Maritime India

Nationalism in its variety has swayed the balance of world power, and history writing has leaned heavily towards the nation as a central concept. This is the tide against which the historiography of oceans has stood. As an area of research, it has evolved in perspective, from looking at accounts of oceans as linked to imperialism, to analyzing the specifics of politics, trade and other activity surrounding oceans. This omnibus of three classic studies provides a basic grounding for scholars of India's 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 region. Kenneth McPherson's the Indian ocean: a history of the people and the sea argues for the existence of distinctive Indian ocean world constituted by trade links and commercial networks established over several centuries, and tell us about the peoples, cultures, and economies of the Indian ocean. 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. He maintains that while the relevant achieves the world over may not be exhausted it is perhaps the turn on a future generation and new materials to help open the field further and the classics included in this volume are indispensable to this course. Historians, specifically in the field of maritime history, as well as researchers seeking a comprehensive view of this field will find at this volume useful.