Before land reclamation, Bombay was an archipelago. But how many islands were there? Different people looked at the archipelago and saw different things. At our Online Talk #MappingEarlyMumbai, historian Timothy Riding will explore early geographical understandings of Bombay under the Portuguese and the English. By exploring seventeenth-century geographical conceptions, he gives us an insight into the process of environmental change and land reclamation which eventually fused the archipelago into one megacity.

About the speaker:
Timothy Riding is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, in 2018 on the early History of the English East India Company. His forthcoming monograph, Global City: Bombay and the East India Company: The Struggle to Establish a Global City, 1661-1790, examines Bombay from a global history perspective, exploring how wider events shaped the city's development.