Artefacts of Encounter: Materialising Emotions in Fifty Early Modern Representations

This book presents corresponding images and essays of fifty early modern artefacts of encounters between European explorers and indigenous peoples, addressing relationships and material exchanges that extend beyond this framework to encompass diverse interactions across early modern societies.

The artefacts selected for inclusion in this volume convey early modern visual dialogues, value systems and imagery through paintings, photographs, maps, drawings, buildings, books, icons, sacred sites and entities, dwellings and natural settings. Placing these objects within a comparative and international context, O’Brien considers the representation of these interactions as they are expressed through a wide gamut of human emotional experiences such as life, death, grief, pain, pleasure, belief, sadness and conflict, along with the extended perspective of image reproduction. In doing so, the book locates the realities of early modern existence - the emotional, legal, spiritual and violent encounters that encompass everyday experiences - in an expansive and varying spatial, cultural, geographical and temporal context.

The book will interest students, scholars and general readers within a broad range of history subdisciplines including early modern history, indigenous history, comparative history and socio-legal history, and is also a useful text for undergraduate courses in politics, law, indigenous studies and global studies.

Karen O’Brien is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her notable works include Petitioning for Land: The Petitions of First Peoples of Modern British Colonies (2019) and Cursing, Crisis and Customary Knowledge in Early Modern English Townships (2024).