| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 295.$49.50.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam begins this collection of interlinked articles centering on early modern South India by contrasting the ease of Hernán Cortez's conquest of the whole of Mexico in 1519–1521 with the limited, largely coastal presence of the Portuguese in India throughout the sixteenth century. After the founding of the English East India Company in 1600, it, too, was largely limited to small coastal enclaves. The rupture of this pattern did not occur until the second half of the eighteenth century, nearly 300 years after the Portuguese naval arrival. Observes Subrahmanyam, Wallersteinians may see this as "a mere matter of detail" in the inevitable march toward the "integration of South Asia into the 'European World Economy,'" but the fact remains that the roles Europeans played determining the course of events during these centuries are open to question (p. 3). He writes, "It is for this reason that it is necessary to examine with some attention the nature of the polities that were formed in this period, and to study their morphology and the logic of change therein, casting one's regard not merely at the 'indigenous' sources of the epoch, but also at the materials produced by the Europeans, and preserved today in scattered collections" (p. 4). . . .

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