Elizabethans in India
4/16/202655 min
How did England’s earliest travellers to India try to win favour in a Mughal golden age that scarcely noticed them?
Professor Suzannah Lipscomb speaks with Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami about Tudor and early Stuart England’s turn to global trade after Elizabeth I’s break with Catholic Europe, and why Mughal India—vast, wealthy, and pragmatically governed—had little need for English wool or broadcloth.
They trace the first arrivals: from a Catholic refugee to an Englishman's Mughal courtly success and marriage, as well as the first English 'walking tourist'.
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Presented by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. The researcher is Max Wintle, audio editor is Amy Haddow and the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSuzannah Lipscomb· Host0:01
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand-new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe. [upbeat music] Hello, I'm Professor Suzannah Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage, and witchcraft. [woman laughing] Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. The story of the interaction between England and India is mostly told as that of the British Empire, and with good reason. From 1757, it was absolutely a story of colonial conquest by the British. But in the early days of encounter, from the late sixteenth century onwards, no one could ever have predicted that result. For the first century and a half of