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

This work combines archaeological and historical evidence to explore the role and significance of craft production in the political economy of the fourteenth through seventeenth-century South Indian Vijayanagara empire. Carla Sinopoli examines a diverse range of crafts from poetry to pottery, employing evidence from the her 20 years of fieldwork at the Vijayanagara capital, one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world in its time. It is the most broad-ranging study of craft production in South Asia, or in any other early state empire.