Sanjay Subrahmanyam

In the title essay of this enthralling collection, Sanjay Subrahmanyam sets a provocative ball rolling: "At the heart of the matter", he says, "is the notion that at some distant point in the past, say about AD 500, the concept of "Indian civilization" had already been perfected. Everything of any importance was in place: social structure, philosophy, the major literary works ... The central idea here is of India-as-civilization, and it very soon becomes the same as a notion of closed India". Demolishing some of the myths which sustain the notion of the wonder that was India, he shows us a region that was always more a crossroads, a rendezvous for concepts, cultures, and worldviews. Subrahmanyam's book is itself a meeting point for a dazzling variety of ideas. It provides the cosmopolitan perspective of a multilingual world scholar who, having begun life in New Delhi, has gone on to live in several thought-provoking cities, including Paris, Lisbon, and Oxford. He is witty, debunking, iconoclastic, and polemically entertaining in all that he anatomizes here Indian history and fiction, South Asian cultural forms, imperialism and imperialists, secularism and Hindu nationalism, travel writing, and the central conceits in Hemingway, Rushdie, Naipaul, and Márquez. Subrahmanyam is renowned as a historian and biographer. This book, which makes us rethink India and the world around it, is the first to reveal that he is also a writer of accessible and delightful English prose.

Fictions and Histories

Is 'Indian Civilization' a Myth?

A history of two centuries of interactions among the areas bordering the western Indian Ocean, including India, Iran, and Africa. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean—“the green sea,” as it was known to Arabic speakers—had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultural exchange and transformation. Using a variety of texts and documents in multiple Asian and European languages, Across the Green Sea looks at the history of the ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints: western India; the Red Sea and Mecca; the Persian Gulf; East Africa; and Kerala. Sanjay Subrahmanyam sets the scene for this region starting with the withdrawal of China's Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century. Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant center and its dominated peripheries, Across the Green Sea demonstrates the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method pioneered by Subrahmanyam himself.

Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440-1640

Across the Green Sea

A wide-ranging consideration of early modern Muslim and Christian empires, covering the Iberian, Ottoman, and Mughal worlds, including questions of political economy, images and representations, and historiography. Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 15001800 uses the innovative approach of connected histories to address a series of questions regarding the early modern world in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. The period between 1500 and 1800 was one of intense inter-imperial competition involving the Iberians, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the British, and other actors. Rather than understand these imperial entities separately, Sanjay Subrahmanyam reads their archives and texts together to show unexpected connections and refractions. He further proposes, in this set of closely argued studies, that these empires often borrowed from each other, or built their projects with knowledge of other competing visions of empire. The emphasis on connections is also crucial for an understanding of how a variety of genres of imperial and global history writing developed in the early modern world. The book moves creatively between political, economic, intellectual, and cultural themes to suggest a fresh geographical conception for the epoch. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the preeminent practitioner of connected histories, offers yet another set of fascinating encounters of peoples, objects, ideas, and practices between the Ottoman, Mughal, and British empires. As always, he stays close to the archive, but is nonetheless able to spin a wonderfully imaginative web of pictures and stories. A delightful read.  Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University

Empires between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Henning Trüper

Examines how the European idea of historical teleology was taken up and worked out in diverse disciplinary and geographical contexts within and outside of Europe.

Historical Teleologies in the Modern World

Muzaffar Alam

In this volume, the authors present essays on the Mughal Empire by intertwining political, cultural, and commercial themes while exploring diplomacy, state-formation, history-writing, religious debate, and political thought.

Studies on Culture and Politics

Writing the Mughal World

A wide-ranging consideration of early modern Muslim and Christian empires, covering the Iberian, Ottoman and Mughal worlds, including questions of political economy, images and representations, and historiography. Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800 uses the innovative approach of “connected histories” to address a series of questions regarding the early modern world in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. The period between 1500 and 1800 was one of intense inter-imperial competition involving the Iberians, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the British, and other actors. Rather than understand these imperial entities separately, Sanjay Subrahmanyam reads their archives and texts together to show unexpected connections and refractions. He further proposes, in this set of closely argued studies, that these empires often borrowed from each other, or built their projects with knowledge of other competing visions of empire. The emphasis on connections is also crucial for an understanding of how a variety of genres of imperial and global history writing developed in the early modern world. The book moves creatively between political, economic, intellectual, and cultural themes to suggest a fresh geographical conception for the epoch. Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Distinguished Professor and Irving and Jean Stone Chair in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of several books, including The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–1650.

