), 20 pp.

15. `The Pisan Maritime Empire’ & `The Late Medieval Magyar World in Central Europe’, in Cynthia Clark ed., Encyclopedia of Empires of the World, 5 vols., Facts on File (Feb 2010), 64pp.

16. `Asian Ports and Harbours’, `The evolution of Renaissance ship design’ in Seas and Waterways of the World: A Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara (2009), 10 pp.

17. `Entre literatura e história:  Um Testemunho ao Professor Eduino de Jesús’, in Eduino de Jesús. A Causa dos Açores (Ponta Delgada, 2009), pp. 142-146.

18. `Maurycy Beniowski. An 18th century East European renegade and self-styled King of Madagascar’, in Carl L. Bankston, Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, Salem Press: 2006, pp. 85-86.

 19. `Vasco Fernandes (c.1475-1541): the first artist of Brazil’, in The Oxford Companion to World Exploration (O.U.P, 2007).

20.  `The European cartographic revolution of the Renaissance’ & `Coromandel, Europeans and Maritime Trade’, in Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450, Macmillan Reference USA, 2005. (4000 words).

21. `Od vojne granice do nacionalnog parka: otkriće Plitvičkih jezera’, in Triplex Confinium (1500-1800): Ekohistorija, Split: K.K (2005), pp. 213–225.

3(a) FULL PAPERS IN REFEREED JOURNALS.

1. ‘Using ‘Distant Reading’ Techniques like Randomised Lexicographical Collection, Co-Occurrence Analysis and

Prosodic Evaluation to Gauge Early Modern Christian Missionary Opinions of the Verenigde Oost Indische

Compagnie (VOC)’, manuscript submitted to Mission Studies, May 2024.

 

2. ‘A discussion with Prof. David Brookshaw on the boundaries of Luso-African literature for the Hay-on-Wye literary festival’, May 2024, to be published in Romance Studies, vol. 41, issue 3, 2024.

3. ‘The Soviet occupation of Polish Lwów (September 1939–July 1941) in light of some unpublished British diplomatic reports by John Russell, R.D. Macrae and Thomas Preston, September 1939-July 1941’, Journal of European Studies, ISSN: 0047-2441, vol. 35:3, Autumn 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/004724412312070.

4. ‘Solitude and despair in the literary oeuvre of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’, Central Europe, ISSN: 1479-0963 (30 pp.), October 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790963.2023.2294403

5. ‘Discovering the fourth Katyṅ cemetery at Bykownia’. An interview with Prof. Andrzej Kola, Professor at Uniwersytet Mikołaj Kopernik (UMK), Toruń, Poland (Zakład Archeologii Podwodnej) and leader of the Polish government-sponsored exhumations at Bykownia between 2001-12 (Wednesday 23 February 2022). Studia Historyczne. 2023. ISSN: 0025-1429. https://doi.org/10.12797/SH.63.2020.02.03

6. ‘The Portuguese trato de Europa of East Indian spices, 1480-1580: between the collapse of the Feitoria de Flandres in 1549, and underinvestment in Atlantic shipping’, in Scripta Mercaturae 48 (2019), pp. 139-170. https://scripta-mercaturae.de/scripta-mercaturae-die-zeitschrift/scrmerc-48-2019/

7. [with Benjamin Jennings] ‘Prince Henry the Navigator and the Practice of Commemoration: Anglo-Portuguese Alliances in Academia 1955-1962’, in  'Praticas de Commemoracao': the organisation and political backdrop to the 1961 'Henry the Navigator' exhibition at the British Library. Práticas da História: Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past (no. 8, 2019) : pp. 85-138. https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa40543. ISSN: 2183-590X.

8. ‘Lisbon in the sixteenth century: decoding the Chafariz d’el Rei’, in Race and Class published September 2018, Volume: 60, Issue: 2, Pages: 63 – 81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818794355. ISSN: 0306-3968.

