Three Ways to Be Alien is based on the Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures that Sanjay Subrahmanyam delivered in 2007. The lectures brought together three narratives of physical, social, and metaphoric displacement: the lives of Miyan ‘Ali (d. 1567) or, as the Portuguese sources refer to him, Meale, a Muslim prince held captive at Portuguese Goa; Anthony Sherley (1565–1633), an English political schemer and self-promoter, whose travels spanned four continents; and Nicolò Manuzzi (1638–1720), a Venetian who spent sixty-four years in India. Through a fascinating discussion of these cases, Sanjay Subrahmanyam examines not only the condition of alienation, but also the tension between agency and structure.

The first protagonist, Meale, found himself at the center of political plots involving the Shi'ite faction at the court of Bijapur, the Portuguese at Goa and several Indian potentates in the 1540s. The Shi'ites hoped to convince Meale to return to Bijapur, depose his nephew, Sunni Ibrahim, and take over. They charged the Portuguese with the task of enticing Meale back to Bijapur via Goa, but by the time he arrived in Goa the Shi'ite schemers had lost power, and Meale remained there for nearly two decades until his death. That the Shi'ites believed Meale could dethrone his nephew meant that the latter saw Meale as a threat, while the Portuguese viewed him as a source of power to be carefully kept prisoner until the right time came. Alienation for Meale, then, was the result of multiple displacements and imprisonment. He remained an outsider, a prisoner in a golden cage, throughout his stay in Goa. Assimilation in Portuguese counter-reformation society, however, expressed by membership in prestigious religious orders was open even for Muslims who were willing to convert to Christianity, as demonstrated by the conversion of Meale's sons.

Unlike Meale, Sherely fancied himself capable of manipulating everybody, crossed religious boundaries—converting to Catholicism when this seemed beneficial—and traveled across the world. In his early career he tried to ally England and other European powers with the Safavids against the Ottomans; later, he whet the appetite of Philip III of Spain for empire by presenting him with grandiose plans that ranged from the conquest of Morocco through the fortification of Singapore and more. Sherely, however, was not only a “rambunctious actor” but also “a manipulator of concepts and schemes” (117). In an arbitrío he submitted to the Count of Olivares in 1622, he expressed disdain for the ethnographic writing mode employed by pilgrims and merchants, creatively advocating instead political—preferably global—analysis freed from the constrains of religion or ethnicity. This apparent detachment, according to Subrahmanyam, was the basis of Sherely's alienation: his analytical perspective which “could have been very nearly located anywhere … came to be located nowhere” (132) and bestowed on him the objectivity associated by Simmel with the stranger (177).

Manuzzi, Subrahmanyam's third test case, arrived in India in 1656 when he was less than twenty years old. He spent thirty-odd years working for Mughal courts as an artilleryman and a “physician,” and nearly as long traveling between English, French, and Portuguese entrepôts in India and writing a multivolume work that was part a history of the Mughals, Storia del Mogol, and part an autobiography. Examined in light of Sherely's distinction between an ethnographic and a political analysis, Manuzzi's work clearly belongs with the merchants and pilgrims. In his Storia del Mogol, he defines a pecking order among the Europeans, Mughals (or Moors), and the Gentiles and makes it clear that life among the Muslims, and even more so among the Gentiles, is problematic for Europeans. Despite his ethnographic orientation and his self-identification as a Venetian and a European, Manuzzi chose to spend nearly half of his life among the Mughals as an exile, voluntarily living as an alien.

Each of these figures allows Subrahmanyam to analyze different aspects of the condition of being alien, understood not in its early modern sense—in relation to the family, transmission of property or the system of justiceFootnote ¹—but rather in relation to territory and displacement, religion or culture and assimilation. Through the discussion of the processes and qualities that made Meale, Sherely and Manuzzi aliens, Subrahmanyam teases out the tension between large scale social processes and individual trajectories. Sherely provides the best example. His flirtation with the English, Safavids, Habsburgs, and other imperial powers was made possible by a global shift reflected in political writing. Whereas sixteenth century philosophers imagined the world as bi-imperial, dominated by the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, seventeenth century political thinkers perceived a multi-imperial world. Sherely, with his sharp political instincts, took advantage of this change. The net result of these explorations is an important addition to historical studies of global scale. Three Ways to be Alien is of interest for scholars of the early modern with diverse geographical focuses. Subrahmanyam offers political, social, and cultural analysis and combines a connected history (a term and approach he coined and developed) perspective with microhistory and biography, thus extending the work's historical and anthropological relevance.