This third volume of André Wink’s acclaimed and pioneering AlHind: The Making of the IndoIslamic World takes the reader from the late Mongol invasions to the end of the medieval period and the beginnings of early modern times in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. It breaks new ground by focusing attention on the role of geography and more specifically on the interplay of nomadic settled and maritime societies. In doing so it presents a picture of the world of India and the Indian Ocean on the eve of the Portuguese discovery of the searoute: a world without stable parameters of pervasive geophysical change inchoate and instable urbanism highly volatile and itinerant elites of nomadic origin farflung merchant diasporas and a famine and diseaseprone peasantry whose life was a gamble on the monsoon. About the Author André Wink Ph.D. Leiden (1984) is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He is the author of Land and Sovereignty in India (1986) as well as numerous articles.