9. ‘Primor e honra da vida soldadesca no Estado da India   : an anonymous late sixteenth-century manual  of soldiery and political affirmation of the military frontier in India’. Romance Studies, vol. 37, issue 1, Spring 2019. ISSN: 0263-9904. https://doi.org/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599565

10. "‘Siam is the best place in the Indies’. Father Nicola Cima O.E.S.A. and his memorandum of 1709 for renewed East Indies trade". Anais de Historia de Alem Mar vol. XVII, January 2018. https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa27201

11. ‘Gasparo Contarini’s Relazione of November 1525 to the Venetian Senate on the divergent dynamics of the Spanish and Portuguese world empires’. Mediterranean History Review 32(2) December 2017. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2017.1396764

12. ‘In the shadow of a pepper-centric historiography: the global diffusion of capsicums in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Journal of Ethnopharmacology 167 (2015): 64-77. doi:10.1016/j.jep.2014.10.048i

13. ‘Languages of subalternity and collaboration: Portuguese in English settlements across the Bay of Bengal, 1620-1800. International Journal of Maritime History 28(2) (2016): 237-267. doi:10.1177/0843871415624096

14. 'The unquiet religious backdrop to European East Indies trade: Christian polemical literature and the first Portuguese translation of the Bible, 1642-1694' (with Luis Henrique Menezes Fernandes). Electronic Journal of Portuguese History, December 2015, vol. 13, no. 2 [https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Portuguese_Brazilian_Studies/ejph/html/issue26/html/v13n2a04.html]

15. `Descent into Hell’. The Logistics and Performative Rhetorics of the Jesuit Jerónimo Lobo’s crossing the Danakil Desert in 1625, in Romance Studies, 29.3 (2011).

16. ‘`Tempestatem, quae cum adventuro D. Francisco Pallu timero potest’: Jean-Baptiste Maldonado S.J., a missionary caught between loyalties to the Portuguese Padroado and the political ascendancy of the Missions Étrangères de Paris in the Siam Mission’, Revista de Cultura, International Edition 34, April 2010, 34-52.

17. `No obvious home: the flight of the Portuguese `tribe’ from Makassar to Ayutthaya and Cambodia during the 1660s’, International Journal of Asian Studies, Issue 7.1, January 2010, 43 pp.

18. ` The mid-Atlantic islands: a theatre of early modern ecocide?’, in "Globalisation, environmental change and social history", Supplement 18 of the International Review of Social History, 2010, 34pp.

19. '"Profits sprout like tropical plants". A fresh look at what went wrong with the Eurasian spice trade between c.1550-1800’, Journal of Global History, 3 (2008), 389-418.

20. `Meanings Behind Myths: The Multiple Manifestations of The Tree of The Virgin at Matarea’, The Mediterranean Historical Review, vol. 23, no. 2, 2008, pp. 101–128.

21. `Insolence and pride’: problems with the representation of the South-East Asian Portuguese communities in Alexander Hamilton’s A New Account of the East Indies (1727)?’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ser. 3, 19 (2009), 213-235 .

22. ``The Physician’s Hand’: trends in the evolution of the apothecary and his art across Europe over the early modern period’, Nuncius. Journal of the History of Science, 24.1 (2009), 33-60.

23. `La fuite du tribu portugais de Macassar en Indochine, 1662-1667’, published by the Réseau Asie, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, Paris, on their website (http://www.reseau-asie.com/cgi-bin/prog/pform.cgi?langue=fr&Mcenter=colloque&TypeListe=showdoc&email=&password=&ID_document=447)

24. 'Perceptions of Nature in Early Modern Portuguese India', Itinerario, 31 (2007), pp. 17-49.

25. `'Demystifying a Change in Taste: Spices, Space, and Social Hierarchy in Europe, 1380-1750’, International History Review, vol. 29, issue 2, 2007, pp. 237-257.

26. `The Disappearance of Fanciful Flourish from World Maps of the Middle Ages’, This Century’s Review, April 2006. [online at http://www.thiscenturyreview.com/ The_Disappearance_of_Fa.the-disappearance.0.html]

27. `”The friendship of Kings is in the ambassadors”: Portuguese diplomatic embassies in Asia and Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries’, Portuguese Studies, vol. 22, no.1 (2006), pp. 101-134.

28. `More than a people of the sea. The Portuguese Discoveries from the perspective of overseas travel’, The Portuguese Studies Review (Canada), vol. 12, no. 2, (2005), pp. 85–137.

