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.
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. Subramanyam was brought up in a Tamil Brahmin family, 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. 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. 1550âÂÂ1650".
Subrahmanyam joined UCLA in 2004 after teaching at University of Oxford and was later appointed Professor of Economic History (1993âÂÂ1995). From 1995 to 2002, he was Directeur dâÂÂétudes at the ÃÂcole des Hautes ÃÂtudes 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.
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 âÂÂconnected histories,â a concept associated with his work.
In 2013, he was elected to a Chair in Early Modern Global History at the Collège de France, where he delivered lectures during 2013âÂÂ2014 and subsequently served as a visiting professor until 2021.
SubrahmanyamâÂÂs 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.
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), EuropeâÂÂs India: Words, People, Empires, 1500âÂÂ1800 (2017), and Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500âÂÂ1800 (2018). Subsequent publications include Faut-il universaliser lâÂÂhistoire? (2020), Les Peuples de lâÂÂOrient au milieu du XVIe siècle (2022), Imperios Entrelazados en los orÃÂgenes del mundo moderno (2024), and Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440âÂÂ1640 (2024).
In 2012, Subrahmanyam was awarded the first Infosys Prize in Humanities, for his 'path-breaking contribution to history'. He also served as a Humanities jury member for the prize from 2019.
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.
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.
In February 2019, Sanjay Subrahmanyam was awarded the Dan David Prize for History (jointly with Kenneth Pomeranz, Chicago).
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.
Historian Srinath Raghavan wrote of Subrahmanyam in 2013,
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>