Across the Green Sea

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean - 'the green sea,' as it was known - underwent vast transformation and an era of commercial and cultural exchange blossomed. 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 Subrahmanyam himself has pioneered.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Distinguished Professor of History and the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA. Educated in Delhi, he previously taught at the Delhi School of Economics, the EHESS (Paris) and at the University of Oxford. A specialist of the early modern period, Subrahmanyam is the author of numerous essays, edited volumes and books, including Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 and Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800. 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.