Encounters on the Opposite Coast

In Encounters on the Opposite Coast Markus Vink provides a narrative of the first half century of cross-cultural interaction between the Dutch East India Company (VOC), one of the great northern European char­tered companies, and Madurai, one of the ‘great southern Nayakas’ and successor-states of the Vijayanagara empire, in southeast India (c. 1645-1690). A shared interest in trade and at times converging political objectives formed the unstable foundations for a complex relationship fraught with tensions, a mixture of conflict and coexistence typical of the ‘age of contained conflict’.