The Political Economy of Craft Production: Crafting Empire in South India, c.1350-1650

by Carla M. Sinopoli

Overview

Carla Sinopoli examines a diverse range of crafts to explore the role and significance of craft production in the political economy of the fourteenth through seventeenth-century South Indian Vijayanagara empire. Ranging from poetry to pottery, Sinopoli utilizes evidence from twenty years of fieldwork at the Vijayanagara capital, one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world in its time. This book is a broad-ranging study of craft production in South Asia, as well as other early state empires.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521826136
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/30/2003
Pages:	370
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 10.08(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Carla M. Sinopoli is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology of the University of Michigan and Associate curator of Asian Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Pots and Palaces: The Earthenware Ceramics of the Noblemen's Quarter of Vijayanagara (1993), Approaches to Archaeological Ceramics (1991) and co-editor of Empires: Comparative Perspectives from Archaeology and History.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. Specialized craft production: archaeological approaches; 3. The South Asian state; 4. Vijayanagara: the historical setting; 5. Vijayanagara: sources of evidence; 6. Craft products and craft producers; 7. Artisans and institutions: artisans and each other; 8. Crafting empire: conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

"[T]his work is remarkably synthetic providing a focused account of a dynamic and extensive range of craft production activities, complete with social, political and economic implications for a wide spectrum of actors and institutions within a diversity of temporal and geographical settings. This volume is an important contribution to historical and archaeological writings on the Vijayanagara state and South Asian history and historiography." Peter G. Johansen, University of Chicago, Chicago South Asia Newsletter

From the Publisher