2018
New essay in History Today
Dr Sood has published a new essay in History Today (vol. 68, no. 2, Feb. 2018) entitled “A World Revealed”. Written using research conducted for his book India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 2016), the article is meant to appeal to a general audience of history students, teachers and aficionados interested in extra-Western, pre-modern history. The essay focuses on an 18th-century world, spanning the Middle East and South Asia, populated by a kaleidoscope of "ordinary" people. It was a moment “of remarkable changes, politically, intellectually, culturally, economically and demographically; it was a moment of unscripted possibilities”, says Dr Sood. This world was historically significant in its own time, but it suddenly vanished and was subsequently forgotten. The aim of the piece is to recapture a sense of this world in the manner of a detective story, and what is revealed is, in many ways, unexpected.
2016
New Book Out Now
Dr Sood's new book, India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange, was published by Cambridge University Press on 31 March 2016. Based on the chance survival of a remarkable cache of documents, India and the Islamic Heartlands recaptures a vanished and forgotten world from the eighteenth century spanning much of today's Middle East and South Asia. The book 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. Read more about about the book on CUP's website. Order it on Amazon.