This research examines how Greco-Roman models of empire became part of native histories of early modern island kingdoms in the far west and the far east—the British Isles and Islamic Southeast Asia. Spread far and wide beyond Greece, legends of Alexander the Great were translated into a bewildering multitude of tongues from Indo-European to Semitic to Turkic and Austronesian languages, suggesting a Eurasian-wide cultural milieu rather than an absolute east-west divide. In both English and Malay Alexander texts, there is a fascination with the outside world and a concern about how to respond to marvel and strangeness. Furthermore, with these texts, both British and Southeast Asian kingdoms used Alexander’s conquests as a model for empire and through imagined descent from him inserted their small kingdoms into world history. Reading the Malay Iskandar and English Alexander against each other, my study considers English relations with Southeast Asians arising from the East Indies spice trade in light of their rival claims to the classical heritage. I explore both sides’ formulations of empire and sovereignty in response to classicism and to globalized cross-cultural relations in late fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth.
In doing so, I offer a major revision and entanglement of two traditional master narratives of the Renaissance: that it was a period of the recovery of the classics and that it was an European age of exploration leading to colonialism. I argue that a shared classical culture meant European explorations were not “first contacts” with utterly alien others. The myth of a European Renaissance was shaped through and by global competition as states across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia all claimed to be the proper heirs of the Greco-Roman classical tradition. Shared by disparate western and eastern, particularly Islamic, cultures, classical history (including history turned into romance) mediated encounters between early modern cultures. The existence of an alternate Alexander as a Muslim world conqueror in Malay and other Islamic versions suggests a relation between east and west, Muslim and Christian, of estranged kinship. Rather than absolute alterity, my narrative of contact is one of familiarity and proximity, of unexpected affinity and intimate strangers.
While current studies of cross-cultural relations have challenged Edward Said’s influential notion of “Orientalism,” the field still focuses on English representations of the other, reinforcing the idea of the silent subaltern. In Southeast Asia, the British entered a political sphere with its own rich literary and cultural traditions that need to be accounted for when studying English writings about the east. I go beyond European representations to investigate as well Southeast Asian views of foreigners, reading a number of early modern Malay chronicles, prose romances, and historical works alongside English literary, historical, and polemical works. The early modern relation between Protestant Britain and Islamic Southeast Asia was not colonial but rather one of alliance and competition between equals. Furthermore, this relation was triangulated by other global players—the Portuguese and Spanish, Ottomans, and the Dutch—in a world-wide competition for the spice trade. Thus, both English and Malay literary imaginations do not present binary relations of self and other but instead represent complex and multiple intersecting cultures, histories, and religions. Putting together the literatures of a language now turned global with one considered minor today, I rethink the questions of center and margin and reveal how the Alexandrian model of empire could be adjusted to fit local circumstances.