What Time is it There? - 9780745647531

`Serge Gruzinski offers a brilliant multi-sited comparative study for an alternative history of modernity and globalization. Goa, Istanbul and Mexico City displace Amsterdam, London and Paris.' Jose Rabasa, Harvard University

`Gruzinski's provocative argument explores the linkages of Christian Europe, Islam and the Americas that created a Renaissance global vision, not only through political or economic ties and parallels, but through the millenarian and apocalyptic hopes and fears of the time. Learned and innovative, this essay explores the process of globalization at the very origins of the modern world.' Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University

`This fluent and lively essay juxtaposes, compares and contrasts two texts, one written in Istanbul and the other in Mexico, offering reflections on early modern history, geography and astrology and showing that the globalization of information has a longer history than is generally thought.' Peter Burke, University of Cambridge

What Time is it There? is a history of worlds that encounter each other without ever meeting. The title is from a film by Tsai Ming-liang which explores the desire to conquer the barriers of space and time by abolishing time differences and inventing substitutes for a coveted elsewhere. This preoccupation with other worlds and awareness of the differences separating them has become a persistent theme of our world today, but the dismantling of closed worlds that gradually opened cultures and peoples to one another is by no means new.

Serge Gruzinski takes us back to the early modern period and examines two testimonies that require us to navigate between America and the Islamic world long before the images of 9/11 had entered our heads. One is a chronicle of the New World compiled in Istanbul in 1580, the other is a Repertory of the Times written in Mexico in 1606, which dwells at length on the Empire of the Turks. Why and how did the Turks come to know so much about America, and what made readers in Mexico ask questions about the Ottomans?

Gruzinski's sensitive analysis brings out the singularities of the two visions, that of Islam and that of America, each already keeping a watchful eye on the other and yet irreducibly different, with this question always in the background: what did it mean to `think the world' at the dawn of modern times?