3(b)          OTHER SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO JOURNALS AND BLOGS.

1. ‘Some outstanding controversies pertaining to Dom Henrique known as ‘the Navigator’, Modern History Review (2025, forthcoming in vol. 27, iss. 2).

2. Conference report on ‘Miasto i Pamięc’ under the auspices of PAN and Muzeum Miasta Gdynia, 27-29 October 2021. Journal of European Studies, vol. 35:3, Autumn 2023.

3. ‘In Memoriam Teresa Halikowska-Smith, 1940-2020’, The European Legacy, vol. 28, Sept. 2023, Pages 782-786, https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2023.2252236. I edited and published some of Teresa’s essays including ‘Aunt Zofia’s Table’ https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2023.2252161, and ‘Meeting with a Hero’ https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2023.2252163.

4. ‘Twentieth-century wartime life histories from East-Central Europe ’, The European Legacy (Spring 2022), ISSN:   1084-8770. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10848770.2022.2051807

 5. 'A Prospect of Fort St. George and Plan of the City of Madras, 1726', contribution to the British Library blog 'Untold Lives' (http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/untoldlives/) [February 2018]

6. 'The Catholic mission in Bengal prior to the nineteenth century', contribution to the blog 'Colonial Voyage':

https://www.colonialvoyage.com/the-catholic-mission-in-bengal/ [April 2015]

7. `Prof. P. E. Russell (1913-2006)’ [obituary], Renaissance Studies, November, 2006, pp. 411-415. A revised version of this obituary came out in the Electronic Journal of Portuguese Studies, Vol.5, number 1, Summer 2007.

8. `The Pacific World, 1500-1900’ [review article], Itinerario, volume XXX, 2006, no. 1, pp. 83-87.

 9. `Patterns of knowledge diffusion of Eastern products in the West: the case of Venetian maioliche jars’, in Relazioni economiche tra Europa e mondo islamico. Atti della  XXXVIII Settimana di Studi, Istituto Datini, 38, Prato, 2006-07.

10. `Antwerp port facilities’, AND `Portuguese liberdades and gasalhados on the Carreira da Índia, in Ricchezza del mare, riccheza dal mare. Secoli XIII-XVIII, Atti della  XXXVII Settimana di Studi,  Istituto Datini: Prato, 2005-06.

I have published book reviews of more than fifty individual books (a full list can be provided upon request), and obituaries of Prof. P. E. Russell (1913-2006) in Renaissance Studies, November, 2006, pp. 411-415 and in the Electronic Journal of Portuguese Studies, Vol.5, number 1, Summer 2007; Teresa Halikowska-Smith (1940-2020), Koło Lwowiań, Biuletyn nr. 120, Październik 2021, pp. 6-8.

4. Academic papers given, and conferences organised:

- ‘Insolence and Pride’: Problems with the Representation of the South-East Asian Portuguese Communities in Alexander Hamilton’s ‘A New Account of the East Indies’ (1727), talk for the TRANSPACIFIC network at Leuven University, https://crossroads-research.net/projects/erc-adg-transpacific/transpacific-lecture-series/. February 23, 2024.

- ‘Mitomania entre escritores poloneses que cruzaram o Gobi e o Himalaia em fuga dos bolcheviques: Slavomir Rawicz (A longa caminhada, pub. 1956) e Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski (Das Estepes Siberianas à Mandchuria : animais, homens e deuses, pub. 1922)’, re-scheduled for Nov. 2024, Quincentenarial Commemorations of António de Andrade S.J., Oleiros, Beira Baixa (Radio Televisão Portuguesa) with Joaquim Magalhães de Castro.

- ‘The End of Polish Galicia’, part of the ‘Szeptycki dialogue’ (in French), Sorbonne, 25 April 2024. https://okp-sorbona.uw.edu.pl/le-seminaire-commun-deurorbem-prof-andrzej-szeptycki-prof-stefan-halikowski-smith/

- ‘Using Lexicographical Collection and Vector Positioning to Gauge Early Modern Christian Missionary Opinions of the Verenigde Oost Indische Compagnie (VOC)’, 12th Annual REFORC conference, Leuven, 11-13 May 2023.

