India and Europe in the Global Eighteenth Century

The long eighteenth century was a period of major transformation for Europe and India as imperialism heralded a new global order. Eschewing the reductive perspectives of nation-state histories and postcolonial ‘east vs west’ oppositions, contributors to India and Europe in the global eighteenth century put forward a more nuanced and interdisciplinary analysis. Using eastern as well as western sources, authors present fresh insights into European and Indian relations and highlight:

• how anxieties over war and piracy shaped commercial activity;
• how French, British and Persian histories of India reveal the different geo-political issues at stake;
• the material legacy of India in European cultural life;
• how novels parodied popular views of the Orient and provided counter-narratives to images of India as the site of corruption;
• how social transformations, traditionally characterised as ‘Mughal decline’, in effect forged new global connections that informed political culture into the nineteenth century.