Sanctum Books (2025)

30/08/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals in Persia and British India, 1865-1914

by Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi

ABOUT THE BOOK

An innovative history of medical mission from the perspective of the history of emotions.

• Raises important historical questions about the process of civilising emotions in Christian missionary contexts.
• Utilises archival research in the UK and Canada, and field work in Persia.
• Weaves together the history of emotions and Christian missions with the history of colonial built environments and colonial medicine to bring new insight to the history of medicine and the history of architecture.
• Highlights and examines the involvement of female missionaries in the design process of mission buildings, engaging concepts of feminist historiography.
• Focuses on Iran/Persia to extend our understanding of the transnational dimensions of architectural history, medical history and the history of emotions.

Missionary medicine flourished during the period of high European imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was considered the best and surest method to overcome the distrust of and gain access to the indigenous population in the so-called Muslim World. Through studying the medical activities and infrastructures of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Persia and north-western British India, and building upon existing works on missionaries in the Middle East and British India, this book examines the practice of obtaining trust.

A synthesis of Christian mission history, architectural history, emotions history and history of medicine and empire, Emotion, Mission, Architecture raises broader historical questions about the process of mobilising and regulating emotions in the Christian missionary contexts – contributing in turn to discussions on hybridity, missionary and local encounters, women’s agency and the interactions between mission and empire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi is a Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

REVIEWS

“Emotion, Mission, Architecture represents an inspired addition to the histories of emotion and architecture. [...] In inviting us to [...] think more deeply about the ways in which current and future emotion history methodologies interact with one another in general, Emotion, Mission, Architecture makes its biggest contribution to the history of emotions.”
—Catherine-Rose Hailstone, Durham University, Emotions: History, Culture, Society 7 (2023)

“A subtly argued and innovative book. Honarmand Ebrahimi brings scholarly attention for the first time to a significant medical building programme in Iran and India. Working across missionary studies, history of emotions, medical humanities and architectural history, she interprets what might seem to be merely practical buildings as richly complex artefacts.”
—Leslie Topp, Birkbeck, University of London

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-27-6
Number of pages: 264 with 56 b/w illustrations
Size: 16 x 24 x 2 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 562 grams
Price: ₹ 1895

ORDER NOW:

Print edition

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/5ds5rewt
Flipkart: https://tinyurl.com/fdeyu7hx
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/bdz6ncr3
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/mr4cv7jb

eBook

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/3ru6ccvh
Google Books: https://tinyurl.com/37ethsns
Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/yk8zyctt

30/08/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

Women, Wealth and the State in Early Colonial India: The Begams of Awadh

by Nicholas J. Abbott

ABOUT THE BOOK

Examines wealthy Indian matriarchs as essential makers of states—and ideas of ‘the state’—in pre- and early colonial India.

• Rethinks the political, economic and institutional transition to British colonial rule through the lives of wealthy matriarchs in a late-Mughal successor state.
• Links the gendered politics of Indian ruling families with the formation of the colonial state and attendant ideas of sovereignty and statehood.
• Traces shifting ideas of ‘the state’ in pre- and early colonial India through emic Persianate political concepts.
• Utilises the East India Company’s vast but little-used Persian-language archive.

Few polities were more instrumental to the rise of the East India Company and the advent of British colonial rule in South Asia than the Mughal successor state of Awadh (c. 1722–1856). And few individuals influenced the making of the Awadh regime and its pivotal relationship with the Company more than the chief consorts (begams) of its ruling dynasty. Drawing on previously unexamined Persian sources, this book centres the begams of Awadh within a revised history of state-formation and conceptual change in pre- and early colonial India. In so doing, it posits the begams as essential, if contested, builders of both the Awadh regime and the Company state, and as ambivalent partners in forging evolving political economies and emerging conceptual languages of statehood and sovereignty in early colonial India.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicholas J. Abbott is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. His research focuses on gender, politics, and state formation in Mughal and colonial India and has been published in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Itinerario and Modern Asian Studies.

