Educated at the University of Cambridge and Yale University, Gagan Sood received his doctorate from Yale’s Department of History. Before arriving at the LSE, he held research and teaching positions at Cambridge, the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and Yale.
Dr Sood’s main interests currently focus on the Middle East and South Asia in the context of the early modern world.
Dr Sood teaches the following courses:
At the undergraduate level:
HY118: Faith, Power and Revolution: Europe and the Wider World, c. 1500-c. 1800 (taught jointly with other faculty members)
HY243: Islamic Empires, 1400-1800
At the postgraduate level:
HY423: Empire, Colonialism and Globalisation (taught jointly with other faculty members)
Dr Sood has just finished a major project that sought to recapture a vanished and forgotten world from the eighteenth century spanning much of today’s Middle East and South Asia. Based on the daily lives of traders, pilgrims, clerics and other footloose types, it helps us better understand the region during a pivotal moment in its history, and offers new answers to old questions concerning early modern Eurasia and its transition to colonialism. Findings from this project have appeared in a number of scholarly journals, including Past & Present, with its culmination being a monograph recently published by Cambridge University Press. Now that this project is at an end, Dr Sood has begun work on the next one, which pivots on the realities of governance under the Mughal and Ottoman empires in the seventeenth century.
His recent publications include:
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India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
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‘Sovereign Justice in Precolonial Maritime Asia: The Case of the Mayor’s Court of Bombay, 1726-1798’, Itinerario 37:2 (2013), 46-72
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‘An Islamicate Eurasia: Vernacular Perspectives on the Early Modern World’, in Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat and Michael E. Gasper (eds), Is there a Middle East? The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 152-169 & 262-265
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‘Circulation and Exchange in Islamicate Eurasia: A Regional Approach to the Early Modern World’, Past & Present 212 (2011), 113-162
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‘Asking about origins’, Science 326:5957 (2009), 1190-1191
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‘The Informational Fabric of Eighteenth-century India and the Middle East: Couriers, Intermediaries and Postal Communication’, Modern Asian Studies 43:5 (2009), 1085-1116
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‘“Correspondence is Equal to Half a Meeting”: The Composition and Comprehension of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Eurasia’, Journal of the Economic & Social History of the Orient 50:2-3 (2007), 172-214
Full list of publications on LSE Research Online