The introduction brings the reader into the world of seventeenth-century Ireland. It offers a brief overview of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially the legacies of rebellion and violence that were present at the opening of the study in 1603. It considers broadly English understandings of and policy towards Ireland across a wide timespan, before introducing some of the key differences that emerged in the early seventeenth century. It offers a survey of important historiography and a reflection on source materials, particularly the 1641 Depositions and associated materials, before concluding with an overview of the book’s structure.

Rights, in the Early Modern era, were conceived in terms of divine and natural law. They were understood to be powers, or faculties, belonging to an individual, or to communities, that had existed from the beginnings of time. The intellectual underpinnings of rights theory were derived from the moral theology of the scholastics, and lay in the idea that rights were a God-given power of the soul, and an expression of active virtue. This was true in the Medieval era, and it remained so in the Early Modern, when the origins of ideas about natural rights lay in the poverty controversies of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The appeal to the concept of a natural right was first and foremost a moral endeavour.

Chapter 1 explores the riverine environment and Indigenous societies using four Spanish accounts. Here, there is ample evidence of the complex, large-scale societies mentioned earlier in the Introduction, characterized by exchange, alliances, and intergroup hostilities into which Europeans integrated themselves. Taken as a whole, these accounts demonstrate that Amerindians were not passive; rather, they dominated and directed interactions with Europeans. These interactions included the cross-fertilization of ideas, skills, and material culture, as well as invitations to form alliances and kinship ties, which became significant in shaping a new riverine society.

Chapter 3 contextualizes Aghā-yi Buzurg and her community within the Sufi milieu of sixteenth-century Central Asia by highlighting a particular aspect of this community, ṭarīqa-yi nā-maslūk (the untraveled path), one of the most frequently used designations to refer to the community in the Maẓhar al-ʿajāʾib. This chapter emphasizes the complex nature of “the untraveled path” by exploring the association of Aghā-yi Buzurg and her followers with the Khwājagān–Naqshbandī Sufi tradition. Aghā-yi Buzurg’s community was unique among Sufi groups: first, because it was guided by a woman, and second, because this woman had not been trained by a living master but instead had received her spiritual training from the enigmatic saintly figure of Khiżr, believed to be endowed with immortal life.

Chapter 1 examines the Timurid-era tradition of ʿAlid devotion and its continuation under the early Shibanid dynasty. Tīmūr’s tombstone inscriptions leave no doubt regarding the ʿAlid orientation of the Timurids. The imagery of ʿAlī that links the Chingizid and Timurid genealogical trees in the tombstone suggests the preeminence of ʿAlī’s authority over the legacy of Chingiz Khan in the Timurid legitimation narrative. However, the decline of the Timurid dynasty in the early sixteenth century brought about large-scale religious and political turmoil in the Persianate world. The contest between the newly founded Shibanid and Safavid dynasties facilitated the Shibanids’ development of a self-conscious Sunni orientation in response to the militant Shiʿism promoted by the Safavids, thus furthering Sunni–Shiʿi antagonism.

Chapter 1, a prelude, provides necessary background about the Mughal Empire, and details about its conquest of Gujarat beginning in 1572. Standard histories portray conquest as swift and decisive. The picture I present is somewhat different. Akbar’s annexation of Gujarat was a slow and protracted effort requiring the astute balancing of military force and the pacification and absorption of local political elites into Mughal administration. A successful campaign, as we shall see, absorbed local elites into the Mughal idiom of hierarchy, privileges, duties, and system of wealth distribution. The arranging of tribute payments and indemnities was a core feature of this system. Money over the course of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries became central to Mughal political dispensation. This background chapter concludes by laying out key opportunities Mughal rule provided for the Jhaveri family as they built their influence.

