Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance. South India through European Eyes, 1250-1650.

My first encounter with this book – published now a good five years ago - took place at a time when a number of scholars were still sceptical of the new cultural history as informed by the linguistic turn, taking it to be a potpourri of self-indulgent and personalised readings of agreeable and often easily accessible texts. Travellers like Pietro della Valle, moreover, as Rubiés himself intimates (p. 365), were often themselves runaways from their own societies, footloose voyeurs prone to pompous self-introductions and exaggerated self-worth, as the Queen of Olaza deduced from their encounter in 1623. One of the virtues of a field such as economic history, by contrast, is that things can be precisely measured: our grails, concepts such as value, actually mean something tangible thanks to a metric scheme of measurement. During the period in which economic history was dominant, mathematics was an entire discipline at our disposal and which provided a battery of refined tools of investigation.