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Hard cover, 8vo in green paper-covered boards with silver titles to the spine, in the original, unclipped pictorial dust jacket. First Edition. 274pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-2877-4 *CONDITION: Fine , as new, in a Fine dust jacket, now in a mylar protector. **"Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, the regions bordering the western Indian Ocean--"the green sea," as it was known to Arabic speakers--had increasing contact through commerce, including a slave trade, and underwent cultural exchange and transformation. Using a variety of texts and documents in multiple Asian and European languages, "Across the Green Sea" looks at the history of the ocean from a variety of shifting viewpoints: western India, the Red Sea and Mecca, the Persian Gulf, East Africa, and Kerala. Sanjay Subrahmanyam sets the scene for this region starting with the withdrawal of China's Ming Dynasty and explores how the western Indian Ocean was transformed by the growth and increasing prominence of the Ottoman Empire and the continued spread of Islam into East Africa. He examines how several cities, including Mecca and the vital Indian port of Surat, grew and changed during these centuries, when various powers interacted until famines and other disturbances upended the region in the seventeenth century. Rather than proposing an artificial model of a dominant center and its dominated peripheries, "Across the Green Sea" demonstrates the complexity of a truly dynamic and polycentric system through the use of connected histories, a method pioneered by Subrahmanyam himself." (blurb) **Author Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Distinguished Professor of History and the Irving & Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA. A really interesting exegesis on historiography itself, and how the cultural biases of earlier (western European) historians have reflected emphasis of western values. (AMJ)
Ref: NAUT 9686
$50.00