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

Product Information

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.

The book recasts the story of Britain and India, moving us beyond a Eurocentric telling with an even-handed, entertaining tale of the encounter of two cultures and the ambitions, misunderstandings and prejudices that came to the fore. For Das the Roe mission is the lens through which to give sharp focus to a remarkably wide-ranging study that does much to illuminate the bigger story of the unpromising origins of British power - and initial powerlessness - in 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. Courting India is ostensibly a study of Sir Thomas Roe's time as the East India Company's representative to the Mughal court from 1615 to 1619, but it is so much more than that . 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.Drawing on a rich variety of sources – literature, the memoirs of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, the journals and correspondence of Sir Thomas Roe, plus the archives of the East India Company – Das invites the reader to get to grips with the making of history, and its narration from both perspectives.

India was a huge continental empire, England a minor maritime kingdom on the fringe of Europe; but with their itchy feet the English were pushing to expand global trade. Although a micro history, this book shines a clear light on the wider times including on the mores and politics of the leaders the Mughal Court, including Shah Jahan, who would go on later to commission the Taj Mahal. But the new king of England was stone broke, and Roe’s embassy had been proposed and funded by the recently founded East India Company, whose directors always kept a beady eye on the ledgers but lacked political sway in the Mughal court.Conflicts over precedence did nothing to advance his mission of securing trade rights, which was the real reason Roe had been sent across the Indian Ocean. The picture that emerges of the first official encounter between Jacobean England and Mughal India is a vivid one, drawn in dazzling technicolour.