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.


Europe's India tracks the changing place of India in the European imagination over three centuries, by looking closely at a varied cast of actors and sites of interaction, from ports and coastal enclaves to inland courts. The opening of the Cape Route by Vasco da Gama in 1498 created a new set of conditions for dealings between Europe and India (and Asia more generally). In the decades that followed, many different Europeans - traders, military men, missionaries and others - came to India, and produced a set of images regarding the sub-continent that left a deep imprint on the European imagination. Initially, the Europeans were relatively minor actors on the fringes of India, but over time they came to occupy a situation of power, especially after about 1750. The particular strength of this book is its close examination of a number of individual agents, acting both within the European empires, and at their fringes. Though the central axis is that between Europe and India, this is equally a larger exercise in a global and connected history of the early modern world.