Religious Conversion and Imperial Rule
Self, Otherness and Power in a Global Perspective (16th–19th Centuries)
Distributed for Campus Verlag
Religious Conversion and Imperial Rule
Self, Otherness and Power in a Global Perspective (16th–19th Centuries)
A comparative study of how religious communities shaped ideas of identity and belonging under empire.
Over centuries and across continents, religious communities played a central role in individuals’ self-positioning within society. While studies on the phenomenon of religious conversion have grown considerably in the historical-anthropological literature, the relationship between conversion and imperial rule has been limited to a few geographical areas. In response to this gap, this volume proposes a more global and comparative approach. Although most of the included studies focus on the spread of Christianity and the responses of communities of different faiths, the broader aim of Religious Conversion and Imperial Rule is to supplement a debate that goes beyond confessions or imperial configurations. By addressing diverse historical cases, the book explores three key aspects of conversion and empire: the multidirectional character of religious conversion practices; the varying degrees of change in conversion, shaped by the possibilities and limits of local structures; and notions of subjectivity within convert communities, which shaped their articulated responses to imperial strategies. Overall, the volume illuminates the interplay between power, agency, and social transformation.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Locating the Self, Negotiating the Other: Conversion and Imperial Rule in the Early Modern Period
- Conversion, Evangelization and Indigenous Agency in Colonial Mexico (16th Century). The Florentine Codex as a Space of Negotiation
- Opening the Doors to Conversion: The Reformed Mission and Antiquarianism in the Open Door to Hidden Paganism
- Evangelization Struggle on the Margins of the French Empire: Conversion in the Illinois Country in the 18th Century
- Adaptation and Ambiguity: Indigenous Engagement with Catholic Devotions in the Jesuit Missions of Spanish Amazonia (1638–1768)
- Imperial Catholicism and Indigenous Cosmologies. An Approach to Religious Conversion on the Frontiers of Colonial Latin America
- Baptism and Bureaucracy: Religious Conversion of the Yakut under 17th-Century Russian Rule
- Conversion by Deception: The Case of the Uniates inside the Russian Empire
- Conversion as a win-win-situation? Russian Imperial Policies and Kalmyk Strategies of Adaptation in the 18th Century
- Negotiating Faith: Jewish Conversions, Imperial Policies, and Confessional Choices in Russia
- Armenians, Empire, and the Politics of Conversion in 19th Century Russia