Early Modernity as Cosmopolis: Some suggestions from Southeast Asia

Modernity is usually asociated in European historiography with ideas of the nation-state, of the individual, and of secular science. Outside the West these concepts also had an astonishing career, though self-conscious borrowing of an ideological package explicitly labelled 'modern' occurred so vigorously around 1900 as to efface older elements of the package. The scholarly construct 'Early Modern', on the other hand, has been welcomed outside Europe for different reasons. It appears to offer a neutral way of rendering a profoundly important global moment that had for too long been provincialised through Euro-centric terms such as 'Renaissance', 'Age of Discovery", or 'Vasco da Gama Epoch'.