Nandini Das moves seamlessly between the inner worlds of the courts of seventeenth century England and India and with a mastery of both. For Das the Roe mission is the lens through which to give sharp focus to a remarkably wide-ranging study that does much to illuminate the bigger story of the unpromising origins of British power – and initial powerlessness – in India . Nandini Das's rich, absorbing account of a critical juncture of global history, the Englishman Sir Thomas Roe's embassy to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, charts both a remarkable personal narrative and the prehistory of colonial expansion, told from the perspective of an imperial go-between. There are some great anecdotes about the discomforts and indignities suffered by Roe, in part self-inflicted (such as refusing to learn the language or give up wearing British-style clothes in the extreme heat) but also due to the penny-pinching ways of the East India Company. What a joy to find the first official Indo-British encounter receiving the scholarly attention and enthralling treatment it deserves .

In reflecting on other things I have read about India as a British colony, it seems like the British (and, I suppose other colonizing powers) were deceitful in their future "plans" for their trading "partners. Das successfully rescues [Roe] from the stilted role of the progenitor of colonial rule and reveals something more interesting: an ambassador too honourable and too inexperienced to achieve anything much for either himself or his country . In Nandini Das's fascinating history of Roe's four years in India, she offers an insider's view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. A profound and ground-breaking approach to one of the most important encounters in the history of the British arrival in India in the early seventeenth century.A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly presents television and radio programmes, including Tales of Tudor Travel: The Explorer's Handbook on BBC4.

Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. Conflicts over precedence did nothing to advance his mission of securing trade rights, which was the real reason Roe had been sent across the Indian Ocean. The power of good writing and a well-told story in getting people to understand each other should not be underestimated.On behalf of the British Academy, it is my honour to congratulate Nandini Das on this exceptional work. By using contemporary sources by Indian and by British political figures, officials and merchants she has given the story an unparalleled immediacy that brings to life these early encounters and the misunderstandings that sometimes threatened to wreck the whole endeavour. For Das the Roe mission is the lens through which to give sharp focus to a remarkably wide-ranging study that does much to illuminate the bigger story of the unpromising origins of British power - and initial powerlessness - in India .