Sanjay Subrahmanyam: “The First Tamil Diaspora: Tamil Merchants in the Indian Ocean before Colonialism”
The lecture will look at the changing profile of Tamil merchants in the Indian Ocean trade before the British came to exercise dominance over India in the late eighteenth century. After briefly surveying the fragmentary inscriptional record, and the issue of medieval ‘guilds’, the greater part of the attention will be devoted to the ‘Golden Age’ of such merchant activity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In particular, attention will be devoted to the adaptation and survival of Tamil maritime merchants — both Hindu and Muslim — in this epoch.
Biographical statement
Professor Subrahmanyam teaches at the University of California in Los Angeles, where he is holder of the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair of Indian History. He was born and educated in New Delhi, and he received his PhD in Economic History at the Delhi School of Economics. Prof. Subrahmanyam teaches courses on medieval and early modern South Asian and Indian Ocean history; the history of European expansion, the comparative history of early modern empires, and world history. He is also Joint Managing Editor of the Indian Economic and Social History Review.
His many publications include: The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500-1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. (with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman), Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka-period Tamil Nadu, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History, London and New York: Longman, 1993. Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India, Delhi/Ann Arbor: Oxford University Press/University of Michigan Press, 2001. (with Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman) Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800, New Delhi/New York, Permanent Black/Other Books, 2001/2003. Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
