Across The Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 14401640

(Hardback)

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Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean 'the green sea,' as it was known to Arabic speakers underwent vast transformation. An era of commercial and cultural exchange blossomed between the Red Sea and Mecca, the Persian Gulf, East Africa, Kerala and western India.

In Across the Green Sea, Sanjay Subrahmanyam recounts the history of this ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints. He sets the scene with the withdrawal of China's Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted, until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century.

Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant centre and its dominated peripheries, Across the Green Sea reveals the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method which he has pioneered.

Reviews

This book is an example of connected histories at its best. Subrahmanyam has a unique command of archival materials and carefully recounts forgotten histories of slaves, warriors, merchants, writers and rulers, masterfully evoking the polyphony of this early modern maritime world. -- Giuseppe Marcocci, University of Oxford
An impressive feat of scholarship. Subrahmanyam brings ways of life that have been obscured by anachronistic understandings of identity and culture back to life. This book clearly demonstrates why Subrahmanyams connected histories approach is one of the best tools for a polyphonic history of the early modern world. -- Kaya ahin, Indiana University
I dont think anyone who has followed the developments of the last thirty years in the discipline of history will be surprised if I say that Subrahmanyam is one of the most important historians of our time. -- Cemal Kafadar, Harvard University

Author Bio

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is a Distinguished Professor of History and the Irving & Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA. He is the author ofEuropes India: Words, People, Empires, 15001800andEmpires Between Islam and Christianity, 15001800. A Fellow of the British Academy, his awards include the Infosys Prize in Humanities, the Dan David Prize for History and the International Prize for History by the International Committee of Historical Sciences. Subrahmanyam lives in Los Angeles.