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

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.