Across The Green Sea

Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440–1640

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780863569517
• eBook ISBN:
  9780863569562
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• A Note on Transliteration
• A Note on Currency and Tonnage
• Introduction: Conceptual Issues in Connected Histories
• Chapter 1. An Epoch of Transitions, 1440–1520
• Chapter 2. The View from the Hijaz, 1500–1550
• Chapter 3. The Afro-Indian Axis
• Chapter 4. The View from Surat
• A Conclusion: Toward Polyphonic Histories
• Notes
• Index