The volume "Revisiting Hormuz", gathers the proceedings of a Conference organized in March 2007 by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, through its Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris. The year 2007, exactly five centuries after the Portuguese first landed on the island of Hormuz, seemed to the scientific coordinators Rui Manuel Loureiro and Dejanirah Couto a very appropriate moment to bring together a large group of specialists that could establish the current state of the art in field of the history of Portuguese interactions with Hormuz and the Persian Gulf region. The chronological borders of the Conference, quite naturally, were extended to the early decades of the 17th century, to include the final departure of the Portuguese from Hormuz in 1622 and subsequent developments. Although the focus of the Paris Conference was supposed to be history, in any of its political, social, economic or cultural variants, the complex nature of Portuguese interactions with Hormuz and Safavid Persia, that spanned for more than a century, and also the existence of an important monumental heritage of Portuguese origin in the Gulf area, made the presence of art historians, architects, and archaeologists desirable.

The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622 studies the conception of Persia in the literary, political and pedagogic writings of Renaissance England and Britain. It argues that writers of all kinds debated the means and merits of English empire through their intellectual engagement with the ancient Persian empire.

An examination of groups and individuals in Rome who were not Roman Catholic, or not born so. It demonstrates how other religions had a lasting impact on early modern Catholic institutions in Rome.

This sweeping history reorients our understanding of the Middle East, placing the Gulf at the heart of globalized trade and cross-cultural encounters. World history began in the Persian Gulf. The ancient port cities that dotted its coastlines created the first global seaboard, a place from where faiths and cultures from around the world set sail and made contact. More than a history, The Center of the World shows us that contradictions that define our modern age have always been present. For over four thousand years, the Gulf—sometimes called the Persian Gulf, sometimes the Arabian Gulf—has been a global crossroads while managing to avoid control by the world’s greatest empires. In its history, we see a world of rapid change, fluctuating centers of trade, a dependency on uncertain global markets, and intense cross-cultural encounters that hold a mirror to the contemporary world. Focusing each chapter on a different port around the Gulf, The Center of the World shows how the people of the Gulf adapted to larger changes in world history, creating a system of free trade, merchant rule, and commerce that continues to define the region today.

In December 1572 the Mughal emperor Akbar arrived in the port city of Khambayat. Having been raised in distant Kabul, Akbar, in his thirty years, had never been to the ocean. Presumably anxious with the news about the Mughal military campaign in Gujarat, several Portuguese merchants in Khambayat rushed to Akbar’s presence. This encounter marked the beginning of a long, complex, and unequal relationship between a continental Muslim empire that was expanding into south India, often looking back to Central Asia, and a European Christian maritime empire whose rulers considered themselves ‘kings of the sea’. By the middle of the seventeenth century, these two empires faced each other across thousands of kilometres from Sind to Bijapur, with a supplementary eastern arm in faraway Bengal. Focusing on borderland management, imperial projects, and cross-cultural circulation, this volume delves into the ways in which, between c. 1570 and c. 1640, the Portuguese understood and dealt with their undesirably close neighbours—the Mughals.

This book examines the many ways in which innovative technologies represent a powerful development tool for the tourism and leisure sector and presents novel strategies based on these technologies that foster sustainable tourism management and promote sustainable destinations. The aim is to elucidate the ways in which ICTs can be used to create a high-quality experience for citizens and visitors while ensuring the wise, ecologically sound management of human and natural resources. Attention is also focused on the globalized environment in which these advances are occurring, and on the impacts of broader social, economic, and political forces in transforming our understanding of "tourism" in the era of online devices. The book is based on the proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the International Association of Cultural and Digital Tourism (IACuDiT) and is edited in collaboration with IACuDiT. It will have broad appeal to professionals from academia, industry, government, and other organizations who wish to learn about the latest perspectives in the fields of tourism, travel, hospitality, culture and heritage, leisure, and sports within the context of a knowledge society and smart economy.

