For historians of early modern Maritime Asia who wish to engage with the burgeoning scholarship on the conquest period in the Americas, Sri Lanka offers an excellent case study. Much like Mexico and Peru, it underwent a conquest phase in the sixteenth century that inaugurated a long period of colonial occupation under three different European regimes: Portuguese, Dutch, and English. Other similarities can also be found by scholars seeking an Asian counterpoint to Iberian America, but Zoltán Biedermann's (Dis)connected Empires urges the reader to see what was dissimilar about the Iberian advent in Sri Lanka. This new monograph expands on the themes that have preoccupied the author for the past decade in a series of articles—namely, the political history of the early colonization of the island and its theoretical implications. As such, the book seeks to make a contribution to the reconfiguration of imperial history and theory that began roughly two decades ago with Sanjay Subrahmanyam's insistence on “connected histories.”

Biedermann's study addresses two concerns, one dealing with the theories surrounding encounter and empire, and another offering a political history of Iberian relations with Lankan kings in the sixteenth century. His aim is to demonstrate that an initial phase of Portuguese interactions with the kings of Kotte on the southwestern coast of the island proceeded for the better part of the century according to the political logic of indigenous states, rather than as impositions from Lisbon or Goa. Owing to a series of unique diplomatic overtures in the 1540s and 1550s in which Lankan kings formally recognized Portuguese overlordship and even converted to Catholicism, they increasingly drew the Iberians into local politics. Conceiving of the Portuguese within their own hierarchical theory of kingship in which formal relations between independent rulers persisted with minimal interference, Kotte's rulers sought to shore up their own kingdom against rival Lankan kings. But this approximation, whether by diplomacy or conversion, created a disconnect between the political understanding of the Portuguese and the Sinhalese. It is here that Biedermann is keen to reveal the fragility of the notion of connected history, a concept that elides moments of divergence in its search for parallels. He identifies an indigenous political concept of nesting empires, each inside another while remaining whole, by analogy to matryoshka dolls, and how the Portuguese presence on the island fit into this scheme until the conquest of Portugal by Philip II in 1580.

It was at that moment that the Christian king of Kotte, João Dharmapāla, decreed that his heir would be the king of Portugal. This gesture was intended to assure Portuguese support for Kotte as previous overtures had done, but it came right as a political realignment was occurring within the Portuguese Estado da Índia, moving away from dominance by local mercantile interests and toward greater centralized authority. In other words, while seeking support under the framework of one set of political notions, the last king of Kotte invited conquest according to another. Although fantasies of conquest had long circulated in certain Portuguese quarters, Philip's will overrode the reluctance in Goa to intervene more forcefully in Sri Lanka, ordering his viceroys to carry out the conquest of the island in the 1590s. This political strategy represented, according to Biedermann, a decisive shift in not only the relations between Europeans and Sinhalese but also a new conception of the island as a whole to be unified, rather than a set of kingdoms competing against each other.

(Dis)connected Histories urges the reader to pause before facile comparisons across the early modern world. But arguing for hesitancy is not easy, and Biedermann's sustained cautionary notes are often difficult to follow. At times, his reliance on metaphors does not ease comprehension, nor does his frequent deployment of clichés—although it is clear that both are used to help the reader overcome unfamiliarity with Lankan and Portuguese names. While this new study offers a compelling means for understanding variations on the theme of conquest that attributes agency and power to Sinhalese actors, it does so almost exclusively with European sources. Some discussion of this unmentioned yet problematic fact, instead of so much parsing of recent theoretical discourse, would have greatly enhanced this book.