Michael H. Fisher is Danforth Professor of History at Oberlin College, USA. He is a specialist on the Mughal and British Raj periods.
"Brings Mughal India buzzing back to life, in all its courtly beauty and brutality. Sharp and lively, full of fascination and moments of great beauty, this fine collection of travel pieces makes a perfect counterpoint to the Mughal's own descriptions of the India they ruled and forever changed." - William Dalrymple"Michael Fisher has collected a fascinating collection of first hand accounts of Mughal India by European travelers. They were a diverse bunch, their individual idiosyncrasies enliven their narratives, though they were all struck by the power as well as the pomp of the Mughal empire, arguably the most powerful state then in existence. By bringing these accounts together, Michael Fisher has made available for the first time an excellent selection of documents that will be of interest to students as well as the general reader who wishes to know more about encounters between Europeans and the wider world. The extracts have been well chosen, and they are masterfully edited and introduced by Michael Fisher. Some of them may be familiar to readers, others are very hard to come by, but in all cases, they yield a unique perspective on the early modern era."Professor Douglas Peers, Associate Dean (Research and Development), Faculty of Social Sciences and Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Calgary"The Mughal empire was one of the great success stories of imperial history, having an enduring effect on the lives and culture of the people it ruled, comparable to the Roman, Ottoman, British and Spanish world empires. It is therefore useful to have a collection of ten narratives that, with the limitations imposed by lack of knowledge of the language, explored that Empire before people were thinking of its decline, much less its fall. Each writer in this anthology was, in his own way and with his own non-Asian predilections, a child of the Renaissance weltanschauung, making man a subject of serious study, not, as in the pre-Mughal era, of legend or of myth."Roderick Cavaliero, former director of the British Council in India, and author of Strangers in the Land: The Rise and Decline of the British Indian EmpireVisions of Mughal India will fill an important gap by providing selected extracts from the writings of early modern European travellers in the Indian subcontinent, garnered from a wide variety of sources, each skilfully contextualised and provided with an illuminating and scholarly introduction by Professor Fisher. As well as being of considerable interest in itself, the volume will be an invaluable study tool and will go some way towards furthering understanding and awareness of a significant but lesser known period in Indian history prior to the advent of colonial rule. I truly believe this will be an incredibly useful compendium. The contextualising remarks before and after each extract are extremely helpful and often missing, or otherwise too brief, in collections of this sort. The introduction speaks for itself, but has the particular advantage of making the texts accessible and meaningful to a wide variety of readers, who may know little about the subcontinent, including those from cultural studies and literature backgrounds, as well as students of history.Dr. Crispin Bates is Senior Lecturer in modern South Asian History in the School of History & Classics at the University of Edinburgh
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