For centuries the world’s Great Powers, along with their fleets, armies, and intelligence services, have been drawn to the Persian Gulf region. Lying at the junction of three great continents – Asia, Europe, and Africa – and sitting athwart the oceanic trade routes that link the cities of the world, the Gulf, like a magnet, has pulled superpowers into the shallow waters and adjacent lands of the 600 mile long appendage of the Indian Ocean. An observer at Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf would alternately have watched pass in the 15th century the treasure ships of Chinese Admiral Zheng He, in the 16th century the caravels of Portuguese Admiral Afonso de Albuquerqe, in the 17th century the merchant ships of the Dutch East India Company, in the 18th to the 20th centuries the frigates and steamships of the British, and finally in the late 20th century to today, the cruisers and aircraft carriers of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Perhaps in the future, Americans may be supplanted by the Indians, or perhaps the Chinese. In the Great Powers’ comings and goings since the 1400s, several consistent broad interests emerged. For the majority of this time, for example, the superpowers entered the Gulf region not to colonize, as the Europeans did in other places, but rather to further trade, which in the 20th century increasingly included oil. They also sought a military presence in the Gulf to protect seaborne flanks to colonial possessions further east on the Indian sub-continent and beyond (India, in fact, has long cast a shadow over the Gulf, given its historic trade and cultural ties to the Gulf region, strong ties that continue today). In their geo-political jockeying, furthermore, the Great Powers sought to deprive their rivals access to the states bordering the Gulf region. In tending to these enduring interests inside the Strait of Hormuz, the Great Powers through history concentrated their trade, political, and military presence along the littorals. Not surprisingly, their navies have played a substantive role. Imperial Crossroads: The Great Powers and the Persian Gulf is a collection of connected chapters, each of which investigates a different perspective in the broader subject of the Great Powers and their involvement with the states of the Persian Gulf. This volume concentrates on four western nations – Portugal, Holland, Britain, and the United States – and concludes with a look at the possible future involvement of two rising Asian powers – China and India.

Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, Volume 11 (CMR 11) covering South and East Asia, Africa and the Americas in the period 1600-1700, is a continuing volume in a history of relations between the two faiths from the 7th to the early 20th century as this is reflected in written works. It comprises introductory essays and the main body of entries which treat all the works, surviving or lost, that are recorded. These entries provide biographical details of the authors, descriptions and assessments of their works, and complete accounts of publications and studies. The result of collaboration between numerous leading scholars, CMR 11, along with the other volumes in this series, is intended as a basic tool for research in Christian-Muslim relations. Section Editors: Clinton Bennett, Luis F. Bernabe Pons, Jaco Beyers, Lejla Demiri, Martha Frederiks, David D. Grafton, Stanisław Grodź, Alan Guenther, Emma Gaze Loghin, Gordon Nickel, Claire Norton, Reza Pourjavady, Douglas Pratt, Radu Păun, Peter Riddell, Umar Ryad, Mehdi Sajid, Cornelia Soldat, Karel Steenbrink, Davide Tacchini, Ann Thomson, Serge Traore, Carsten Walbiner

In 1585, at the height of Jesuit missionary activity in Japan, which was begun by Francis Xavier in 1549, Luis Frois, a long-time missionary in Japan, drafted the earliest systematic comparison of Western and Japanese cultures. This book constitutes the first critical English-language edition of the 1585 work, the original of which was discovered in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid after the Second World War. The book provides a translation of the text, which is not a continuous narrative, but rather more than 600 distichs or brief couplets on subjects such as gender, child rearing, religion, medicine, eating, horses, writing, ships and seafaring, architecture, and music and drama. In addition, the book includes a substantive introduction and other editorial material to explain the background and also to make comparisons with present-day Japanese life. Overall, the book represents an important primary source for understanding a particularly challenging period of history and its connection to contemporary Europe and Japan.

This book explores the secret relations between theatre and diplomacy from the Tudors to the Treaty of Westphalia. It offers an original insight into the art of diplomacy in the 1580-1655 period through the prism of literature, theatre and material history. Contributors investigate English, Italian and German plays of Renaissance theoretical texts on diplomacy, lifting the veil on the intimate relations between ambassadors and the artistic world and on theatre as an unexpected instrument of 'soft power'. The volume offers new approaches to understanding Early Modern diplomacy, which was a source of inspiration for Renaissance drama for Shakespeare and his European contemporaries, and contributed to fashion the aesthetic and the political ideas and practice of the Renaissance.