- ‘Rudolf Wizimirski (urodzony Berger) w zbrodni katińskiej’, 8 May 2022, Ośrodek Polski i Kulturalny, 7th annual History conference, Leamington Spa. https://ipn.gov.pl/en/news/9577,7th-Polish-History-Conference-and-Exhibition-Leamington-Spa-8-May-2022.html.

- "Between Illusions and Realities. Recovering Missionary Accounts of Southeast Asia from the End of the Seventeenth Century." 26 January 2021, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Zintegrowany Program Rozwoju.

- Organiser of five-day conference bid on ‘Colonial Gardens as Places of Experiment’, 25 participants,  Lorentz Centre, Leiden, Netherlands, December 2019 (3800 euros startup finance).

- ‘Two Missionary Accounts of Southeast Asia in the Late Seventeenth Century’ Royal Asiatic Society, London, 26 September 2019.

- ‘The trato de Europa of Portuguese spices, 1480-1580: underinvesting in Atlantic shipping’, XVIII International Reunion for the History of Nautical Science, Ponta Delgada, Azores, 11-14 November 2018.

- ‘Creolization and Diaspora. The Social World of Ayutthaya’ in conference entitled ‘Global Portuguese’, School of Advanced Study, London University, 11 June 2018. 

- How we teach and commemorate the 500th Anniversary of Martin Luther. Jonathan Durrant (USW) and Stefan Halikowski-Smith (Swansea), MEMO sponsored research seminar, March 22, 2018.

- ‘Venice and the Danish East India Company: Reading Nicola Cima’s ‘Relatione Distinta delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino e Cocincina’ (c. 1707)’,  Hakluyt Society annual conference, 11-12 September 2017.

- ‘The mid-Atlantic islands: a theatre of early modern ecocide’? Stefan Halikowski Smith, Histories of Nature and Environments: Perspectives and Dialogues, University of Lisbon and Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 15-17 March 2017.

- I organised a one-day conference at Warwick University’s Centre of Global Culture with a £1100 subsidy in April 2016 on ‘Travel Narratives to Ayutthaya: Persian, Chinese, European sources’. 

- ‘Presenting Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, a ten-part encyclopedic project with Brill’, with John Chesworth, MEMO research group, Swansea University, April 2015.

- ‘Understanding the global diffusion of capsicums in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, at ‘The trade between the Mediterranean area and India: Roman, Arab, Early Modern’, Gent, Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, Ghent University, 12 December 2014.

- ‘European states and the problem of maritime piracy, 1450-1750: two historical studies’, Economic History Society annual conference, St. Catherine’s College , Oxford, March 2012.

- `Atlantic perspectives on Central European mining technologies at Schemnitz, 1668-1816’, in the Sektion `Cultural and technological exchange in the age of Enlightenment'., 13th International Congress of 18th Century Studies, Graz, July 2011.

-  `The Early East India Company in Indonesia and its language of state’, in Symposium on the East India Company and Language, City University, Hong Kong, 6-9 April 2011.

- ‘Diplomatic relations between Ayutthaya and Macao over the eighteenth century. The case of the 1721 embassy´, Luso-Asian diasporas conference, NUS Singapore, 29 September 2010.

- `A fresh look at what went wrong with the Eurasian spice trade, c. 1550-1800’, XIII International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese History, Aix-en-Provence, 25 March 2010.

- `European National Libraries and Digitization in History’, in Contemporary History in the Digital Age, Conference on Digital Humanities organised by the Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance de l’Europe, Luxembourg, October 2009.

- `Seventeenth population movements in the seventeenth-century Portuguese Indies’. Instituto de Investigação Cíentifica Tropical, Lisbon, March 2009.

- ``Any man of colour, however dark, who wears a hat, passes for a descendant of the companions of the renowned Vasco da Gama’. Problems conceptualising creolisation in the Indian Ocean world’, European University Institute, Fiesole, November 2008.

- `La fuite du tribu portugais de Macassar en Indochine, 1662-1667’ at a panel I organised for the Third Congress of the Réseau Asie, C.N.R.S., Paris, September 2007.

