An Interview with Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Abstract

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Distinguished Professor and Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he teaches comparative history of early modern empires, the history of European expansion, and South Asian history. He is also Professor at the College de France in Paris, where he teaches the global history of the early modern period. His work addresses the economic, political, cultural, and intellectual entanglements of Europe and South-East Asia in the early modern world. Subrahmanyam was trained in Economic History at the Dehli School of Economics (PhD 1987), where he became a professor, before joining the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1995, and Oxford University in 2002. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and a member of the British Academy. His most important publications include: Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Mary Flexner Lectures) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History (London and New York: Longman, 1993; 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).