Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire

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Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire

Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire

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The picture that emerges of the first official encounter between Jacobean England and Mughal India is a vivid one, drawn in dazzling technicolour.

And while Roe kept a journal and wrote letters, I didn’t get the impression that he was particularly interested in any of this, unless it pertained to him obtaining privileges for British traders. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. It also highlights the complex relationships and power structures at Jahangir’s court, and the open way he conducted much government business, as well as sharing court gossip and intrigue. Traditional interpretations to the British Empire’s emerging success and expansion has long overshadowed the deep uncertainty that marked its initial entanglement with India. Alighting on land, Roe was incensed to see that the waiting party of officials of the great port of Surat in Gujarat did not rise from their tented carpets to welcome him.Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. It explored the beginning of Britain's imperial and colonial as well as the goings on and culture of Elizabethan England.

Things began to go awry almost as soon as the squadron of ships bearing Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal Empire, sighted India’s western shores in September 1615. A profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century. This was chosen by Pratinav Anil, Lecturer at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and author of Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77 (Hurst, 2023), as one of History Today’s Books of the Year 2023.

All of this makes for a fascinating book - the wealth and power of the Mughals, their interest in novelty and luxury, and the failure at that time by the East India Company to provide Roe with the support he needed to secure favour with them. Das] is the rare scholar who combines a sensitivity to the literature of Jacobean England with a sympathetic and nuanced understanding of the Mughal empire . She is a scholar of Renaissance literature, travel, migration, and cross-cultural encounters, and has published widely on these topics, from major sixteenth and seventeenth century authors like Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Cervantes, to the fleeting presence of three Japanese boys in sixteenth century Portuguese-held Goa, India. In this genuinely ground-breaking work, Indian-raised Das challenges our understanding of this pivotal pre-colonial period.

He went on to have a successful diplomatic career as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire but here he is quite the fish out of water, trying to establish relationships and obtain better trading arrangements without the proper means to do so. In September 1615, Thomas Roe—Britain’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire—made landfall on the western coast of India. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage.



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