Abstract
This essay examines how one seventeenth-century native wife, the unnamed daughter of Mubarak Shah, one of Akbar's courtiers, entered the archives of the East India Company. Married to two different English factors, William Hawkins and Gabriel Towerson, she became a new investigative category for the Company directors in London as well as for the new English ambassador to Jahangir's court, Sir Thomas Roe. The debates surrounding Mubarak Shah's daughter provide an important insight into the East India Company's emergent discourse on race and profit. Simultaneously, the debates open up conflicting attitudes toward the taking of native spouses: their advantages and liabilities to Company merchants.
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