All of this makes for a fascinating book - the wealth and power of the Mughals, their interest in novelty and luxury, and the failure at that time by the East India Company to provide Roe with the support he needed to secure favour with them. But the new king of England was stone broke, and Roe’s embassy had been proposed and funded by the recently founded East India Company, whose directors always kept a beady eye on the ledgers but lacked political sway in the Mughal court. The book has since been acquired by Netflix in association with the Chilean production company Fábula, and a feature film entitled La Homicida is to be released in 2024.

Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified 'Great Britain' under the Stuart monarchy. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Professor Charles Tripp was joined on the 2023 Book Prize judging panel by Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed FBA, Professor Rebecca Earle FBA, Fatima Manji, and Professor Gary Younge Hon FBA.

Moreover, we were reminded through this story of the first ambassadorial mission of the value of international diplomacy, but also of the cultural minefields that surround it in ways that still have resonance today. In the face of a lavish court where relationships were built on exchange of gifts, Roe had to resort to handing over his most prized personal possessions to get a hearing. Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford.On behalf of the British Academy, it is my honour to congratulate Nandini Das on this exceptional work. A BBC New Generation Thinker, she regularly presents television and radio programmes, including Tales of Tudor Travel: The Explorer's Handbook on BBC4. Courting India, by Nandini Das, is a brilliant and insightful study of Thomas Roe's embassy at the Mughal court. Drawing on a rich variety of sources – literature, the memoirs of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, the journals and correspondence of Sir Thomas Roe, plus the archives of the East India Company – Das invites the reader to get to grips with the making of history, and its narration from both perspectives. Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das is today named as the winner of the 11th British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.