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Sanjay Subrahmanyam (born 21 May 1961) is an Indian American historian of the early modern period. He is the author of several books and publications. He holds the Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA which he joined in 2004.^[1]

Sanjay Subramanyam was born on 21 May 1961 in New Delhi, India. He is the son of Indian civil servant K. Subrahmanyam and his wife Sulochana.^[2] Subramanyam was brought up in a Tamil Brahmin family,^[3][4] His father was a prominent expert on strategic affairs. Sanjay has an elder sister, and two elder brothers. His brother Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is a noted bureaucrat who currently serves as India’s Minister of External Affairs in the BJP government.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam graduated with a BA (Hons) in economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.^[5][6] He received his MA and PhD in 1987 in economic history from the Delhi School of Economics on the topic of “Trade and the Regional Economy of South India, c. 1550–1650”.

Subrahmanyam joined UCLA in 2004 after teaching at University of Oxford and was later appointed Professor of Economic History (1993–1995). From 1995 to 2002, he was Directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, working on the economic and social history of early modern India and the Indian Ocean. In 2002, he became the first holder of the Chair in Indian History and Culture at Oxford.^[7]

At UCLA, Subrahmanyam served as founding director of the Center for India and South Asia from 2005 to 2011. His teaching covers medieval and early modern South Asian and Indian Ocean history, European expansion, comparative empires, and global historical methods. He has supervised graduate research on Indian history, Iberian empires, and “connected histories,” a concept associated with his work.^[2]

In 2013, he was elected to a Chair in Early Modern Global History at the Collège de France, where he delivered lectures during 2013–2014 and subsequently served as a visiting professor until 2021.

Subrahmanyam’s scholarship spans multiple areas of early modern history. His early works, including The Political Economy of Commerce (1990), contributed to the study of the Indian Ocean. In collaboration with Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman, he co-authored Symbols of Substance (1992) and Textures of Time (2001), which examine South Indian cultural and political history, along with Penumbral Visions (2001). With Muzaffar Alam, he co-authored Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries (2007), Writing the Mughal World (2011), and later Mirrors of Empire (2026), focusing on Mughal and early modern Islamic historiography.^[8]

He has also written on the Iberian empires, including Improvising Empire (1990), The Portuguese Empire in Asia (1993), and The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (1997). His essays on global and comparative history are collected in Explorations in Connected History (2005). Later works include Three Ways to Be Alien (2011), Courtly Encounters(2012), Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (2017), and Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800 (2018). Subsequent publications include Faut-il universaliser l’histoire? (2020), Les Peuples de l’Orient au milieu du XVIe siècle (2022), Imperios Entrelazados en los orígenes del mundo moderno (2024), and Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440–1640 (2024).^[8]

In 2012, Subrahmanyam was awarded the first Infosys Prize in Humanities, for his ‘path-breaking contribution to history’.^[9] He also served as a Humanities jury member for the prize from 2019.^[10]

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and as a corresponding fellow to the British Academy in 2016. Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania selected Dr. Subrahmanyam as the 2009 Mary Flexner Lecturer. He was elected professor and to the chair Histoire Globale de la Première Modernité at the Collège de France in 2013.

On 6 February 2017, Subrahmanyam received an honoris causa doctorate from the Université catholique de Louvain.^[11]

The Martine Aublet Prize for 2018 was awarded to Subrahmanyam for his book, L’inde sous les yeux de l’Europe: mots, peuples, empires (Alma Editeur, 2018), by the Musée de Quai Branly.^[12]

In February 2019, Sanjay Subrahmanyam was awarded the Dan David Prize for History (jointly with Kenneth Pomeranz, Chicago).^[13]

In 2022, Sanjay Subrahmanyam was awarded the Comité International des Sciences Historiques (CISH) Prize in History at the XXIII Congress of the Historical Sciences in Poznan, Poland.^[14]

Historian Srinath Raghavan wrote of Subrahmanyam in 2013,^[15]

His scholarship spans the entire early modern period, from the 15th to 18th centuries CE, and more besides. Similarly, his geographical expertise stretches from South, South-East and West Asia to Western Europe and Latin America. Then there are his technical skills, ranging from statistical analysis of economic data to interpretation of literary and visual materials. Although Subrahmanyam began as an economic historian, he has branched out to work on political, intellectual and cultural history. He works in over ten European and Asian languages and draws on sources from a dazzling array of archives. Finally, there is his sheer productivity. Subrahmanyam seems to write top-class history faster than most of us can read.

• The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Doctoral thesis.
• Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500–1700, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History, London and New York: Longman, 1993. (2nd ed. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
• The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India, Delhi/Ann Arbor: Oxford University Press/University of Michigan Press, 2001.
• Explorations in Connected History: From the Tagus to the Ganges, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World, (Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures), Waltham (Mass.): Brandeis University Press, 2011.
• Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Mary Flexner Lectures), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Is ‘Indian Civilization’ a Myth?: Fictions and Histories, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2013
• Aux origines de l’histoire globale (Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France), Paris: Fayard, 2014.
• Europe’s India: words, people, empires 1500–1800, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017 (translated to French: L’Inde sous les yeux de l’Europe. Mots, peuples, empires 1500-1800, Paris, Alma, 2018).
• Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500-1800, New York: State University of New York Press, 2019.
• Faut-il universaliser l’histoire? Entre dérives nationalistes et identitaires, Paris: CNRS editions, 2020.
• “Connected History. Essays and Arguments”, London, New York: Verso, 2022. (= expanded version of “Is ‘Indian Civilization’ a Myth?”)

• (with Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman), Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka-period Tamil Nadu, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.
• (with Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman) Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001.
• (with Muzaffar Alam) Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• (with Muzaffar Alam) Writing the Mughal World, Ranikhet/New York: Permanent Black/Columbia University Press, 2011.

• (Ed.) Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• (Ed.) Money and the Market in India, 1100–1700, Delhi: Oxford University Press, (Series: Themes in Indian History), 1994.
• (Ed.) Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World (volume 8 of An Expanding World). Aldershot: Variorum Books, 1996.
• (Ed. with Kaushik Basu) Unravelling the Nation: Sectarian Conflict and India’s Secular Identity, New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1996.
• (Ed. with Burton Stein) Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• (Ed. with Muzaffar Alam) The Mughal State, 1526–1750, Delhi: Oxford University Press (Series: Themes in Indian History), 1998.
• (Ed.) Sinners and Saints: The Successors of Vasco da Gama, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• (Ed. with Claude Markovits and Jacques Pouchepadass) Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003.
• (Ed.) Land, Politics and Trade in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• (Ed. with Kenneth McPherson) From Biography to History: Essays in the History of Portuguese Asia (1500–1800), New Delhi: TransBooks, 2006.
• (Ed. with David Armitage) The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• (Co-editor) The Cambridge World History, Vol. VI: The Construction of a Global World, 1400-1800 CE, Books 1 & 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• (Ed. with Henning Trüper and Dipesh Chakrabarty) Historical Teleologies in the Modern World, London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

• Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “V. S. Naipaul: Where Does He Come From?”. London Review of Books. Vol. 29, no. 21.