Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory, and attachments to community, place, and particular literary cultures. In my essay I explore the history of writing in Java, including the story of the letters’ creation, to think about cultural and religious transformations, the relationship of foreign to local, and the powerful hold certain texts have on the imagination.

This article discusses the early modern Acehnese epic tradition to demonstrate the emergence of an individualized Muslim ethics. From the late seventeenth century onwards, a protracted decline of Acehnese royal power initiated a process of political fragmentation as well as the gradual integration of rural areas in the globalizing economy. This shift coincided with the emergence of local religious teachers as a new and influential social group. Contingent upon these changes, the Acehnese epic tradition shifted from a dominant cosmological model based on ritual hierarchies to a paradigm of reflexive ethics based on individual responsibility to God.

In 1643, a Moluccan mestizo soldier named Alexo de Castro was arrested by the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the multicultural Manila barrio of Binondo. Suspected of secretly observing the Muslim faith in Manila, Castro faced inquisitorial investigations that culminated in his trial and punishment in Mexico. Based on evidence from Philippine, Mexican, and Spanish archives, this article examines Castro’s inquisition trial in the broader context of the seventeenth-century Hispano-Asian Pacific world that stretched from Mexico to Manila and the Moluccas. Within its permeable and shifting maritime boundaries, this transpacific cosmopolis was shaped by notions of Catholic universalism and orthodoxy present both in Spanish imperial ideology and in local adaptations. This article draws upon the Castro trial to reveal the tensions of this expanding world. On the one hand, Alexo’s mestizo genealogy and conversion to Catholicism, his work as a go-between in the Moluccas, and long career as a soldier for Spain and Portugal all reveal, on an intimate scale, the innumerable transits that interconnected this seventeenth-century world. On the other, Castro’s trial exposes the political-religious anxieties of Manila’s inquisitors, who saw in Castro a global threat posed by cosmopolitan New Christians – the moriscos, conversos, and indigenous converts whose adaptability and mobility helped to build this transpacific cosmopolis but also seemed to undermine it. By juxtaposing Alexo’s court arguments with those of his inquisitors, this study explores the limits of pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and exclusivism on this volatile seventeenth-century Pacific frontier.

This forum discusses the utility of ‘corporate constitutionalism’ as a category of historical analysis. Corporate constitutionalism privileges the constitutional activities of international trading corporations to understand the cross-cultural dynamics at work in European expansion. William A Pettigrew sets out the possibilities of corporate constitutionalism in the first essay which defines the concept, makes the case for viewing trading corporations as constitutional entities at home and abroad, signals some possible interpretive benefits for historians of empire, corporate historians, global historians, and constitutional historians, before offering an illustrative case study about the Royal African Company. Leading thinkers in international history (David Armitage), legal history (Paul Halliday), constitutional theory (Vicki Hsueh), and corporate history (Thomas Leng and Philip J Stern) offer their reflections on the possibilities of this new approach to the international activities of trading corporations. Although the Forum focuses on seventeenth century English trading corporations, it proposes to start a discussion about the utility of corporate constitutionalism for other European corporations and for periods both before and after the seventeenth century.