Markus Vink, professor in the Department of History, announces the publication of his new monograph from Brill Academic Publishers, “Encounters on the Opposite Coast: The Dutch East India Company and the Nayaka State of Madurai in the Seventeenth Century.”
“In Encounters on the Opposite Coast,” Dr. Vink provides a narrative of the first half century of cross-cultural interaction between the Dutch East India Company (VOC), one of the great northern European chartered companies, and Madurai, one of the '"great southern Nayakas" and successor-states of the Vijayanagara Empire, in southeast India (c. 1645-1690). A shared interest in trade and at times converging political objectives formed the unstable foundations for a complex relationship fraught with tensions, a mixture of conflict and coexistence typical of the "age of contained conflict."
Drawing extensively on archival materials, Vink covers a topic felt neglected by both company historians and their Indian counterparts and sheds important light on a "black hole in South Indian history."
Vink has published monographs and numerous articles on the Indian Ocean World, including “The Merchant-Warrior Pacified” (Oxford University Press, 1991) and “Mission to Madurai” (Manohar, 2012).
