The book integrates the latest scholarly literature on the entire Indian Ocean region, from East Africa to China. Issues such as India's history, India’s changing status in the region, and India's cross-cultural networking over a long period are explored in this book. It is organized in specific themes in thirteen chapters. It incorporates a wealth of research on India’s strategic significance in the Indian Ocean arena throughout history. It enriches the reader's understanding of the emergence of the Indian Ocean basin as a global arena for cross-cultural networking and nation-building. It discusses issues of trade and commerce, the circulation of ideas, peoples and objects, and social and religious themes, focusing on Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. The book provides a refreshingly different survey of India’s connected history in the Indian Ocean region starting from the archaeological record and ending with the coming of empire. The author’s unique experience, combined with an engaging writing style, makes the book highly readable. The book contributes to the field of global history and is of great interest to researchers, policymakers, teachers, and students across the fields of political, cultural, and economic history and strategic studies.

Rila Mukherjee is Professor of History at University of Hyderabad, India. She did her doctoral dissertation at the EHESS, Paris. She specializes in the history of the extended Indian Ocean world, more particularly the networked economic and cultural histories of the Bay of Bengal realm. Historical cartography, network theory, and spatial concepts are focal to her interests. Chief Editor of the Brill journal Asian Review of World Histories, she has held Visiting Professorships at Paris, Aixen Provence, Shanghai, and Uppsala, and has been Visiting Scholar to Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid. She has partnered international interdisciplinary projects funded by European Science Foundation; Agence Nationale de Recherche, France; Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK; the Australian Research Council. She has authored six monographs, singly and jointly edited nine volumes, contributed 46 chapters to national and international publications, guest edited themed issues in two internationaljournals, and published 28 articles in national and international journals on oceanic histories.