Chapter 1 establishes the intellectual and cultural backdrop for royal justice in late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century England. It explores what justice meant for the wider populace of this period, drawing from a range of elite and non-elite sources: coronation oaths and proclamations issued by the Crown; sermons and speeches made by the chief ministers of the realm in Parliament and Council; and bills of complaints, popular poetry, rebel petitions, and commonplace books produced by humbler people. Surveying this range of differing perspectives, the principle of justice supplied by the king proves to have been deeply ingrained across society. Yet how, exactly, it might be put into practice proved a more contentious topic, and one that opened even the existing royal courts up to criticism. This nebulous ideal, with its cognate concepts of mercy, pity, and charity, was already at odds with the law of the land by the middle of the fifteenth century. These fragmentations help to explain why a more extraordinary kind of royal justice was in demand, and to show the expectations that weighed upon it.

England promulgated more laws of significance about religion than any nation in the Early Modern period in large part because of England’s break from the Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII and the inconsistent relationship that Henry VIII’s successors had with that church. The colonies chronicled in this book were planted primarily by English persons with an aversion to English laws that adversely impacted their religious beliefs and practices. Given the book’s emphasis on law, it is appropriate to provide a brief history of the English laws from which the planters of colonial America were fleeing. The Introduction sets the stage for the chapters about colonial America that follow.

The Consolatio philosophiae of the Roman statesman and philosopher Boethius (fifth/sixth century) was read and studied intensely in medieval western Europe and repeatedly translated into vernacular languages. Medieval commentaries on this text and translations of it claim attention today as case studies in a history of reading, for they exemplify the practices of medieval literary scholasticism. In an English context, the final flowering of this reading tradition may be placed in the year 1556, when John Cawoode printed a new translation of the Consolatio by a ‘George Coluile, alias Coldewel’. The translator remains unidentified. The translation is a medieval throwback in its treatment of Boethius’s text. Whereas subsequent English translators of the Consolatio separate text from commentary, Colvile permitted these categories to interpenetrate. He transmitted a wealth of exegetical material traceable to a commentary on the Consolatio attributed falsely to Thomas Aquinas. Pseudo-Thomas’s commentary and Boethius’s Consolatio were often printed together after their editio princeps in 1473. Colvile probably worked from a book printed in Lyon between 1486 and 1498.

Chapter 1 takes the long view of regional development in Mexico’s Gulf Coast lowlands, from prehistory through Veracruz’s foundation in 1519 and its refounding as Nueva Veracruz in 1599. It examines geography, environment, and how human societies mediated coastal spaces before the seventeenth century. It culminates with Veracruz’s 1599 relocation, which followed an extended battle between powerful merchants in Mexico City, Seville, and Puebla and Veracruz’s own cabildo. While metropolitan merchants and administrators wanted to locate the city closer to port facilities at San Juan de Ulúa, local officials resisted the move, arguing the coastal climate was “unfit for the sustenance of life” and proposing to relocate it further into the mainland interior. By the end of the sixteenth century, metropolitan forces had won out, moving Veracruz closer to the port and securing the primacy of coastal climates and maritime commerce and migration in its social and cultural development in the seventeenth century.

Chapter 2, ‘A Mathematical Culture: The Art of Setting Limits’ brings the reader directly into early modern metal mines. The birth of a vernacular culture of geometry is described, detailing the daily work of craftsmen and insisting on the materiality of measuring practices. Surveys, carried out in public during solemn ceremonies, were a keystone of mining laws. The chapter exposes a central hypothesis of this book: At the time, mathematical accuracy acquired a dual meaning. Measurements had to be precise enough to solve intricate technical problems, while at the same time respecting procedures codified in mining customs and laws. Far from being a mere tool, geometry was meant to ensure trust; it was ubiquitous and pervaded many aspects of a miner’s life. In the early years of the Protestant Reformation, Lutheran pastors actively fostered the rise of practical mathematics. Mathematical and religious rationality were equated, making subterranean geometry accurate in a third way, this time as an expression of divine will. The omnipresence of measurements, combined with their legal and religious recognition, ultimately conferred a higher status to the discipline.