Between Europe and the Indian Ocean: a “Global History“ for the seventeenth century

The Boghossian Foundation is pleased to welcome the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam for a reflection on the links between Europe and the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century.

How did connections between the continents develop ? Were there attempts by European powers to establish political, economic, religious and cultural dominance ? How can we revisit this period, marked by the expansion of global trade, while taking into account an approach that gives equal weight to both European actors and those of the Indian Ocean world? Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who teaches economic history and holds the Chair of Indian History at the University of California in Los Angeles, sheds light on this fascinating subject, in conversation with Gaïdz Minassian, journalist at Le Monde.

Considered one of the foremost contemporary historians of the early modern period (fifteenth-eighteenth century) and one of the leading advocates of connected history, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has taught in Delhi, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, at the University of Oxford and then at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he has been a professor since 2004. He also held the Chair in Global History of the Early Modern Period at the Collège de France. Trained in economic history at the Delhi School of Economics, he has reshaped the history of globalization by demonstrating that exchanges, movements, and encounters between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas shaped the world long before the nineteenth century.
Among his major works are The Portuguese Empire in Asia (Longman, 1993), The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Three Ways to Be Alien (Brandeis University Press, 2011).
A polyglot and a specialist in European and Asian archives, he is regarded as one of the key figures in the renewal of global history.

Gaïdz Minassian is a journalist at Le Monde and a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris.

This is a demo store for testing purposes — no orders shall be fulfilled. Dismiss

Between Europe and the Indian Ocean: a “Global History“ for the seventeenth century

Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Gaïdz Minassian

Lecture ◇ 17 September 2026