Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire

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The picture that emerges of the first official encounter between Jacobean England and Mughal India is a vivid one, drawn in dazzling technicolour. Conflicts over precedence did nothing to advance his mission of securing trade rights, which was the real reason Roe had been sent across the Indian Ocean. From the point of this time it must have seemed highly unlikely that Britain would go on to any significant level of interest, never mind to rule, in India. The British Academy Book Prize, formerly known as the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize, was established in 2013, to reward and celebrate the best works of non-fiction that demonstrate rigour and originality, and have contributed to public understanding of other world cultures and their interaction.

Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. Moreover, we were reminded through this story of the first ambassadorial mission of the value of international diplomacy, but also of the cultural minefields that surround it in ways that still have resonance today. Stretching from the dark waters of the Thames to the blossom-strewn floors of the Jahangiri Palace, Courting India covers a vast canvass with masterful aplomb. Unable to match the lavishness of the Persian embassy for example or to make much headway against the Portuguese, already by this time better established on the subcontinent, he is forever complaining about lack of funds. This is something of a micro history, focusing as it does on a three year period from 1616 to 1619; the years of the ambassadorship of Thomas Roe from the Court of King James 1 of England to Mughal India.What followed in India was a turning-point in history, a story of palace intrigue, scandal, and mutual incomprehension that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia.

He went on to have a successful diplomatic career as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire but here he is quite the fish out of water, trying to establish relationships and obtain better trading arrangements without the proper means to do so. What a joy to find the first official Indo-British encounter receiving the scholarly attention and enthralling treatment it deserves .Traditional interpretations to the British Empire’s emerging success and expansion has long overshadowed the deep uncertainty that marked its initial entanglement with India. Courting India is an interesting account of the British arrival in India in the early 1600's from the perspective of Thomas Roe, James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, who arrived there in 1616. A profound and ground-breaking new history of one of the most important encounters in the history of colonialism: the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century. At the same time, she grants us a privileged vantage point from which we can appreciate how a measure of mutual understanding did begin to emerge, even though it was vulnerable to the ups and downs of Mughal politics and to the restless ambitions of the British.

She is a scholar of Renaissance literature, travel, migration, and cross-cultural encounters, and has published widely on these topics, from major sixteenth and seventeenth century authors like Philip Sidney, Shakespeare and Cervantes, to the fleeting presence of three Japanese boys in sixteenth century Portuguese-held Goa, India. The result is a rich and radical challenge to our understanding of Britain and its early empire—and a cogent reminder of the dangers of distortion in the history books of the victors.In the face of a lavish court where relationships were built on exchange of gifts, Roe had to resort to handing over his most prized personal possessions to get a hearing.

Fascinating and comprehensive account of Thomas Roe’s embassy from the impoverished James I to the opulent Mughal Court of Jahangir.Courting India is ostensibly a study of Sir Thomas Roe's time as the East India Company's representative to the Mughal court from 1615 to 1619, but it is so much more than that . Das successfully rescues [Roe] from the stilted role of the progenitor of colonial rule and reveals something more interesting: an ambassador too honourable and too inexperienced to achieve anything much for either himself or his country . There are some great anecdotes about the discomforts and indignities suffered by Roe, in part self-inflicted (such as refusing to learn the language or give up wearing British-style clothes in the extreme heat) but also due to the penny-pinching ways of the East India Company.