Globalising Goa (1660-1820)

Drawing on more than twenty years of study and scholarship, *Globalising Goa* offers a wide-ranging account of the place Goa occupied both in India and the world beyond, before the advent of the British Raj. It was the capital of a European maritime empire that teetered on the brink of collapse in the tumultuous seventeenth century, only to become a thriving cultural, religious and diplomatic hub in the eighteenth century, building close relations with the foremost continental empires of the day -- Mughal, Maratha and Mysore. The globalisation of trade in the eighteenth century restored its former Atlantic ties via Brazil and the development of the African slave trade, while also opening the doors to the Orient, via China and the opium markets. Within a century, however, it was but a modest outpost of bustling Bombay. Today, Goa is being rediscovered by the West. As a far-flung capital where two worlds and two cultures overlapped, it appealed hugely to the European popular imagination in the early Modern Era, inspiring a wealth of travel journals. After falling into oblivion for two centuries, such narratives are now being reassessed as inventive forms in a Western literary tradition which yearned to relive exotic history by proxy or to understand the expansionist appetites of the past.