This volume takes a pan-Indian view of different professional groups and service providers mainly based in towns. While Persian texts provide limited information on the subject, European sources in the form of travelogues, letters, memoirs and official reports unfold an interesting panorama on the subject. Here focus has been on the seventeenth century, as some prominent European share holders’ Companies established their warehouses-cum-residential complexes in India in this very century. Officials of these Companies sent to India or elsewhere, maintained proper records of their transactions and interaction with the state officials, common people, servants inside the household and outside, and through their reports attracted many European freebooters also to have a firsthand experience of the East. Here from, we get numerous details on the social life, working conditions, wages and other aspects of life of people who earned their livelihood through manual labour, as conditions in India appeared novel to them and they meticulously recorded everything with much interest. Their information is corroborated with the Indian sources. In both types of sources – Persian and European – artisans, labourers and service providers have generally been projected as ‘poor’, ‘miserable’ and ‘wretched’; who faced exploitation at all levels. Still, their contribution to the economy and society was im­perative. Aspects of life of such people deserve a detailed discussion as this volume amply proves. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This book showcases the wide variety of commercial cosmopolitan practices that arose from the global economic entanglements of the early modern period. Cosmopolitanism is not only a philosophical ideal: for many centuries it has also been an everyday practice across the globe. The early modern era saw hitherto unprecedented levels of economic interconnectedness. States, societies, and individuals reacted with a mixture of commercial idealism and commercial anxiety, seeking at once to exploit new opportunities for growth whilst limiting its disruptive effects. In highlighting the range of commercial cosmopolitan practices that grew out of early modern globalisation, the book demonstrates that it provided robust alternatives to the universalising western imperial model of the later period. Deploying a number of interdisciplinary methodologies, the kind of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ that Ulrich Beck has called for, chapters provide agency-centred evaluations of the risks and opportunities inherent in the ambiguous role of the cosmopolitan, who, often playing on and mobilising a number of identities, operated in between and outside of different established legal, social, and cultural systems. The book will be important reading for students and scholars working at the intersection of economic, global, and cultural history.

Focusing on Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces, this book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India. Starting in the sixteenth century, it discusses how the emergence of race was always shaped by affiliations based on religion, class, national identity, gender and citizenship across empires. In the context of increasing British power, the book looks at the Anglo-French tensions of the eighteenth century to consider the relationship between modernity and race-making. Arguing that different forms of modernity produced divergent categories of hybridity, it considers the impact of changing political structures on mixed-race communities. With its emphasis on specificity, the book situates current and past debates on the mixed-race experience and the politics of whiteness in broader historical and global contexts. By contributing to the understanding of race-making as an aspect of colonial governance, the book illuminates some margins of colonial India that are often lost in the shadows of the British regime. It is of interest to academics of world history, postcolonial studies, South Asian imperial history and critical mixed-race studies.

'This is a remarkable book. It combines a spellbinding account of the first forgotten half of the English encounter with India with a fascinating history of the Mughal Empire' JOSEPHINE QUINN, author of How the World Made the West 'A compelling, highly readable account of the earliest phase of English presence in India' NANDINI DAS, author of Courting India When the first English travellers in India encountered an unimaginable superpower, their meetings would change the world. Before the East India Company and before the British Empire, England was a pariah state. Seeking better fortunes, 16th and 17th century merchants, pilgrims and outcasts ventured to the kingdom of the mighty Mughals, attempting to sell coarse woollen broadcloth along the silk roads; playing courtiers in the Mughal palaces in pursuit of love; or simply touring the sub-continent in search of an elephant to ride. Into this golden realm went Father Thomas Stephens, a Catholic fleeing his home; the merchant Ralph Fitch looking for jewels in the markets of Delhi; and John Mildenhall, an adventurer revelling in the highwire politics of the Mughal elite. It was a land ruled from the palatial towers by women - the formidable Empress Nur Jahan Begim, the enterprising Queen Mother Maryam al-Zamani, and the intrepid Princess Jahanara Begim. Their collision of worlds helped connect East and West, launching a tempestuous period of globalisation spanning from the Chinese opium trade to the slave trade in the Americas. Drawing on rich, original sources, Lubaaba Al-Azami traces the origins of a relationship between two nations - one outsider and one superpower - whose cultures remain inextricably linked to this day.

The settlement of the Hebrides is usually considered in terms of the state formation agenda. Yet the area was subject to successive attempts at plantation, largely overlooked in historical narrative. Aonghas MacCoinnich’s study, Plantation and Civility, explores these plantations against the background of a Lowland-Highland cultural divide and competition over resources. The Macleod of Lewis clan, ‘uncivil’, Gaelic Highlanders, were dispossessed by the Lowland, ‘civil,’ Fife Adventurers, 1598-1609. Despite the collapse of this Lowland Plantation, however, the recourse to the Mackenzie clan, often thought a failure of policy, was instead a pragmatic response to an intractable problem. The Mackenzies also pursued the civility agenda treating with Dutch partners and fending off their English rivals in order to develop their plantation.

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