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

by Nandini Das

🏆 Winner of the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding

Recommendations from our site

“In 1615, Thomas Roe arrived as an ambassador to the Mughal Emperor from the court of King James I of England and VI of Scotland, hung around for three years, and really didn’t achieve anything. He was constantly ill. He misunderstood customs. He bigged himself up in his own mind but, very revealingly, left no trace in the diaries of the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, whom Roe presents as a bosom buddy and hugely impressed by him. Clearly, Jahangir wasn’t. Roe was a bedraggled person from a puzzlingly faraway country with which the emperor had very little dealings and not much interest.” Read more...

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Diarmaid MacCulloch, Theologians & Historians of Religion

“The hapless ambassador to the second-order monarch finds himself in these extraordinary palaces, where he hangs around and it’s not even clear that he’s going to be given an audience. Das is conjuring this world. Every sentence gives you a present. It’s absolutely wonderful. It’s constructed like a Swiss watch: everything locks in and returns. One moment you find yourself in Jacobean London, and then, the next moment, you’re encountering something oriental and remote.” Read more...

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Susan Brigden, Historian

“This is an excellent book with extraordinary historical depth. It focuses on the moment when Britain encountered the Mughal court in northern India, through the journey of the British envoy Thomas Rowe. He left Stuart Britain, which was chaotic and in conflict about its own identity. I would say that Das shows us how impoverished Britain was in contrast with Mughal India. Rowe arrives in India and Das follows his journey on a boat—a difficult and hazardous trip at the time. He then moves on land to reach the amazing Mughal court where successive Mughal emperors lived.” Read more...

The 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding

Madawi Al-Rasheed, Anthropologist