Four members of our Research Team have published new monographs and editions in the first few months of 2026! Spanning the early modern globe from the British Isles to the Indian Ocean, Nia Deliana, Nat Cutter, Amrita Sen, and Iman Sheeha have written works that deepen our understanding of the early modern world and how cultural interaction, particularly in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian worlds, shaped the histories of India, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire from c.1500 to c.1800.

Firstly, Nia Deliana's new monograph with the Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, The Ocean Remembers: Indians and the Tides of Empire (2026), focuses on the the Keling merchants in India between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries and the ways in which their presence in Indian Ocean trade made Southeast Asia a critical piece of the early modern global economy. This work seeks to shift a Eurocentric understanding of Indian Ocean trade and how the Indo-Malay Archipelago was an important centre of trade prior to European colonization. Amrita Sen's new book with Routledge, Performing India in Early Modern England 1575-1642: Commerce, Spectacle, and the Formation of the East India Company (March 2026), similarly focuses on India, Indian Ocean trade, and the ways in which British colonizers understood South Asian culture. Performing India focuses on how English merchants interacted with and performed Indian culture on the English stage in the decades preceding the establishment of the East India Company in 1600. Contributing to scholarly discussion of early modern race and race making, Sen's work sheds new light on the role that theater, material culture, and performance played in cultural interactions between England and India at the advent of English colonization of the subcontinent in the late sixteenth century. Together, The Ocean Remembers and Performing India shift understandings of the early modern history of India, the Indian Ocean world, and the role of trade in British colonization in Asia prior to the nineteenth century.

In the Mediterranean world, Nat Cutter's new book with Oxford University Press, Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662-1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange (April 2026), examines the lives and experiences of English people living in the Ottoman Maghreb in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as they formed communities abroad, engaged in trade and business, and became involved with the traffic of "Barbary" enslavement. Cutter's work rethinks Ottoman-British relations in the Maghreb in an effort to show mutual benefit and cooperation between both Ottoman north Africans and British subjects. In Britain itself, Iman Sheeha's new introduction for William Shakespeare's Arden of Faversham--edited by Terri Bourus, Gary Taylor, and Emma Smith--provides new historical context and discussion of Shakespeare's 1592 play based on the murder of Thomas Arden by his wife, Alice Arden, and her lover in 1551. Sheeha's introduction situates the play in the growing historiography on true crime, gender, domestic violence, class, race, and the early modern city.

Congratulations to all of our team members! You can purchase and learn more about their books here: The Ocean Remembers, Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, Performing India, and Arden of Faversham.