The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay, with Related Documents

Margaret R. Hunt and Philip Stern (editors)

2015

Bedford/St. Martin’s

The book captures a moment when the competing ambitions of the Mughal Empire and the English East India Company brought them into armed conflict. The central document is a previously unpublished diary by an English officer who participated in the 1689 Siege of Bombay, a sixteen-month battle between English and Mughal-allied forces, which devastated the island and threatened the very foundations of English empire in western India, almost before it even began.

Revealing much about seventeenth-century warfare and social relations, the diary and the two dozen related documents collected by Stern, associate professor of history, and his co-editor deliver new insights into encounters not only between the Mughals and the English but among a number of competing South Asian and European companies, states, and empires as they sought political and economic power in the Indian Ocean world.