Terrains of Exchange

In a fairly short period of time, Nile Green, a very talented social and cultural historian at UCLA (who I do remember from his time at Pembroke College in Cambridge, SOAS, Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford and Manchester), has established himself as a keen and insightful historian of modern Islam. Firmly locating his research interests in Iranian and South Asian Islam within the new paradigm of global history and drawing upon the approach of Michael Mann and others that focus upon both the nature of organisations and human capital as well as the notion of ‘religious and social economies’ to understand different forms of social transactions on the cusp of the colonial and modern world, he extends in this volume his analysis, already presented in Bombay Islam, to present a way of analysing the colonial, missionary encounters. In a sense his method is an interesting way of engaging with global history through vignettes of micro-history that also demonstrates the influence of his colleagues Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Carlo Ginzberg.