REVIEWS

“An erudite, thorough and thoughtful break with androcentric colonial-postcolonial historiography of ‘the native state’. Abbott’s book also pioneers as the first monograph on women in propertied households as pivots of early modern South Asian finance and political culture. It considerably deepens modern feminist debates on Indian women’s political and property rights.”
—Indrani Chatterjee, University of Virginia

“Nicholas Abbott is breaking new ground in writing about South Asia’s eighteenth century from predominantly Persian source materials. This monograph offers a fresh approach to early colonial history as well as an exhaustive and imaginative treatment of source material. Abbott is particularly innovative in using philological and semiotic tools to think about the evolving concept of ‘sarkar’ and in his capacious and thoughtful treatment of gender; by foregrounding the role of Awadh’s matriarchs, he presents a gender-sensitive reading of state and colonialism at a time of profound transition.”
—Samira Sheikh, Vanderbilt University

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-14-6
Number of pages: 312
Size: 16 x 24 x 2 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 626 grams
Price: ₹ 2295

ORDER NOW:

Print edition

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/m5wu6e9d
Flipkart: https://tinyurl.com/37ss947m
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/53sehh33
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/ys49x6ft

eBook

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/3dfu5p5u
Google Books: https://tinyurl.com/378dp6wu
Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/yrn2t5hr

30/08/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

J.S. Mill's Encounter with India

by Martin I. Moir, Douglas M. Peers, and Lynn Zastoupil

ABOUT THE BOOK

John Stuart Mill worked for the East India Company in London for thirty-five years (1823-58), drafting many hundreds of dispatches for the guidance of British administrators in India. Historians have long been aware of Mill’s involvement in British Indian government. This comprehensive effort brings together different strands of scholarship on Mill to determine the character of his role based on analyses of his draft dispatches and comparisons of their practical and theoretical concerns with the broad themes of Mill’s major writings on political philosophy and economics. The essays in this collection explore specific aspects of Mill’s approach to Indian issues, including religion, law, education, and security, and also place him within the broader currents of utilitarianism. The contributors present different perspectives on the ideology in Mill’s pragmatic work for the Company and his personal philosophy.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Martin I. Moir was deputy director of the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collections.

Douglas M. Peers is an associate professor in the Department of History, University of Calgary.

Lynn Zastoupil is an associate professor in the Department of History, Rhodes College.

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-44-3
Number of pages: 276
Size: 16 x 24 x 2 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 578 grams
Price: ₹ 1995

ORDER NOW:

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/y6k94xjh
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/2vxwppjc
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/3fkaz49n

30/08/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

Brothers and Sisters in India: A Study of Urban Adult Siblings

by G.N. Ramu

ABOUT THE BOOK

Indian society is rapidly becoming more urban, and while the level of urbanization and the values associated with it have yet to correspond with those of Western societies, the traditional ethos governing sibling relations is becoming increasingly less relevant. G.N. Ramu explores this phenomenon in Brothers and Sisters in India, the first detailed study of adult siblings in contemporary Indian society.

Based on sixteen months of field work in the city of Mysore and over three decades of research in this area, Ramu’s study focuses on the three types of sibling relationships (fraternal, sororal, and cross-sibling), and examines the frequency of interaction, the level of mutual assistance, and the incidence of conflict and strain between brothers and sisters. Ramu’s findings are revealing, and often differ substantially from those typically found in research on family and kinship patterns in contemporary India. The sibling relationships investigated in this study demonstrate that the nature and function of kinship ties in India are undergoing striking changes – changes that suggest patterns similar to those found in Western societies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

G.N. Ramu is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manitoba.

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-52-8
Number of pages: 281
Size: 16 x 24 x 2 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 589 grams
Price: ₹ 1995

ORDER NOW:

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/mrpbcpx7
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/2k77zne6
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/3ap6ubzf

19/06/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism

by Aria Fani

ABOUT THE BOOK

Contrary to the presumption that literary nationalism in the Global South emerged through contact with Europe alone, Reading across Borders demonstrates how the cultural forms of Iran and Afghanistan as nation-states arose from their shared Persian heritage and cross-cultural exchange in the twentieth century. In this book, Aria Fani charts the individuals, institutions, and conversations that made this exchange possible, detailing the dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through new ideas about literature.

Fani illustrates how voluntary and state-funded associations of readers helped formulate and propagate “literature” as a recognizable notion, adapting and changing Persian concepts to fit this modern idea. Focusing on early twentieth-century periodicals with readers in Afghan and Iranian cities and their diaspora, Fani exposes how nationalism intensified—rather than severed—cultural contact among two Persian-speaking societies amidst the diverging and competing demands of their respective nation-states. This interconnected history was ultimately forgotten, shaping many of the cultural disputes between Iran and Afghanistan today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aria Fani is an assistant professor and director of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He serves as the current deputy editor of Iranian Studies and is a co-investigator of the Translation Studies Hub at UW.

