Portugal, a tiny nation with around a million inhabitants, created a world empire between the 15th and 17th centuries which left vestiges in Africa and Asia as late as the 1970s. To illuminate the Asian dimension of this empire - to show how it came into being and how it changed over time - Dr Subrahmanyam explores the interaction of international and local factors in Europe, Asia and Africa alike. This is a contribution to the early modern history of Asia; as well as to the study of European expansion. The author takes into account a vast literature of recent research by European and Asian historians, in English, Portuguese and French and sets the Portuguese in their wider Iberian, European and global contexts. It should be accessible to a wide readership, assumes little or no previous knowledge of the subject. It is aimed at undergraduate students, historians and the informed general reader and is suitable for courses covering the history of Asia, Hispanic studies, the political and economic roots of imperialism, and the rise of the modern west.

Product Description: Between the mid-sixteenth and early nineteenth century, the Mughal Empire was an Indo-Islamic dynasty that ruled as far as Bengal in the east and Kabul in the west, as high as Kashmir in the north and the Kaveri basin in the south...read more

Sanjay Subrahmanyam's Three Ways to Be Alien draws on the lives and writings of a trio of marginal and liminal figures cast adrift from their traditional moorings into an unknown world. The subjects include the aggrieved and lost Meale, a "Persian" prince of Bijapur (in central India, no less) held hostage by the Portuguese at Goa; English traveler and global schemer Anthony Sherley, whose writings reveal a surprisingly nimble understanding of realpolitik in the emerging world of the early seventeenth century; and Nicolo Manuzzi, an insightful Venetian chronicler of the Mughal Empire in the later seventeenth century who drifted between jobs with the Mughals and various foreign entrepots, observing all but remaining the eternal outsider. In telling the fascinating story of floating identities in a changing world, Subrahmanyam also succeeds in injecting humanity into global history and proves that biography still plays an important role in contemporary historiography.

Product Description: This first book to fully explore the opulent art and refined lifestyle of Lucknow showcases cultural diversity at its most magnificent.Lucknow was a cosmopolitan Indo-Islamic-European capital in northern India that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...read more

Product Description: Originally published in 2007, this fascinating work is based on detailed and sensitive readings of travel accounts in Persian, dealing with India, Iran and Central Asia between around 1400 and 1800. The first comprehensive treatment of this neglected genre of literature (safar nama), it links the Mughals, Safavids and Central Asia in a crucial period of transformation and cultural contact...read more

Product Description: Distinguished historians provide uniquely broad coverage of the dynamics of global and regional change in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sheds new light on the American, French and Haitian revolutions, alongside ground-breaking treatments of Africa's place in world history and Asia's age of revolutions...read more

Product Description: The idea of an 'eternal India', based on stable and unchanging villages, has been in disarray for at least two decades. However, having demolished this myth, historians have been rather less able to construct an alternative vision...read more

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

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

Contributed articles previously published in Indian economic and social history review.

Product Description: This omnibus of three classic studies provides a basic grounding for scholars of India's maritime history. In an introduction written especially for this edition Sanjay Subrahmanyam locates these classics in the extant literature in the area...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Penumbral Visions examines the politics of South India during the transition from Vijayanagara to colonial rule. Through a series of case studies, it argues for the inadequacy of standard models of conquest and instead depicts a flexible set of polities that are gradually undermined over the course of the eighteenth century...read more

Product Description: Along with the clock and the railroad, did the British colonists bring the questionable gift of history to India? Is it true that historical consciousness did not exist in India before its conquest by the British at the end of the eighteenth century? Generations of western writers have claimed this to be true; that Indians in pre-colonial times were indifferent to historical fact and approached their past through myth, legend, and story...read more

Product Description: In The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India 1500-1650 Sanjay Subrahmanyam explores the relationship between long-distance trade and the economic and political structure of southern India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Penumbral Visions explores how the political structure and political culture of the states of south India were transformed between 1500 and 1800. In Asia this period was characterized by a contest between European influence and indigenous political and economic processes...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Vasco da Gama (?1469-1524) is well known as one of a generation of discoverers, along with Magellan, Cabral, and Columbus. Yet little is known about his life, or about the context within which he 'discovered' the all-sea route to India in 1497-99...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Looking at the three major Nayaka states--ruled from Senji, Tanjavur, and MAadurai/Tiruccirapalli--as well as at minor states located at their periphery, this volume deals with the political culture of the NaAyaka period in medieval South India, an era which extends from the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century...read more

Contributed articles. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This work offers global coverage of merchants as privileged intermediaries between peoples and cultures in the early modern era. The material ranges from the Wangara of the Sudan to the Mississippi Indians, and from Muslim merchants of Anatolia to the mercantile classes in England...read more

Product Description: The book looks at the three major Nayaka states--ruled from Senji, Tanjavur and Madurai, Tiruccirappalli--as well as at minor states located at their periphery. While these states had differing life-spans, developmental patterns, geo-ecological environments, and distinct forms of historical experience, they also shared salient structural and cultural features...read more

Product Description: The concepts of "trade," "market," and "state" both divide historians, economists, and anthropologists, and provide a meeting point for discussion in these disciplines. These essays, originally published in the Indian Economic and Social History Review and available now for the first time in a single volume, provide a comprehensive look at the process of economic change in pre-industrial India; the ways in which markets functioned; the role of individuals merchants in the regional societies of India; the position of mercantile communities as agents and victims of change; and the complex relationships between political states and trading communities...read more