Claude Markovits. India and the World: A History of Connections, c. 1750–2000.

Abstract

Fernand Braudel provided us with a useful way of thinking with the Indian subcontinent as the profession veers away from the narrow concerns of area studies to a more global perspective. He conceived of India in the seventeenth century as a quadrilateral: the southwest integrated by ocean with the Middle East, Europe and beyond; the northwest incorporated into the physical and intellectual realms of Islam through the Mughal and Safavid Empires; the southwest connected through the ocean with Southeast Asia and China; and the northeast, by land, with China and northern Asia. These geographies were never completely disrupted despite arguments about the Indian Ocean having become a British lake and the assiduous attempt of the British to render India as a terrestrially bounded entity. The dialectic of the ocean and land continued as a paracolonial imaginary, exemplified best by Engseng Ho’s marvelous evocation of the flows of trade, religion, and political personnel from the Hadramawt to South and Southeast Asia over a period of a few centuries. India remained connected through flows of capital and coerced labor—including military service and indenture—as much as voluntary migration across the continuous oceans from South America to Southeast Asia. In India and the World, Markovits works with this expansive, connected sense of geography that bridges maritime and terrestrial histories.