India and the Early Modern World provides an authoritative and wide-ranging survey of the Indian subcontinent over the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, set within a global context.
This book explores questions critical to our understanding of early modern India. How, for instance, were Indians’ religious beliefs, their ways of life, and the horizons of their learning changing over this period? What was happening in the countryside and towns, to culture and the arts, and to the state and its power? Were such experiences comparable or linked to those in other parts of the world? Can we speak of a global early modernity, therefore, within which India played an important role? Organised thematically, each chapter engages with such key issues, debates, and concepts, covering wide ground as it connects, compares, and contrasts developments witnessed across early modern South Asia to those around the globe.
Drawing on the fruits of research in numerous fields over the past fifty years and rich in detail, India and the Early Modern World is a pathbreaking volume written engagingly and accessibly with scholars, students, and non-specialists in mind.
1. Introduction 2. Belief 3. Ideology 4. Urbanism 5. Capitalism 6. Violence 7. The State 8. Kingship 9. Vernacularisation 10. Knowledge 11. Conclusion
Biography
Jagjeet Lally is Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and Colonial India at University College London, where he is also Co-Director of the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. He was educated at Oxford, the London School of Economics, and then at Cambridge, where he was also a junior research fellow. His prize-winning first book is India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World (2021).
