"In Encounters on the Opposite Coast Markus Vink provides a narrative of the first half century of cross-cultural interaction between the Dutch East India Company (VOC), one of the great northern European char­tered companies, and Madurai, one of the ‘great southern Nayakas’ and successor-states of the Vijayanagara empire, in southeast India (c. 1645-1690). A shared interest in trade and at times converging political objectives formed the unstable foundations for a complex relationship fraught with tensions, a mixture of conflict and coexistence typical of the ‘age of contained conflict’. Drawing extensively on archival materials, Markus Vink covers a topic neglected by both Company historians and their Indian counter­parts and sheds important light on a ‘black hole in South Indian history’. About the Author Markus P.M. Vink, Ph.D. (1998), University of Minnesota, is Professor of History at The State University of New York at Fredonia. He has published monographs and numerous articles on the Indian Ocean World, including The Merchant-Warrior Pacified (OUP, 1991) and Mission to Madurai (Manohar, 2012).c