REVIEWS

“In this fascinating account of the forging of national literatures, Aria Fani focuses on individuals, institutions, and mediums. He introduces us to the likes of the Afghan Sarwar Guyā E‘temādi, who lectured in Pakistan, Iran, and Soviet Central Asia, and the Bombay- and Lausanne-educated Mahmud Afshār, who founded periodicals and literary endowments in Iran. Linking such figures were local literary associations and state-funded universities whose textbooks and journals propagated new tasks for literature within and across national borders. Via what Fani calls his method of ‘East-East comparison,’ this is a milestone study that pushes against the boundaries of Middle Eastern cultural history.”
—Nile Green, editor of Afghan History through Afghan Eyes

“Reading across Borders is a groundbreaking critique of the very concept of literature in Iranian and Afghan contexts. With an outstanding command of literary history, primary texts, and the appropriate theoretical underpinnings, Aria Fani invites us to question decades of received wisdom that have relied on the constructed exceptionalism and glorification of 'Persian literature.' Through such a radical reassessment, Fani paves the way for a vastly more inclusive and socially responsible way of approaching Persian-language literary production, giving the reader the tools for a long overdue problematization of the myths of national identity and unexamined adages on the canon of Persian literature.”
—Leyla Rouhi, Mary A. and William Wirt Warren Professor of Romance Languages, Williams College

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-59-7
Number of pages: 272 with 14 b/w photos
Size: 16 x 24 x 3 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 572 grams
Price: ₹ 1795

ORDER NOW:

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/yesta9rm
Flipkart: https://tinyurl.com/4f4vzbze
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/4kc6f39j
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/re5r9rc4

19/06/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare

by Joerg Esleben with Rolf Rohmer and David G. John

ABOUT THE BOOK

This volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of the work of East German theatre director Fritz Bennewitz in India between 1970 and 1994. Joerg Esleben has gathered together many of Bennewitz’s own writings, most published for the first time, in which he reflects on his production of plays by Bertolt Brecht, Shakespeare, Goethe, Chekhov, and Volker Braun. By translating these writings into English, the editors have provided unprecedented access to Bennewitz’s thinking about intercultural work in India. This material is illuminated by explanatory annotations, contextualized commentary, and critical perspectives from Bennewitz’s former colleagues in India and other leading scholars. Through its kaleidoscope of perspectives, Fritz Bennewitz in India offers a significant counter to dominant models of Western theatrical interculturalism.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Joerg Esleben is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Ottawa.

Rolf Rohmer is a professor emeritus of theatre at Leipzig University.

David G. John is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Waterloo as well as the founding director of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies.

REVIEWS

“…[offers] detailed instances of how a western director might think about working in rehearsal across cultural difference.”
—Ric Knowles, University of Guelph, University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018

“This exhaustively researched book by Joerg Esleben and his group represents the culmination of efforts to document and evaluate Bennewitz’s multifaceted work in India.”
—Vera Stegmann, Lehigh University, German Studies Review, vol 42 no 1, February 2019

“The narrative that unfolds in Fritz Bennewitz in India documents major cross-cultural collaborations, and is a much-needed counterpoint to other forms of Euro-American interculturalism.”
—Aparna Dharwadker, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“Fritz Bennewitz’s work was a major contribution to Indian theatre and his letters are a valuable testimony and record of it. The translators have performed a wonderful feat in translating the original German into sensitive and highly readable English prose.”
—Vasudha Dalmia, Professor Emerita of Hindi and Modern South Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-95-5
Number of pages: 384 with numerous b/w illustrations
Size: 16 x 24 x 4 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 730 grams
Price: ₹ 2495

ORDER NOW:

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/5tjz3c5z
Flipkart: https://tinyurl.com/55uunnue
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/4uup2tkn
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/2twnzy4p

19/06/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de la Sablière, and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-century France

by Faith E. Beasley

ABOUT THE BOOK

Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France’s “Great Century” and the early Enlightenment. Focusing on the salon of Marguerite de la Sablière and its encounter with the traveler and philosopher François Bernier, this book resurrects the conversations about India inspired by Bernier’s travels and inscribed in his influential texts produced in collaboration with la Sablière’s salon. The literary works, correspondences, and philosophical texts produced by the members of this eclectic salon bear the traces of this engagement with India.

