This book explores the changing meanings that ‘maritime India’ acquired during the early modern period as a result of the frequent efforts of the Mughals and the Portuguese, from two different fronts, to control its vast, resourceful enclaves and profit-yielding neighbourhoods. By analysing the highly nuanced socioeconomic processes of these regions and addressing themes that have as yet remained unexplored, this volume creates a new framework to understand the varying nature of maritime India.
Some of the issues explored here focus on the political implications of the religious dialogues between Akbar and Jesuits; the attempts of the Portuguese to create a supportive social group out of the Paravas in the Pearl Fishery Coast; the creation of parallel circuits to Ottoman markets in the eastern Mediterranean as an alternative to the Cape Route trade of the Portuguese; the multiple strands of trade between coastal western India and the markets of East Africa; the economic and political processes that prompted the shifting of the Mughal capital from the hinterland to the vicinity of the major maritime trading centres of northern Konkan; voices of dissent in Christianity and discourses on early nationalism; the changing perceptions of Portuguese enclaves in Bengal and aspects of the ethnic mutation of the Luso-Indians as well as the social manoeuvrings of the English.
The Mughals, the Portuguese and the Indian Ocean: Changing Imageries of Maritime India will be of interest to students and scholars of early modern history of India in general and those studying transitions in maritime India in particular.