- ‘Meanings behind myths. The multiple manifestations of the tree of the Virgin at Matarea’, Exploring Pilgrimage symposium, Dept. of History, University of Sheffield, November 2006 / also delivered in IMEMS seminar series, Universities of Wales, January 2007.

- Panel participant on 4th section `Kerekasztal beszélgetés a legfrissebb Kolumbusz szakirodalomról’ of the international conference Kolumbusz és Kora, E.L.T.E., Budapest, 13-14 September 2006.

- `Armada, Feitoria, Fortaleza: Pillars or Shibboleths of the Portuguese Seaborne Empire’, paper delivered at `Sea in Global History’ symposium, Center of Historical Analysis, Rutgers University, March 2006.

- `”Profits sprouted like tropical plants”. A fresh look at what went wrong with the Portuguese administration of the Atlantic spice trade, 1480-1622’. Seminar in the Dept. of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies, King’s College, London, 2 November 2005.

- Organiser of conference PortugaL ĺndico (14 participants), Watson Center, Brown University, 2003.

5.  External Professional Responsibilities.

  1. Associate Editor of the Journal of European Studies (https://journals.sagepub.com/home/JES) since May 2023.
  2. Assistant Editor of the Electronic Journal of Portuguese History (see http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Portuguese_Brazilian_Studies/ejph/) between 2001-2007. 
  3. Anonymous reviewer of manuscripts for International Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, Reaktion Books, Cambridge University Press (series ‘Critical Perspectives on Empire’); and for Routledge Publishers’ Early Modern History list, June 2017.
  4. Assessed research projects for Fundação de Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal) and proposals for the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen, (FWO), and Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). 
  5. Editorial board membership of the Polish historical journal Studia Historyczne, editor Jakub Basista (Uniwersytet Jagielloński), July 2012-. URL: https://journals.akademicka.pl/studiahistoryczne.
  6. Editorial board membership since 2012 of InterDISCIPLINARY Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies: https://portuguese-diaspora-studies.com/index.php/ijpds/about
  7. Member of the European think-tank for historical research, Cliohworld 2006-2011: http://www.cliohworld.net/. We produced online readers and brochures for university teachers trying to broaden their horizons: for example, see http://www.cliohworld.net/docs/multiculturalism.pdf.
  8. Membre de l’Institut Belge des Hautes Etudes Chinoises a.s.b.l. (Belgium), 2017-.

6. Research supervision for the following doctoral students:

- Adam Wlodarski, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Ph.D. on Jesuits in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 2020-1.

- Adrian Warsinski, UW, Polish perspectives on Pomeranz’s ‘Great Divergence’ thesis. 2020-1.

- Elke Schobelt, Leuven Univ., Codicology, History of Church and Theology. 2023.

  1. Successful Ph.D. defence of Wim de Winter, Ghent University, Thursday, 24 June, 2021. Worlds of the Ostend Company in Qing China and Mughal India (1717-1744) : a comparative approach of the GIC's 18th-century trade communities, cultural interactions and foreign exchanges. One of the seven examiners.
  2.  Nicholas Smith, Ph.D. candidate at Swansea University (Calico Acts, first half of 18th century)
  3. João Vicente Melo, Ph.D. successfully defended at Swansea University 2012. 'Lord of Conquest, Navigation and Commerce' : diplomacy and the imperial ideal during the reign of John V, 1707-1750.
  4. Andreu Martinez d’Alòs Moner (the Jesuit mission in Gondar) European University Institute, now successfully defended doctorate 28 January 2009)
  5. Amélie Guimard, Cardiff University (2008-9).

 