Faith E. Beasley’s analysis of these conversations reveals France’s unique engagement with India during this period and challenges prevailing images derived from a nineteenth-century “orientalism” imbued with colonialism. The India encountered in la Sablière’s salon through François Bernier and others is not the colonized India that has come to dominate any image of the Orient. Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal adds a new chapter to literary and cultural history by adopting a new approach to the study of salon culture, exploring how texts, cultural artifacts, and patterns of thought were shaped by the collective reading and by the conversations emanating from these practices. Beasley’s analysis highlights the unique role of French salon culture in the evolution of western thought during the early modern period.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Faith E. Beasley is a professor of French and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College.

REVIEWS

“This book skillfully raises tensions between the nature of absolutism and foreign influence.”
—Susan Mokhberi, Rutgers University at Camden, H-France Review, vol 19 no. 168, August '19

“This rich and timely work combines close analysis of texts, images, and objects with historical contextualization and broad methodological reflections.”
—Olivia Tolley, Jesus College, Cambridge

“Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal is a major contribution to our understanding of the work of Bernier, his place in the early modern history of travel, and his contribution to the genre of the travel narrative. Beasley paves the way for further study of how the accounts of Bernier and other travellers influenced French imaginative literature, especially the novel.”
—Elizabeth Goldsmith, Department of Romance Studies, Boston University

“I firmly believe that Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal will represent one of the most interesting contributions to French studies in the decade. Beasley’s image of India fosters a better understanding of diversity in France in its rich traditions - literary, cultural, gender-related, and political - because this image was mediated through the social milieu of the women’s salon in seventeenth-century France, notably the gathering of Madame de la Sablière.”
—Jean-Vincent Blanchard, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Swarthmore College

“The ease and pleasure with which Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal reads belies the hard-hitting contributions it makes to French literary and cultural studies. When Beasley sets out to understand the engagement of two of the seventeenth-century’s most eminent women writers with India - what India might have meant to Sèvignè and Lafayette, and more broadly to France in these pivotal years of cultural consolidation – she creates a new and experimental methodology that imaginatively reconstructs the “conversation” out of which Bernier’s writings about Mughal India, and the salon-produced literature of Lafayette, Sèvignè, La Fontaine, and Fontenelle, emerged.”
—Claire Goldstein, Department of French and Italian, University of California, Davis

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-03-0
Number of pages: 384 with numerous colour plates and b/w figures
Size: 16 x 24 x 4 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 738 grams
Price: ₹ 2495

ORDER NOW:

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/2s46n5pn
Flipkart: https://tinyurl.com/yc6xf9dh
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/3bkjvsje
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/bpz2dt9y

19/06/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

Hidden Paradigms: Comparing Epic Themes, Characters, and Plot Structures

by Brenda E.F. Beck

ABOUT THE BOOK

Understanding an epic story’s key belief patterns can reveal community-level values, the nature of familial bonds, and how divine and human concerns jockey for power and influence. These foundational motifs remain understudied as they relate to South Asian folk legends, but are nonetheless crucial in shaping the values exemplified by such stories’ central heroes and heroines.

In Hidden Paradigms, anthropologist Brenda E.F. Beck describes The Legend of Ponnivala, an oral epic from rural South India. Recorded in 1965, this story was sung to a group of village enthusiasts by a respected pair of local bards. This grand legend took more than thirty-eight hours to complete over eighteen nights. Bringing this unique example of Tamil culture to the attention of an international audience, Beck compares this virtually unknown South Indian epic to five other culturally significant works – the Ojibwa Nanabush cycle, the Mahabharata, an Icelandic Saga, the Bible, and the Epic of Gilgamesh – establishing this foundational Tamil story as one that engages with the same universal human struggles and themes present throughout the world. Copiously illustrated, Hidden Paradigms provides a fresh example of the power of comparative thinking, offering a humanistic complement to scientific reasoning.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brenda E.F. Beck is an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

REVIEWS

“Everyone with an interest in epic or, indeed, in narrative or mythology generally should read this book by an internationally respected authority. Taking an innovative comparative approach likely to deeply affect this field of scholarship, it is full of mind-opening insights that will delight the expert and the general reader alike.”
—Ruth Finnegan, Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences, The Open University

