Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity underwent outward expansion and internal division, with the result that people belonging to different religious traditions increasingly came into contact with each other. The eight essays in this volume examine instances of accommodation and conflict that emerged in response to interaction between different religious groups. Many of the essays focus on areas of the early modern world that lay on the periphery of empires: Central and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean basin, Southeast Asia, and North America. In these regions, responses to religious difference were often entwined with considerations of economic exchange and political contestation.

The contributions reveal how conflict and accommodation were often connected to the project of centralization of state power in the early modern period. Accommodation was a useful policy for rulers of religiously mixed polities seeking to maintain unity. Stephen Blake's essay looks at efforts by the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Akbar to promote inter-faith dialogue, while Graeme Murdock investigates leaders in post-Reformation Transylvania who extended religious liberty to people of rival Christian creeds. Alternatively, religious conflict could enhance a state's ability to project its power, as Timothy Brook describes in a fascinating piece on how an uprising of Chinese inhabitants living under Spanish rule in the Philippines in 1640 allowed the Spanish crown to marshal its forces under the banner of Catholicism. Historians interested in religious conflict and coexistence will find useful the comparative treatment these problems receive here.