7. Measures of Esteem /Awards.

  •  TNA-Resilience Fellowship at KADOC. Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Culture and Society, KU Leuven, June-July 2024.
  •  January 2023, BBC consultant for Pilgrimage, episode in Series 5 ‘Path of Miracles’ (3 episodes, 364 km trek to Fatima in central Portugal). Executive Producer: Toni Williamson.
  •  ‘Mobility and Integration in the Iberian Colonial Systems’ (MIBER), a three-year funded research project from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia under Principal Investigator, Dr. João Vicente Melo (Pablo Olavide University, Seville). One of the six external consultants.
  • Leverhulme Research Fellowship, March 2021 – May 2022. Allegories of civic government: the seventeenth-century Sala Czerwona decorations, £48,584.
  • TV consultancy work for Kompas TV (Indonesia), November 2016; Uplands TV.com documentary with David Olusoga on the Eurasian spice trade, March 2019.
  • Delmas Krieble award July 2018 (£2500) for research project ‘Faustino Brascuglia’s Descrizione corografica, topografica & iconografica della provinzia di Dalmazia e stati confinant (1745) as a tool of imperial knowledge’.
  • Shortlisted for the EURIAS Senior Fellowship competition in 2014 for project on the global diffusion of capsicums in the early modern period.
  • Delmas Krieble award December 2013 (£1800) to research in the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, on the Gasparo Contarini dispacci.
  • 2011- Invited to join CHAM (Centro de História de Além Mar, Lisbon) as external member.
  • Invitation to participate in the Università di Firenze’s summer doctoral school, 2006.
  • Invited to participate during two consecutive years at the Istituto Datini’s Settimana di Studio in Prato, Italy, May 2005 and 2006.
  • External consultant for the Centro de Hístoria Ultramarina and the Universidade de Coimbra’s research project Bombaim antes dos Britânicos, 2006-.
  • Third prize in the essay-writing competition "Mit jelent számomra a magyar kultúra?" Debreceni Egyetem, March 2017.
  • CHAM grant for external collaboration (English translation) with Angelo Cattaneo on ‘La mise en carte del Giappone,1500- 1700’, July 2012.
  • FLAD/Fundação Oriente scholarship to participate in Luso-Asian diasporas conference and workshop in Singapore and Melaka (Malaysia), September 2010
  • Two-month fellowship, Sonderforschungbereich (Collaborative Research Centre) 597, Bremen University, for work on early modern piracy, 2009-2010
  • Erasmus Teaching Mobility Grant, Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical, Lisbon, March-April 2009; Karl-Franzens Universität Graz, 2013, 2015, 2016; Universidade Nova de Lisboa, April 2018; Sveučilišta u Zadru, May 16-30, 2019.
  • Visiting Fellow, European University Institute, Fiesole, 2008-09
  • British Academy, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme award, 2007
  • MINERVA award from the Slovak government, June-July 2007
  • Scouloudi Fund (Institute of Historical Research), publications grant, 2007 to bring out proceedings of a conference on Portuguese colonialism.
  • Egypt Exploration Society Centenary award, December 2006 to visit Matarea, Egypt in preparation of a study of the holy balsam grove.
  • Borsista at the Settimana di Studio, Istituto Datini, Prato, April 2005, May 2006  and April 2010.
  • FLAD (Fundação Luso-Americana de Desenvolvimento) Research Fellowship, Lisbon, 2005.

 

8. Teaching activities and responsibilities :

Golden Age of Iberia, 1450-1700 [2nd year]. This course will provide an introduction to the history of Spain, Portugal and their empires in the early modern period. Students will come away with a broad knowledge of the political, cultural, religious and social history of Iberia during its period of greatest influence. We will begin by surveying the political history of Castile, Aragon and Portugal, seeking to understand the complex series of inheritances and political manoeuvres that created Spain. After looking at Early Modern Iberian imperial government, we will turn to the area’s social and intellectual history. Here we will discuss Portuguese and Spanish culture, literature and art, as well as the intense religious fervour that launched both a global missionary effort and the Inquisition. The final weeks of the course will be devoted to studying the Spanish and Portuguese empires, both in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Here, our perspective will be decidedly metropolitan as we seek to understand how Iberian social and political institutions were exported overseas. We will also discuss the problems encountered by the Iberian monarchy as it attempted to manage the world’s first truly global empire and faced the problem of dynastic decline.

