Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean – ‘the green sea, ‘ as it was known to Arabic speakers – underwent vast transformation. An era of commercial and cultural exchange blossomed between the Red Sea and Mecca, the Persian Gulf, East Africa, Kerala and western India.
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 he has pioneered.
About the author
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is a Distinguished Professor of History and the Irving & Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA. He is the author of Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 and Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800.
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