In an undated early-17th-century poem, Ben Jonson alternately praised and cautioned his friend, the clever and ambitious courtier Sir Thomas Roe: “Thou hast begun well, Roe, which stand well too, / And I know nothing more thou hast to do. / He that is round within himself, and streight, / Need seek no other strength, no other height.”
This was not empty moralizing. Roe would stand in need of round Jonsonian inner reserves during his years in India (1615–19) as the first English ambassador to the court of the Mughal emperor Jahangir. Roe’s eloquent diary of the period is the vital source for Oxford professor Nandini Das’s striking and original Courting India: Seventeenth-Century England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, which, she writes, is “not a biography of Roe, or a history of the English in India, or an account of English engagement with the wider world beyond Jacobean London, but the story it tells emerges from the intersection of all three.”
