When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I's first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Courting India is an interesting account of the British arrival in India in the early 1600's from the perspective of Thomas Roe, James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, who arrived there in 1616. Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The book has since been acquired by Netflix in association with the Chilean production company Fábula, and a feature film entitled La Homicida is to be released in 2024.

Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified 'Great Britain' under the Stuart monarchy. At the same time, she grants us a privileged vantage point from which we can appreciate how a measure of mutual understanding did begin to emerge, even though it was vulnerable to the ups and downs of Mughal politics and to the restless ambitions of the British. In September 1615, Thomas Roe—Britain’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire—made landfall on the western coast of India.A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly presents television and radio programmes, including Tales of Tudor Travel: The Explorer's Handbook on BBC4. The announcement was made by Chair of the Book Prize judging panel, Professor Charles Tripp FBA, at a celebration at the British Academy. Courting India was chosen from a shortlist of six books that included: Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Cultural Revolution by Tania Branigan; The Violence of Colonial Photography by Daniel Foliard; Black Ghost of Empire: The Long Death of Slavery and the Failure of Emancipation by Kris Manjapra; Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo; and Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living by Dimitris Xygalatas.

Small wonder, then, that by the end of the first month, the authorities had already prohibited the town’s merchants from dealing with the English. This lucid and imaginatively written book tells us a great deal about the hesitant early days of the first British Empire, as a traditionally inward-looking island nation sought to engage with the wider world. There he found challenges aplenty - the lack of cooperation of the employees of the fledgling East India Company, the sometimes direct challenge from other European powers seeking to develop their commercial interests there, and the lack of any real interest shown by the Mughal court in granting the trading privileges Roe sought. Roe’s time in India apparently had little impact on the Mughals (he is barely mentioned in Jahangir’s own comprehensive writings).What followed in India was a turning-point in history, a story of palace intrigue, scandal, and mutual incomprehension that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. It serves as a rich repository of cultural memories from the beginnings of the colonial encounter - memories that have continuing resonance and relevance in our own era as we grapple with the aftermath of empire.