“Brenda Beck shows in this book that the oral folk epic Annanmar katai ‘the story of twin brothers’ is not local or vernacular in its reach. It is in essence a story of the emergence of a farming culture superseding a hunting culture. This sets the ground for the comparative study of five other legends from around the world. Relating the local to the global is new in anthropology. The book ends up showing that all humans journeyed through comparable paths and that they have similar ways of telling that story.”
—E. Annamalai, formerly of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

“By setting the Land of the Golden River in conversation with the Mahabharata, the epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, Icelandic saga, and North American Indigenous legends, Brenda Beck explores how epic narratives address perennial questions at the core of our humanity. In the process, she reveals to the English-speaking world the anthropological, psychological, and symbolic complexity of a hitherto little-known masterpiece of world literature.”
—Jo Ann Cavallo, Professor of Italian, Columbia University

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-65-8
Number of pages: 476 with numerous b/w figures
Size: 16 x 24 x 4 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 866 grams
Price: ₹ 2995

ORDER NOW:

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/5ne2ceap
Flipkart: https://tinyurl.com/336bbhmd
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/c8xbahex
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/ump4r4hd

12/06/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

Garland of Visions: Color, Ta**ra, and a Material History of Indian Painting

by Jinah Kim

ABOUT THE BOOK

Garland of Visions explores the generative relationships between artistic intelligence and ta***ic vision practices in the construction and circulation of visual knowledge in medieval South Asia. Shifting away from the traditional connoisseur approach, Jinah Kim instead focuses on the materiality of painting: its mediums, its visions, and especially its colors. She argues that the adoption of a special type of manuscript called pothi enabled the material translation of a private and internal experience of "seeing" into a portable device. These mobile and intimate objects then became important conveyors of many forms of knowledge—ritual, artistic, social, scientific, and religious—and spurred the spread of visual knowledge of Indic Buddhism to distant lands. By taking color as the material link between a vision and its artistic output, Garland of Visions presents a fresh approach to the history of Indian painting.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jinah Kim is George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Harvard University. She is the author of Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist Book Cult in South Asia.

REVIEWS

“I am in awe of this book. Jinah Kim controls a stunning range of information, both verbal and visual, that she uses as the basis for her brilliant insights. Elegantly written, entirely pioneering, and fully persuasive, this is a book of enormous importance.”
—Frederick M. Asher, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota

“This is a paradigm-changing work. By linking together a dizzying array of concerns in this exploration of visionary practice and color, Jinah Kim complicates long-held assumptions about religious imagery in India and produces remarkable insights. The book is sure to create new paths of scholarly inquiry in a wide range of fields.”
—Janice Leoshko, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-50-4
Number of pages: 352 with 119 color illustrations, 1 map, and 6 tables
Size: 21 x 26 x 3 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 1 kg 423 grams
Price: ₹ 7995

ORDER NOW:

Print edition

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/bdf6fd66
Flipkart: https://tinyurl.com/45fuxm49
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/3ya93vcr
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/5aaknz33

12/06/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport

by Patrick Bixby

ABOUT THE BOOK

This surprising global history of an indispensable document reveals how the passport has shaped art, thought, and human experience while helping to define the modern world.

In License to Travel, Patrick Bixby takes the reader on a captivating journey from pharaonic Egypt and Han-dynasty China to the passport controls and crowded refugee camps of today. Along the way, you will:

• Peruse the passports of artists and intellectuals, writers and musicians, ancient messengers and modern migrants.

• See how these seemingly humble documents implicate us in larger narratives about identity, mobility, citizenship, and state authority.

• Encounter intimate stories of vulnerability and desire along with vivid examples drawn from world cinema, literature, art, philosophy, and politics.

• Witness the authority that travel documents exercise over our movements and our emotions as we circulate around the globe.

With unexpected discoveries at every turn, License to Travel exposes the passport as both an instrument of personal freedom and a tool of government surveillance powerful enough to define our very humanity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick Bixby is Professor of English at Arizona State University. His books include Unaccompanied Traveler: The Writings of Kathleen M. Murphy.

