India's rise as a global power in the 21st century will be backed with a strong blue economy. The high volumetric trade activities through its coastal region, mainly due to its geostrategic location and efficient links with the vast potential market in the hinterland and other landlocked states, provides it unmatched leverage. Among such promising enterprising, attracting global investments and trade, the non-conventional security threats within the Indian Ocean region and India's ports and coast cannot be ignored. Therefore, to address these challenges, the law at the seas formulated by various global organisations and other national and international regulatory mechanisms become essential for all those directly or indirectly involved in India's maritime security. Over the years, many state coastal security agencies have evolved with specific potential and restrictions, which creates a certain conditionality of the existing non-conventional security challenges and maritime conflicts with its neighbours. The successful use of security-related technology to outpace such non-conventional threats creates a demand for further bolstering such technologies for India's advantage. Besides, these prevailing threats to the ports and coastal region, the environmental security challenges also directly impact humans and cannot be undermined. The book covers all these facets in detail, identifying the specific fault lines and makes recommendations to address the non-conventional security challenges of India's ports, coast and maritime trade. The book will be of interest to policymakers, academicians, practitioners, scholars, and all those individuals and institutes interested in India's Ports, Coastal and Maritime Security.

This volume discusses the various socio-economic and political processes that evolved over centuries in the vast coastal fringes of India and out of the circuits of the Indian Ocean, ultimately giving it the distinctive consciousness and identity of Maritime India. The book comments on a wide range of issues, including the nature of maritime trade of the Sassanids with India; the impact of maritime trade on the political processes of Goa; the impact of Portuguese commercial expansion on the traditional Muslim merchants of Kerala and the role of private traders in the structure and the functioning of Estado da India.

World-wide maritime trade has been the essential driver of wealth-creation, economic progress and global human contact. Trade and exchange of ideas have been at the heart of economic, social, political, cultural and religious life and maritime international law. These claims are borne out by the history of maritime trade beginning in the Indian Ocean and connecting to Southeast Asia, Japan, the Americas, East Africa, the Middle East especially the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean and Europe. This development predates the end of the Ice Age with worldwide flooding and stimulated the establishment of land-based civilizations in the above regions with particular effect on the Greek and Roman empires and even China's 'Celestial' empire. The Indian subcontinent was the original major player in maritime trade, linking oceans and regions. Global maritime trade declined with the fall of Mediterranean empires and the 'dark age' in Europe but revived with Indian Ocean and Asian maritime networks. Shipping and trade studies are hugely practical but can be technical, legalistic and even dull for non-specialists. But this history is a broadly based and exciting account of human interaction at multiple levels, for general readers, specialists and practitioners. It is based on huge reading and rare sources and with an attractive writing style, and full of fascinating sidelights illuminating the historical narrative - and from an author with lifelong experience in international shipping.

This omnibus of three classic studies provides a basic grounding for scholars of India's maritime history. 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.

The focus of this volume is the rise and fall of the Indian maritime merchant in the early modern period: the heyday of Moghul Surat, the appearance of a group of independent merchant shipowners, and their eclipse at the end of the period in the face of European competition and monopolies. Much of the evidence for the activity of these Indian merchants comes from the records of the Dutch and English East India Companies, as well as the papers of English private merchants, and this is carefully assessed by Professor Das Gupta in these articles. He is also concerned to set the picture thus gained in the context of the trade of the Indian Ocean region as a whole, and to relate it to the questions of continuity and change raised by Van Leur.