 

European Empires in the East, 1500-1800: a comparative analysis [3rd year]. The course provides an opportunity to study the European expansion in the East during the early modern period. Starting with an analysis of European familiarization and encounters with the peoples of India, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, China and Japan, the course shall investigate how Europeans traded, built up their presence in the East, exchanged knowledge and ideas, and on what terms. One of the engaging features of this period is that the interaction between European and Asian was fundamentally pre-hegemonic, before European imperialism in its classic sense as understood by historians today, so it was essentially more two-way or interactive. We shall strive to determine whether this reflects on European intentions, or merely mirrors the meager resources available to them, and the difficulties of implanting colonial society.The course is essentially a comparative one, which means two things. First, although we shall start from the concept of an Indian Ocean world, students will be encouraged to think of Asia not as some great cultural monolith but an array of very different civilizations posing European different challenges and which reacted in very different ways to the arrival of the `Franks'. The second comparative dimension will be to explore the differences in organization and approach of the Portuguese, Dutch and English merchant empires, which largely followed each other in succession.

The Early Modern World, 1500-1800 [1st year]. In 1500, European exploration and colonisation of the rest of the world was only in its infancy. America, two continents North and South, had been unknown to Europeans until just eight years previously. Most of it was still unmapped by Europeans, as were large parts of the rest of the world. By 1800, on the other hand, it was possible to construct a recognisable modern version of a world map. Europeans had explored, colonised, and resettled huge swathes of America in the first instances. They had killed or displaced millions of Native Americans in the process, wiping out whole civilisations, and they had enslaved 12 million or more Africans in that same process, inflicting immense damage on African societies. Europeans were in the early stages of colonising large parts of Africa and Asia too by 1800.
And yet, advances in science had transformed human understanding of the universe, of the world, and indeed of ourselves. This was connected through the Renaissance in art, culture, and politics as well as science, to enormous changes in the structure of polities and societies. The early modern era perhaps saw the invention not only of modern empires, but of large, centralised modern states. Also, the Renaissance and then Enlightenment changed the way people and states interacted. Arguably, the early modern period represents the transition period between an era of medieval hierarchy and the origins of modern social and political democracy.
Essentially, the aim of the module, through your lectures, seminars, and independent reading and thinking, is to give you a sense of the connections between these places and their histories, highlighting that the increasing inter-connection between them is itself a feature of the early modern period. You’ll also get a broad sense of how the world as a whole changed between 1500 and 1800.

A World on the Move: The Portuguese Overseas World, 1415-1808 [Masters level].Portugal has often been viewed as a poor appendage to Spain, but this obscures a remarkable and far-flung early modern world empire and a population diaspora that stretched from Lima in South America to Nagasaki in Japan. The nature of Portuguese power was, however, always markedly different to the Spanish: maritime rather than territorial; decentralised rather than metropolitan; its population racially mixed rather than segregated. The product of a small population, this ‘network of spaces’ – often outside official government control - was created extremely rapidly by two or three generations of brilliant individuals and, as a European empire, was not only the first, but outlasted all others.

Merchants and Marvels. Long-distance trade in the early modern world, 1500-1800 [3rd year, Special Subject, HEC].  'Globalisation' is a phenomenon that has caused a good deal of recent debate, though the movement of goods,
people, bullion and services from one corner of the planet to another is nothing new. In this course, students shall
investigate in some depth the role of long-distance commerce in 'disenclaving' (to use a French term) the world in
the early modern period, the forms this trade took and some of its effects. The elaborate paths luxury goods wove
across the planet seem remarkably unimpeded by either the speed of communications (it could take 16-23 months
to send a consignment of silk from Nagasaki in Japan to Amsterdam), the high risks of banditry on the caravan
routes or shipwreck at sea, and the transmission often via unreliable and hostile intermediaries. At the same time,
the instruments of commerce - insurance, credit, speculation and derivative trading that went on in the European
trading exchanges like London and Amsterdam - suggest a remarkably modern global system was already on its
feet.

We shall begin with a look at some of the historical interpretations of the role of early modern trade (Marx, Weber, Hicks) contrasting it with more recent anthropological approaches to the history of trade (diaspora theory) and go on to investigate how trade was organised (through kin, companies, the support of states, diasporas and the mediation of port-cities). Then we concentrate on the trades themselves - from mysterious objects of wonder to the mass-produced textiles of the eighteenth century. How these goods changed their social and cultural meanings as, say, porcelain was transposed from its Chinese to its European context is an interesting story. While the historiography of the 1970s and '80s emphasised the agency of the supply-side in the creation of markets, we shall go right down to the consumers with the task of finding out when demand structures began to influence trade and how consumers behaved when confronted with new goods.

