SANJAY SUBRAHMANYAM

PROFESSOR

Ph.D., Delhi School of Economics, 1987.

Office: 9347 BUNCHE HALL
Phone: 310-825-3376
Fax: 310-206-9630
E-mail: subrahma@history.ucla.edu

Mailing Address:

Class Websites

Field

South and Southeast Asia, World

Research Interests

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor and holder of the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair of Indian History, joined UCLA in 2004. He was born and educated in New Delhi, where he did all his college degrees (BA and MA in Economics) in the University of Delhi, and where he also received his PhD in Economic History in 1987 at the Delhi School of Economics for his thesis on ‘Trade and the Regional Economy of South India, c. 1550-1650’. From 1983, he had begun to teach economic history and comparative economic development at the Delhi School of Economics, where he continued until 1995 as first Associate Professor (1989-93) and then Professor of Economic History (1993-95).

In the years following his Ph.D., his interests broadened from economic and commercial history, to the study of the interplay of political and economic history, to the study of political culture and cultural history. In the course of the 1990s, Subrahmanyam’s work has embraced new sources and archives, not only those from South India, or of the Portuguese and Spanish empires and the Dutch and English East India Companies, but also materials reflecting his growing interest in the history of the Mughal empire, and the comparative history of early modern empires. This accompanied his move to Paris as Directeur d’études in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where he taught from 1995 to 2002.

In 2002, Subrahmanyam was appointed as the first holder of the newly created Chair in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford. Since July 2005, he has served as founding Director of UCLA's Center for India and South Asia.

In UCLA, Sanjay 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 quarterly
Indian Economic and Social History Review, besides serving on the boards of a number of other journals in the US, UK, and Portugal.

Subrahmanyam also writes in Indian and other newspapers and magazines, such as India Today, Outlook as well as the London Review of Books.

Selected Publications

1. The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500-1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

2. (Ed.) Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.
3. Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1700, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990 (Revised Portuguese translation: Comércio e Conflito: A Presença Portuguesa no Golfo de Bengala, 1500-1700, Lisbon: Edições 70, 1994).

4. (with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman), Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka-period Tamil Nadu, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.

5. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political and Economic History, London and New York: Longman, 1993 (Portuguese translation: O Império Asiático Português, 1500-1700: Uma História Política e Económica, DIFEL Editora, Lisbon, 1996); Chinese translation Putaoya diguo zai yazhou, 1500-1700: Zhengzhi he jingji shi (Macau: Comissão Territorial de Macau para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 1997); French translation, L’Empire portugais d’Asie, 1500-1700: Histoire économique et politique (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1999). Recipient of the Prémio D. João de Castro, Portugal, 1994.

6. (Ed.) Money and the Market in India, 1100-1700, Delhi: Oxford University Press, (Series: Themes in Indian History), 1994.

7. (Ed.) Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World (Series: An Expanding World, Vol. 8), Aldershot: Variorum Books, 1996.

8. (Ed. with Kaushik Basu) Unravelling the Nation: Sectarian Conflict and India’s Secular Identity, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1996.

9. (Ed. with Burton Stein) Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.

10. The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 (Spanish translation, Vasco de Gama, Barcelona: Crítica, 1998; Portuguese translation, A Carreira e a Lenda de Vasco da Gama, Lisbon: CNCDP, 1998).

11. (Ed. with Muzaffar Alam) The Mughal State, 1526-1750, Delhi: Oxford University Press (Series: Themes in Indian History), 1998.

12. (Ed.) Sinners and Saints: The Successors of Vasco da Gama, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

13. Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India, Delhi/Ann Arbor: Oxford University Press/University of Michigan Press, 2001.

14. (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 (French translation, Textures du temps: Ecrire l’histoire en Inde, Paris: Le Seuil, 2004).

A review symposium on this book appears in History and Theory, 46 (October 2007).

15. (ed. with Claude Markovits and Jacques Pouchepadass)
Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750-1950, New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2003.

16. (ed.) Land, Politics and Trade in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.

17. Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.

18. Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.

19. (ed. with Kenneth McPherson) From Biography to History: Essays in the History of Portuguese Asia (1500-1800), New Delhi: TransBooks, 2006.

20. (with Muzaffar Alam) Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

21. (Ed. with David Armitage) The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Awards

- A.D. White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University, 2002-2008.
- Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2009.

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