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

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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. I thought that Nandini Das did a wonderful job of describing life in the Mughal emperor's court and some of the wonders of the Mughal civilization at that time. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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.

In reflecting on other things I have read about India as a British colony, it seems like the British (and, I suppose other colonizing powers) were deceitful in their future "plans" for their trading "partners. There he found challenges aplenty - the lack of cooperation of the employees of the fledgling East India Company, the sometimes direct challenge from other European powers seeking to develop their commercial interests there, and the lack of any real interest shown by the Mughal court in granting the trading privileges Roe sought. 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. The announcement was made by Chair of the Book Prize judging panel, Professor Charles Tripp FBA, at a celebration at the British Academy. What a joy to find the first official Indo-British encounter receiving the scholarly attention and enthralling treatment it deserves .The result is a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire—and a cogent reminder of the dangers of distortion in the history books of the victors. The power of good writing and a well-told story in getting people to understand each other should not be underestimated. 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. By using contemporary sources by Indian and by British political figures, officials and merchants she has given the story an unparalleled immediacy that brings to life these early encounters and the misunderstandings that sometimes threatened to wreck the whole endeavour.

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.Roe’s time in India apparently had little impact on the Mughals (he is barely mentioned in Jahangir’s own comprehensive writings). 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. Things began to go awry almost as soon as the squadron of ships bearing Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal Empire, sighted India’s western shores in September 1615. Traditional interpretations to the British Empire’s emerging success and expansion has long overshadowed the deep uncertainty that marked its initial entanglement with India.

It also highlights the complex relationships and power structures at Jahangir’s court, and the open way he conducted much government business, as well as sharing court gossip and intrigue. 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.Unable to match the lavishness of the Persian embassy for example or to make much headway against the Portuguese, already by this time better established on the subcontinent, he is forever complaining about lack of funds. Nandini's] book makes us rethink the idea that Britain was always dominant in India -- Hannah Cusworth ― BBC History Magazine, 2023 Books of the Year --This text refers to the hardcover edition. 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 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. What followed in India was a turning-point in history, a story of palace intrigue, scandal, and mutual incomprehension that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia.