‘Courting India:
England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire’
Nandini Das
Bloomsbury Publishing
When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a large stage. Roe represented a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest empires of the world.
In Nandini Das’s history of Roe’s years in India, she offers an insider’s view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. It is a story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers unfolding as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to Indonesia.
Exploring the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India, Courting India reveals Roe’s time in the Mughal Empire to be a turning point in history – and offers a radical challenge to our understanding of the early British Empire.
About the author
Nandini Das is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. Brought up in India, she was educated at the Jadavpur University in Kolkata, before moving to England for further study. Among other books, she is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Travel Writing. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly presents television and radio programmes, including Tales of Tudor Travel: The Explorer’s Handbook on BBC4.
Read an extract from Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire.
- Illuminating, compelling and wonderfully rich in detail. This book is a startlingly original account of the early diplomatic encounter between Britain and precolonial India.
Wolfson History Prize judges
