At its outset, Ananya Chakravarti's The Empire of Apostles confronts the naturally human and narcissistic challenge, or even critique, that most historians of any period outside that of contemporary have been discouraged from engaging for some time—what does history tell us about our current moment? Yet the author employs the judgments of Pope Benedict XVI regarding the “universalization of European culture” with aplomb, charging the reader not to take the topic of the early modern Portuguese Empire in Asia and South America as a mirror to the present but rather pointing to the rhetoric of the former pontiff as part of a “venerable genealogy” of Christian ideology worth reflection. As Chakravarti points out, “scholarly analyses of Europe's expansion are often studiously secular, with religion often reduced to a footnote” (2), yet the complex entanglement of religion with political and commercial interests, forces seen as distinct developments, is far more often the rule rather than the exception when it concerns the early global excursions of European polities with imperial aspirations.
Adopting an almost exclusively Jesuit focus, Empire of Apostles seeks to examine this relationship through what Chakravarti calls “a religious imaginaire of empire” constructed through fluctuating commitments of missionaries on a local, global, and universal scale. This central theme permeates the chapters, serving as a lynchpin for the case studies of Jesuit figures who fall along the spectrum of these priorities towards the particulars of localized missions, the global interests of Portuguese imperial dominion, and Catholic evangelical universality. The practice of accommodatio, an exegetical and rhetorical principle which directed adaptation of immutable Christian messages to an audience's temporal particulars, “required the individual missionary to fashion a self suited to the local mission context, without losing sight of either his role as representative of the universal Church or the vagaries of global politics to which Portuguese rule was always vulnerable” (17). Given accommodatio's emphasis on self-fashioning, Chakravarti's historiographical approach of historical biography allows for an “exploration of the ways in which an individual moulds himself, and is himself moulded” (11) alongside the coterminous, imperial spatial tiers within which these individuals operate. As such, Empire of Apostles couples individuals from the distant imperial sectors of India and Brazil—Francis Xavier and Manuel da Nóbrega, José de Anchieta and Thomas Stephens, and Baltasar da Costa and António Vieira—who exercised varying degrees of accommodatio through which “Jesuits came to place the myriad locales of their acquaintance into the much broader conceptual geographies” (10).
One of the most significant values of this book is the attempt to decolonise the understanding of Church and empire. Chakravarti achieves this through comprehensive synthesis of post-colonial thought, critical theory, global historiography, and revisionist perspectives towards the Portuguese Empire on a macro and micro level. Disparate regions are placed in conversation with one another in a comparative and connected fashion, using the imperial patronage and dissemination of the Jesuits as conduit for closer investigation. The work's contribution comes from the emphasis on not only indigenous voices from the margins, a notoriously tricky task given the limited source material available and languages required to study it, but also the in-depth analysis of intercultural encounters that occur between Jesuits and local actors in ways hitherto unrealized. The third chapter on ethnological frameworks, for example, gives a much-needed closer look into the episode of Xavier's conversations with Brahmins and the classification of peoples along lines of civility that he develops as a result, with the added comparative insight on Nóbrega's framework developed amongst the Tupí. This is drawn through both men's emphasis on Augustinian principles of “mutual knowledge and salvation of oneself and one's neighbour” (118) over the later efforts at sophisticated ethnography. Moreover, from start to end, the inclusion of overlooked non-European sources provide a fresh perspective on the imperial project of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Jesuit literary output is certainly not in short supply, yet the sheer volume of European vernacular letters and indigenous literature means that the discursive analysis with which Chakravarti handles them is often not quite sufficient; this is not the case here. Outside of more familiar figures like Costa, whose missionary mimesis Chakravarti managed dutifully in an earlier article yet expands upon in chapter six, Stephens and his Marathi epic poem Kristapurana receive the deserved attention that has often eluded scholars in the discussion of accommodatio and its humanist commitment to the production of printed texts. From Stephens’ initiative to correspond the extant literate culture in his mission to Salcete, “the following generation of Jesuits in India pursued ever more radical projects of accommodatio that transcended text to embrace mimetic praxis” (227), not only creating opportunities at Christian indigeneity but also imperialist initiatives and millenarian fulfilments. Despite the well-known pivotal consequences of the Iberian Union for the “empire of apostles”, the existence of ethnic and national factions, however, certainly presented problems for Jesuits earlier than 1580, albeit in a more subdued way, illustrating some of the prior clerical challenges to the imperial identity.
In the context of accommodation, a more extensive discussion of the St. Thomas Christians would have been welcome given their integral place in the narrative of this imperial imaginaire as an indigenous body brought under the fold both politically and ecclesiastically. Yet more recent works by scholars like Antony Mecherry may perhaps offer more opportunities for scholars to review these episodes considering Chakravarti's approach here. The clever use of the individualized attention to local history within a cosmopolitan organization like the Jesuits as a means for overcoming the challenges of writing global history may very well illuminate the path for more critical and stimulating explorations of the early modern world. Few have tackled such a spatial scale at all, let alone with such clarity, and in this regard Empire of Apostles presents an exceptional contribution within a resurgent area of scholarship in Portuguese history through an innovative and critical lens.