REVIEWS

“In License to Travel, Bixby explores the passport’s linguistic journey and much else. . . . An impressive survey.”
—Wall Street Journal

“A comprehensive, insightful history. . . . Bixby offers up a formidable survey of this everyday artifact and how it defines individuals and affords varying degrees of privilege and freedom, depending on one’s place of birth.”
—New York Times

“Neatly lays out the mighty power of the passport and the pains of passport inequality. . . . With License to Travel, Bixby also makes the argument that applying and carrying a passport is not just an administrative hoop that travelers must jump through: Having a passport gives us the freedom to travel—and the freedom to thrive.”
—AFAR Magazine

“Read this book and you’ll never again treat your passport so casually.”
—Geography Realm

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-17-7
Number of pages: 244 with 18 b/w images
Size: 15 x 23 x 2 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 461 grams
Price: ₹ 1495

ORDER NOW:

Print edition

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/3ahysu3m
Flipkart: https://tinyurl.com/4u8rk836
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/yb9r2mvm
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/4xsjydbs

eBook

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/4zdk2bdb
Google Books: https://tinyurl.com/bdd8u7xk

12/06/2025

JUST PUBLISHED

The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present

by Allen James Fromherz

ABOUT THE BOOK

This sweeping history reorients our understanding of the Middle East, placing the Gulf at the heart of globalized trade and cross-cultural encounters.

World history began in the Persian Gulf. The ancient port cities that dotted its coastlines created the first global seaboard, a place from where faiths and cultures from around the world set sail and made contact. More than a history, The Center of the World shows us that contradictions that define our modern age have always been present.

For over four thousand years, the Gulf—sometimes called the Persian Gulf, sometimes the Arabian Gulf—has been a global crossroads while managing to avoid control by the world’s greatest empires. In its history, we see a world of rapid change, fluctuating centers of trade, a dependency on uncertain global markets, and intense cross-cultural encounters that hold a mirror to the contemporary world. Focusing each chapter on a different port around the Gulf, The Center of the World shows how the people of the Gulf adapted to larger changes in world history, creating a system of free trade, merchant rule, and commerce that continues to define the region today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allen James Fromherz is Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at Georgia State University. He is author of Qatar: A Modern History and Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times and editor of The Gulf in World History: Arabia at the Global Crossroads.

REVIEWS

“In a very readable history, Fromherz provides a millennia-long narrative replete with fascinating details.”
—Asian Review of Books

“Many authors would be daunted by the task of synthesizing over four millennia of history in a geographical area that encompasses eight different modern states. But Fromherz rises to the challenge. . . . He chronologically presents the stories of six different port cities in the Gulf that, in turn, open the door to exploring different historical eras in the region.”
—Informed Comment

“An engaging study of a neglected region in the global historical narrative.”
—H-Net Reviews

“This is an excellent, engagingly written overview of the political and commercial history of a crucial waterway mostly known for the vagaries of the oil that has flowed through it in modern times.”
—R. P. Matthee, University of Delaware, in Choice

“Remarkably accessible, this book offers an authoritative history of the Gulf, boldly linking the region to the wider currents of global history.”
—Dale F. Eickelman, author of The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach

“Simply compelling! Allen Fromherz does for the Gulf what Braudel did for the Mediterranean.”
—G. R. Garthwaite, Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies and Professor Emeritus of History at Dartmouth College

“The best historical interpretation of the gulf geography . . . A must read for anyone with an interest in the Middle East, Persia, and economic history.”
—Ansgar Baums, Senior Fellow, Stimson Center

SPECIFICATIONS

ISBN: 978-93-95474-36-8
Number of pages: 332 with 17 b/w figures and 1 map
Size: 16 x 24 x 3 cm
Year of publication: 2025
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 651 grams
Price: ₹ 1995

ORDER NOW:

Print edition

Amazon.in: https://tinyurl.com/4fv8w3vn
Flipkart: https://tinyurl.com/ye253akz
Biblio.com: https://tinyurl.com/yc3rcs65
Sanctum Books: https://tinyurl.com/5ft4pzbd

eBook

Google Books: https://tinyurl.com/3npxbjxv
Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/p84knt22

Monday	10:00 - 18:00
Tuesday	10:00 - 18:00
Wednesday	10:00 - 18:00
Thursday	10:00 - 18:00
Friday	10:00 - 18:00
Saturday	10:00 - 18:00

Sanctum Books

30/08/2025

30/08/2025

30/08/2025

30/08/2025

19/06/2025

19/06/2025

19/06/2025

19/06/2025

12/06/2025

12/06/2025

12/06/2025

Address

Opening Hours

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share