Featuring updates and revisions that reflect recent historiography, this new edition of The Portuguese Empire in Asia 1500-1700 presents a comprehensive overview of Portuguese imperial history that considers Asian and European perspectives. Features an argument-driven history with a clear chronological structure Considers the latest developments in English, French, and Portuguese historiography Offers a balanced view in a divisive area of historical study Includes updated Glossary and Guide to Further Reading

A Political and Economic History

The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Jerry H. Bentley

The era from 1400 to 1800 saw intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections on an unprecedented scale. Divided into two books, Volume 6 of the Cambridge World History series considers these critical transformations. The first book examines the material and political foundations of the era, including global considerations of the environment, disease, technology, and cities, along with regional studies of empires in the eastern and western hemispheres, crossroads areas such as the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and the Caribbean, and sites of competition and conflict, including Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean. The second book focuses on patterns of change, examining the expansion of Christianity and Islam, migrations, warfare, and other topics on a global scale, and offering insightful detailed analyses of the Columbian exchange, slavery, silver, trade, entrepreneurs, Asian religions, legal encounters, plantation economies, early industrialism, and the writing of history.

The Cambridge World History

A collection of essays that span many regions and cultures, by an award-winning historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam is becoming well known for the same sort of reasons that attach to Fernand Braudel and Carlo Ginzburg, as the proponent of a new kind of history - in his case, not longue durée or micro-history, but 'connected history': connected cross-culturally, and spanning regions, subjects and archives that are conventionally treated alone. Not a research paradigm, he insists, it is more of an oppositionswissenschaft, a way of trying to constantly break the moulds of historical objects. The essays collected here, some quite polemical - as in the lead text on the notion of India-as-civilization, or another, assessing such a literary totem as V. S. Naipaul - illustrate the breadth of Subrahmanyam's concerns, as well as the quality of his writing. Connected History considers what, exactly, is an empire, the rise of 'the West' (less of a place than an idea or ideology, he insists), Churchill and the Great Man theory of history, the reception of world literature and the itinerary of subaltern studies, in addition to personal recollections of life and work in Delhi, Paris and Lisbon, and concluding remarks on the practice of early-modern history and the framing of historical enquiry.

Essays and Arguments

Connected History

A study of Persian travel accounts, dealing with India, Iran and Central Asia between 1400 and 1800.

Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800

Comprehensive account of the intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections, between 1400 and 1800.

When Portuguese explorers first arrived in India, the maritime passage initiated an exchange of goods as well as ideas. European ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars who followed produced a body of knowledge that shaped European thought about India. Sanjay Subrahmanyam tracks these changing ideas over the entire early modern period.

Words, People, Empires, 1500 - 1800

Europe’s India

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the court was the crucial site where expanding Eurasian states and empires met and made sense of one another. Richly illustrated, Courtly Encounters provides a fresh cross-cultural perspective on early modern Islam, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Protestantism, and a newly emergent Hindu sphere.

Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia

Courtly Encounters

Presents the life and career of Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama focusing on a blend of the facts and legends around him.

The Career and Legend of Vasco Da Gama

Merchant organisation was a global phenomenon in the early modern era, and in the growing contacts between peoples and cultures, merchants may be seen as privileged intermediaries. This collection is unique in essaying a truly global coverage of mercantile activities, from the Wangara of the Central Sudan, Mississippi and Huron Indians, to the role of the Jews, the Muslim merchants of Anatolia, to the social structure of the mercantile classes in early modern England. The histories of merchant communities are not their histories alone, but also the histories of assumptions concerning their contexts. From the comparative perspective adopted here, it emerges that in markets where Western European merchants vied for place with competitors from the Near East, South Asia or East Asia, they were very often unsuccessful.

Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World, 1450–1800

Eugenia Vanina

Professor Department of History Centre for India and South Asia Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Collection of essays previously published; based on various conference presentations.

From the Tagus to the Ganges

Explorations in Connected History

David Armitage

A distinguished international team of historians examines the dynamics of global and regional change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Providing uniquely broad coverage, encompassing North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and China, the chapters shed new light on this pivotal period of world history. Offering fresh perspectives on: • the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions • the break-up of the Iberian empires • the Napoleonic Wars. The volume also presents ground-breaking treatments of world history from an African perspective, of South Asia's age of revolutions, and of stability and instability in China. The first truly global account of the causes and consequences of the transformative 'Age of Revolutions', this collection presents a strikingly novel and comprehensive view of the revolutionary era as well as rich examples of global history in practice.

The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, C. 1760-1840

A study of individual trajectories in an early modern global context

Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World

Three Ways to be Alien

Historical Teleologies in the Modern World tracks the fragmentation and proliferation of teleological understandings of history – the notion that history had to be explained as a goal-directed process – in Europe and beyond throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. Historical teleologies have profoundly informed a variety of other disciplines, including modern philosophy, natural history, literature, humanitarian and religious philanthropism, the political thought and practice of revolution, emancipation, imperialism, colonialism and anti-colonialism, the conceptualization of universal humankind, and the understanding of modernity in general. By exploring the extension and plurality of historical teleology, the essays in this volume revise the history of historicity in the modern period. Historical Teleologies in the Modern World casts doubt on the idea that a single, if powerful, conception of time could function as the unifying principle of all modern historicity, instead pursuing an investigation of the plurality of modern historicities and its underlying structures. By bringing together Western and non-Western histories, this book provides the first extended treatment of the idea of historical teleology. It will be of great value to students and scholars of modern global and intellectual history.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

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