• ISBN13: 9780199486748
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: History
• Publisher: Oxford UP
• Publisher Imprint: Oxford UP
• Publication Date: June 17, 2018
• Pages: 328
• Original Price: INR 895.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 480 grams

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 kilometers 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 neighbors the Mughals.