Courting the Islamic World: The Origins of Empire | Nandini Das, Jerry Brotton & William Dalrymple

Courting the Islamic World: The Origins of Empire | Nandini Das and Jerry Brotton in conversation with William Dalrymple

Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Nandini Das, in her fascinating book Courting India, brings forth the story of Thomas Roe’s arrival in India as James I's first ambassador to the Mughal Empire. The book explores the foundations of Britain’s imperial roots through a comparative study of the art, literature, sights and sounds of Jacobean London and Imperial India. British historian and Professor of Renaissance Studies, Jerry Brotton’s award-winning book This Orient Isle reveals England’s relationship with the Muslim world and its influence on the commercial and political landscape of Elizabethan England. In conversation with award-winning historian William Dalrymple, Das and Brotton discuss the shared history of the East and the West and their influence on each other’s culture, literature and economy.

Nandini Das is a Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture and a Fellow of Exeter College at Oxford University. She is a scholar of Renaissance literature, travel, migration, and cross-cultural encounters. Her Cambridge History of Travel Writing, co-edited with Tim Youngs, covers global Anglophone and non-Anglophone travel writing from antiquity to the internet, while Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England traces the impact of travel and human mobility, both forced and voluntary, on fundamental ideas of identity and belonging. Her book on the first English embassy to Mughal India, Courting India, was published by Bloomsbury in March 2023.

Jerry Brotton is an academic, BBC TV and radio broadcaster, curator and prize-winning and bestselling author of ten books published in more than twenty languages. They include A History of the World in Twelve Maps and This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World.

William Dalrymple is the author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, Duff Cooper Prize-winning The Last Mughal, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. His book, The Anarchy, was shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington medal, the Tata Book of the Year, and the Historical Writers Association Award, and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. Dalrymple has been awarded five honorary doctorates, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting lectureships at Princeton, Brown, and Oxford, where he is currently an Honorary Bodleian fellow and Visiting Fellow at All Souls. He was presented with the President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect Magazine. He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival