ABSTRACT
Though still problematic when applied to societies beyond Western Europe and the Americas, the term “early modern” is gaining currency in Southeast Asian studies. Historians generally agree that the period between 1400 and 1800 was a time of unprecedented change in which the region was integrally involved in processes that resulted in “a genuinely global periodization of world history”.1 The expanding interactions that characterize this period are central to discussions of religious change in Southeast Asia because of the spread of Islam and Christianity. In tandem with increased trade networks, both faiths introduced new connectivities that scholars of contemporary religious plurality have characterized by the fashionable but inelegant amalgam, “glocalization”.2
