Rethinking the Global Early Modern: India, 1400-1900

This class critically approaches the idea of a trans-regionally or globally constituted early modern age. It does so by reading methodological interventions as well as studies that advocate, exemplify, complicate, or challenge the global approach. The course engages with the idea of pre-modern and non-European cosmopolitanisms as well as exchanges between South Asia on the one hand and other world regions on the other. It reflects on the use of terms like "encounter", "circulation", "flow", and "network" in this historiography with the aim of exploring the roots, stakes, possibilities, and limits of the idea of an early modern world.