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

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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. From the point of this time it must have seemed highly unlikely that Britain would go on to any significant level of interest, never mind to rule, in India. Professor Charles Tripp was joined on the 2023 Book Prize judging panel by Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed FBA, Professor Rebecca Earle FBA, Fatima Manji, and Professor Gary Younge Hon FBA. Courting India was chosen from a shortlist of six books that included: Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan; The Violence of Colonial Photography by Daniel Foliard; Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation by Kris Manjapra; Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo; and Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living by Dimitris Xygalatas.

What a joy to find the first official Indo-British encounter receiving the scholarly attention and enthralling treatment it deserves . Traditional interpretations to the British Empire’s emerging success and expansion has long overshadowed the deep uncertainty that marked its initial entanglement with India. A major debut that explores the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, Courting India reveals Thomas Roe's time in the Mughal Empire to be a turning point in history – and offers a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire. The picture that emerges of the first official encounter between Jacobean England and Mughal India is a vivid one, drawn in dazzling technicolour.This book does just that, drawing on the best of the academic and the literary traditions to shed light on how we are today. This is something of a micro history, focusing as it does on a three year period from 1616 to 1619; the years of the ambassadorship of Thomas Roe from the Court of King James 1 of England to Mughal India. The youthful ambassador was hindered by his perfect ignorance of any Indian languages, entangled in bitter rivalries with other English officials and undercut by the behavior of his own staff: On the very day of his arrival, Roe’s personal chef drunkenly attacked a Mughal nobleman in the streets of the city. Nandini Das's rich, absorbing account of a critical juncture of global history, the Englishman Sir Thomas Roe's embassy to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, charts both a remarkable personal narrative and the prehistory of colonial expansion, told from the perspective of an imperial go-between. Stretching from the dark waters of the Thames to the blossom-strewn floors of the Jahangiri Palace, Courting India covers a vast canvass with masterful aplomb.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The British Academy Book Prize, formerly known as the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize, was established in 2013, to reward and celebrate the best works of non-fiction that demonstrate rigour and originality, and have contributed to public understanding of other world cultures and their interaction.Though London was at the height of the Renaissance—the era of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne—financial strife and fragile powerbases presented risk and uncertainty at every turn. This lucid and imaginatively written book tells us a great deal about the hesitant early days of the first British Empire, as a traditionally inward-looking island nation sought to engage with the wider world. A profound and ground-breaking approach to one of the most important encounters in the history of the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century. In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. Roe saw himself as the representative of James I, a great monarch and powerful actor on the European stage, and his intransigence in dealing with the Mughals was a familiar posture by which European diplomats evoked and displayed the power of their sovereign (and so, likewise, the Mughals’ insistence on their customs procedures).

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. In this remarkable debut, Nandini Das – Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford – presents an important new perspective on the origins of empire through the story of the arrival of the first English ambassador in India, Sir Thomas Roe, in the early 17th century. Small wonder, then, that by the end of the first month, the authorities had already prohibited the town’s merchants from dealing with the English. 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. It does seem however that Roe was greatly concerned with avoiding paying obeisance to the Mughal royals, and continuing to dress in hot English style clothing, neither of which made his job any easier. Nandini Das moves seamlessly between the inner worlds of the courts of seventeenth century England and India and with a mastery of both.