The Atlantic Ocean and India

Abstract

Growing interest in world, global, and what Subrahmanyam 2007 (cited under Portuguese) calls “connected histories” have increasingly led historians to query the permeable and imprecise boundaries of the Atlantic, and to consider its relationship with the rest of the world. As European ships, goods, people, and ideas were increasingly diffused around the world, jurisdictional boundaries failed to hew neatly to arbitrary divisions between the seas and oceans, while itinerants, merchants, and pirates alike similarly defined their own economic, political, and social worlds in the space between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. Though there is a long tradition of historiography that has understood the way Atlantic and Indian empires have comingled in the metropolitan markets of Europe, historians have also come to more direct connections between the Atlantic and India along the “webs” of empire (see Games 2008, cited under British: Imperial and Global Connections), from the earliest European efforts to find various maritime routes to Asia via the Atlantic through the diffusion of Spanish American silver in South Asian markets to the late 18th-century dumping of English East India Company tea into Boston Harbor. For some, the recognition of the interfluvial nature of the oceans has increasingly become the framework for a methodological critique of Atlantic history itself; for others, it has opened up a wealth of new subjects and possibilities for enhancing our understanding of the nature of the early modern Atlantic world. In this spirit, and given the somewhat diffuse nature of this particular subject, the emphasis in this bibliography is on a sampling of different perspectives and approaches that scholars have used to pursue the historical or historiographical relationships between the Atlantic world and South Asia, directly and often self-consciously, in whole or in part. It is also delimited quite specifically to the early modern Atlantic and India, though at times it inevitably hints at work on the Indian Ocean writ large as well as the great interest, particularly in economic history, in Atlantic empires and East Asia. As such, the list below is intended simply to suggest a variety of overlapping points of entry for scholars who are interested in exploring the various consequences for Atlantic history, when considering comparisons, connections, and ramifications of the worlds beyond its borders, and specifically with India.