Menu
Courting India: Seventeenth-Century England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire
Maybe someday
42
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
39/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
Nandini Das
Publisher:
Pegasus Books
Date:
April 4, 2023
When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I's first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. 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 considered to be one of the greatest empires of the world. In this history of Roe's four years in India, Nandini Das offers an insider's view of Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown.
What The Reviewers Say
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.
A scholarly biography with an antiquary’s eye for detail. Das’s leisurely diversions into the world of Jacobean fashion, food and curiosities are fascinating.
Das’s book is at its most interesting when it moves beneath the familiar and unearths stories that have been forgotten or suppressed.
Das offers elucidating digressions into the roles of Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry, and Jahangir’s queen.
