Lubaaba Al-Azami
Travellers in the Golden Realm
in conversation with Dr Molly Zeigler

Saturday 12 April 2025
10.30 - 11.30am; £10/£7

Central Library, 555 Silbury Blvd,
Central Milton Keynes, MK9 3HL

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‘Disrupts the conventional narrative to give a vital pre-history to the Raj, when the indomitable empire in question was Indian, not British, and the only English in India were opportunistic upstarts, murderous priests and drunken louts.’ – Susannah Lipscomb, author of A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England

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Cultural historian Lubaaba Al-Azami explores the dramatic and engaging story of the first English travellers to India in the 16th century, and their encounters with an unimaginable superpower – the Mughal dynasty.  In conversation with Molly Ziegler, she discusses this long-forgotten, transformative period of England’s mercantile birth.

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Before the East India Company and before the British Empire, England was a pariah state. Seeking better fortunes, 16th and 17th century merchants, pilgrims and outcasts ventured to the kingdom of the mighty Mughals. Into this golden realm went Father Thomas Stephens, a Catholic fleeing religious persecution; the merchant Ralph Fitch, looking for jewels in the markets of Delhi; and John Mildenhall, an adventurer revelling in the highwire politics of the Mughal elite.

 

It was a land ruled from its palatial towers by women – the formidable Empress Nur Jahan Begim, the enterprising Queen Mother Maryam al-Zamani, and the intrepid Princess Jahanara Begim. Their collision of worlds helped connect East and West, launching a tempestuous period of globalisation spanning from the Chinese opium trade to the slave trade in the Americas.

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Lubaaba explores what it means to look at alternative pathways to progress and modernity, and to consider history through the lens of an equally-centred east rather than exclusively-centred west.

 

About Lubaaba Al-Azami
Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami is a cultural historian of the Global Renaissance. She is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at the University of Manchester, a research fellow at the University of Liverpool and Founding Editor of Medieval and Early Modern Orients (memorients.com / @memorients). She specialises in England’s premodern relationship with Asia and the Islamic Worlds. Her scholarship spans the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to travel literature and life writing, covering themes of gender, empire and transcultural encounter.

More about Lubaaba:

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