Maritime India: Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800

Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century 'This is an erudite addition to the expanding literature on the maritime history of India. Though the focus of the study is on the seventeenth century, it has wider implications for debates on wider issues.' --The Northern Mariner '...Sinnappah Arasaratnam's most notable contribution is his ample consideration of the exchange networks between India's coasts ...and Southeast Asia...' -- American Historical Review The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea 'This book offers an excellent introduction to the common history of the societies that have been linked by maritime activity in the Indian Ocean.' --Mariner's Mirror 'His strength...lies in an ability to put across a coherent narrative on social and political history with a minimum of fuss and pretension.' --The Economic Times This omnibus of three classic studies provides a basic grounding for scholars of India s maritime histo ry . L In an introduction written especially for this edition Sanjay Subrahmanyam locates these classics in the extant literature in the area. He argues that these works, the older being a quarter of a century old, are still insightful to new entrants into the field of maritime history. Holden Furber's Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600 1800 is an account of European expansion in Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It tells the story of the rivalries of the East India companies and the growth of British maritime dominance, eventually leading to the Pax Britannica. Sinnappah Arasaratnam, in his Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century, supplements his own researches into the overseas trade of India and its commercial economy, with a thorough study of the current historiography of these themes. He divides the maritime region into four zones Gujarat, Malabar, Coromandel, and Bengal and looks at the ports, the seas and the commerce of each regi on. Kenneth McPherson's The Indian Ocean: A History of the People and the Sea argues for the existence of a distinctive Indian Ocean World constituted by trade links and commercial networks established over several centuries, and tells us about the peoples, cultures, and economies of the Indian Ocean.