Markus Vink publishes new book on Dutch court journeys to South Indian interior in the 17th century

Manohar Books has published the new book by History Professor Markus Vink, Mission to Madurai: Dutch Embassies to the Nayaka Court of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012).

Dr. Vink is an expert on the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and Indian Ocean world and southeast India in particular, especially in issues such as cross-cultural encounters.

In the words of Dr. Vink, "Court journeys represent the most spectacular sub-genre in Western travel literature and the history of cross-cultural interaction."

Preceded by an incisive introduction on images and ideologies of Dutch-South Asian contact, Vink's book reveals the heretofore unpublished accounts and related documents of three encounters between representatives of the Dutch East India Company, one of the great northern European chartered companies in the age of mercantilism, and the state of Madurai, one of the 'great southern Nayakas' and successor-states of the Vijayanagara empire, in southeast India in the second half of the seventeenth century.

"A shared interest in trade and at times converging political objectives formed the unstable foundations for a complex courtship fraught with tensions between two ill-suited partners, a mixture of conflict and coexistence typical of the 'age of contained conflict,'" Dr. Vink said.