Indian National Science Academy and Centro de Historia de Alem-Mar, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon cooperated in the 9th International Seminar on Indo-Portuguese History in December 1998 held in the premises of the Academy.
Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated Texts from the Age of the Discoveries is designed to provide access to translations of 16th- and 17th-century documents which illustrate various aspects of this encounter, combining texts from indigenous sources with those from the Portuguese histories and archives. These documents contribute to the growing understanding that different groups of European colonizers - missionaries, traders and soldiers - had conflicting motivations and objectives. Scholars have also begun to emphasize that the colonized were not mere victims but had their own agendas and that they occasionally successfully manipulated colonial powers. The texts in this volume help to substantiate these assertions while also illustrating the changing nature of the interactions. The present volume contains chapters covering the Portuguese arrival in Sri Lanka and their first encounters with the island and its peoples, their subsequent relations with Kandy and Jaffna, and a final chapter on Portuguese relations with the Maldive Islands. A historical introduction provides the context in which the documents can be read and a select bibliography indicates the most recent and authoritative secondary works on the subject
In Encounters of the Opposite Coast Markus Vink provides a narrative of the first half century of cross-cultural interaction between the Dutch East India Company (VOC), one of the great northern European chartered companies, and Madurai, one of the 'great southern Nayakas' and successor-states of the Vijayanagara empire, in southeast India (c. 1645-1690). A shared interest in trade and at times converging political objectives formed the unstable foundations for a complex relationship fraught with tensions, a mixture of conflict and coexistence typical of the 'age of contained conflict'. Drawing extensively on archival materials, Markus Vink covers a topic neglected by both Company historians and their Indian counterparts and sheds important light on a 'black hole in South Indian history'.
When Portuguese explorers first arrived in India, the maritime passage initiated an exchange of goods as well as ideas. European ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars who followed produced a body of knowledge that shaped European thought about India. Sanjay Subrahmanyam tracks these changing ideas over the entire early modern period.
This book examines the sizeable Portuguese community in Ayutthaya, the chief river-state in Siam, during a period in which Portuguese power in the region declined. The analysis turns on the creolization and diaspora that affected this community, as well as problems with international trade, the Christian conversion process, and European rivalries.
In December 1572 the Mughal emperor Akbar arrived in the port city of Khambayat. Having been raised in distant Kabul, Akbar, in his thirty years, had never been to the ocean. Presumably anxious with the news about the Mughal military campaign in Gujarat, several Portuguese merchants in Khambayat rushed to Akbar’s presence. This encounter marked the beginning of a long, complex, and unequal relationship between a continental Muslim empire that was expanding into south India, often looking back to Central Asia, and a European Christian maritime empire whose rulers considered themselves ‘kings of the sea’. By the middle of the seventeenth century, these two empires faced each other across thousands of kilometres from Sind to Bijapur, with a supplementary eastern arm in faraway Bengal. Focusing on borderland management, imperial projects, and cross-cultural circulation, this volume delves into the ways in which, between c. 1570 and c. 1640, the Portuguese understood and dealt with their undesirably close neighbours—the Mughals.
Ocean of Trade offers an innovative study of trade, production and consumption across the Indian Ocean between the years 1750 and 1850. Focusing on the Vāniyā merchants of Diu and Daman, Pedro Machado explores the region's entangled histories of exchange, including the African demand for large-scale textile production among weavers in Gujarat, the distribution of ivory to consumers in Western India, and the African slave trade in the Mozambique channel that took captives to the French islands of the Mascarenes, Brazil and the Rio de la Plata, and the Arabian peninsula and India. In highlighting the critical role of particular South Asian merchant networks, the book reveals how local African and Indian consumption was central to the development of commerce across the Indian Ocean, giving rise to a wealth of regional and global exchange in a period commonly perceived to be increasingly dominated by European company and private capital.
India, especially coastal India, has a long history of shipbuilding and navigation dating back to the Indus Valley Civilization. Indian shipwrights and the labour force associated with various aspects of shipbuilding excelled in naval architecture. Their native wisdom was adopted by the Europeans engaged in shipbuilding in coastal India. Similarly some of the techniques of navigation followed by Indians were emulated by the European mariners. A comprehensive peep into the science of naval architecture and navigation is attempted in this work making a comparative study of Indian and Portuguese architecture and navigation. The volume discusses the importance of the timber grown in the monsoon-fed forests of the Malabar coast and its appreciation by the Portuguese shipwrights and theoreticians of naval architecture. The work shows that increase of the tonnage of ocean-going vessels and the appearance of hostile mariners from other quarters of Western Europe compelled the Portuguese to adopt enhanced technology in naval architecture and navigation. The fact that the use of canons for defence against intruders made the Portuguese vessels stronger than the Indian ships which, for centuries, were accustomed to considerably peaceful navigation is also brought out in this much anticipated volume.