Given the nature of the source material readily available, much of the merchant activity studied will be European, albeit operative outside of the European home environment. Issues of cultural contact within the framework of the Chinese tributary system and the 'silent trade' for gold in West Africa will, however, be addressed and secondary readings will open up detailed glimpses of the Armenian diaspora, the Indian caste of Banjāra long-distance road hauliers and the roving sea-borne Bugi communities of the Indonesian archipelago. From these we shall explore how much the wider world offers instances of 'connected histories' rather than distanced comparisons.

As a Special Subject, great emphasis shall be placed upon source readings. These include:

a) the letters of merchants agents of the early modern companies posted overseas (Fugger family archives, English East India Company)

b) accounts of life on the road, such as the Bolognese merchant Tommaso Alberti's caravan convoy he drove from Constantinople to Leopolis in 1609 across marshy terrain and at the mercy of unhelpful Muslim carters, the French jeweller Jean Chardin's adventures in Persia (1673-7) and the unscrupulous adventures of a Portuguese man of fortune, Fernão Mendes Pinto (1509-83).

c) astrologers' reports (a kind of early modern business consultancy)

d) contemporary biographies of renowned traders

e) European accounts of the functioning of Chinese tributary trade and the African 'silent trade'

f) court trial records of Marrano (crypto-Jews) monopolists hauled up by the authorities of Charles V's empire keen to take away their property;

g) pamphlets promoting miracle goods introduced from the Orient; reports of strange animas brought to Europe; consumer reactions to tea, coffee, chocolate and the medical debate as to whether these goods be sanctioned

h) examples of the public debate for and against state mercantilism, and the international legal dispute on the validity of 'mare clausum' monopolies.

i) excerpts from contemporary literature typecasting merchants and their place in society

j) illustrated designs of English company draughtsmen for furnutire and clothing to be out-sourced to producers in India 

 

A snapshot of sixteenth-century Lisbon. The anonymous, undated Chafariz d’el Rei and its problems [3rd year, Special Subject, HEC].This vigorous anonymous painting of Lisbon depicting the scene around the King's Fountain in the Alfama, the Chafariz d'el Rei, and packed with 155 human figures involved in a variety of distinct, but not immediately clear social activities within one overarching scene or setting is an original and unique source addressing Portuguese early modern history. Since the painting first emerged on the public scene in 1997 from obscure private ownership it begs a number of thorny questions. 

Who is the author, who might he/she have been? Is our painting Flemish or Portuguese?

Can we and how should we proceed to read its detail at face-value? Is there a deeper message, and would that be ludic, exotic or vilipendious (moral condemnation of black/white intermixing primarily by churchmen)? Is the picture a twentieth century fake particularly given its owner, the businessman Berardo’s conviction on counts of fraud? What artistic genre can we see it as part of?

The course will use this painting to explore a number of different but distinct themes grounded on sixteenth-century Portugal : the history of Portugal and its overseas empire, its social history at a time of great change and the role of incomers and institutionalised persecution, history of art (cityscape genres) and fashion, the problem of forgery, the functioning of emporia trade and Europe’s first cities over 100.000 souls, questions of historical meaning when approaching concepts like ‘exotic’, ‘festivity’, ‘truth’ (Begriffsgechichte).

 

Witness to History. A survey of Polish letters after World War Two [3rd year HEC]. Poland has enjoyed a flurry of Nobel prizes in Literature, six to be exact, since its rebirth (odrodzenia): independence won from the retreat of Russia and collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the end of World War I. After a bold, modernist experiment during the climactic and unstable years of the II Rzeczpospolitej (2nd Republic), and quiet during the cataclysm that was World War II (Inter arma, silent Musae), Polish letters spent much of the long fifty-year reign of the PRL (Communism) coming to terms with the war’s utter disruption of normality and Poles’ tragic witness to the slaughter. A variant strand of literature slowly developed as protest against an autocratic and increasingly isolated Communist regime, which took on different forms (contemplation of the value of exile, a return to classical aesthetics and a celebration of the ‘moral voice’ of the writer). We shall conclude this course by embracing recent Polish variants of postmodern reflection on the world.