Narratives, Routes and Intersections in Pre-Modern Asia

This book traces connections in pre-modern Asia by looking at different worlds across geography, history and society. It examines how regions were connected by people, families, trade and politics as well as how they were maintained and remembered. The volume analyses these intersections of memory and narrative, of people and places and the routes that took people to these places, using a variety of sources. It also studies whether these intersections remain in later and present times, and their larger impact on our understanding of history.

The narratives cover several journeys drawn from archaeology, texts and cultural imagination: trade routes, marts, fairs, forts, religious pilgrimages, inscriptions, calligraphy and coinages spanning diverse regions, including India–Tibet–British forays, India–Malay intersections, corporate enterprise in the Indian Ocean, impacts of slave trade in Southeast Asia shaped by the Dutch East India company, movements and migrations around Indo-Iranian borderlands and those in western and southern India.

The book will greatly interest scholars and researchers of history and archaeology, cultural studies and literature.

Radhika Seshan is Associate Professor at the Department of History, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Maharashtra, India. Her area of specialisation is medieval Indian history, with a focus on economic history, especially maritime and urban history. In recent years, she has also been working on travel accounts and the constructions of the East therein. She recently organised a panel at the World Economic History Congress in Japan. Apart from publishing many papers in national and international journals and editing five books, she has authored Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast: Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (2012) and Ideas and Institutions in Medieval India: Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries (2013). She is joint editor (with Professor Rila Mukherjee) of the series ‘Issues in History’, in which she edited the book Convergence: Rethinking India’s Past (2014).