SEEMA ALAVI is a professor of history at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana.

She earned her PhD from Cambridge University, England, and has twice been a Fulbright Scholar and a Smuts Visiting Research Fellow at Cambridge. In 2010, she was at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard as the William Bentinck-Smith Fellow.

Dr Alavi specializes in early modern and modern South Asia, with an interest in the transformation of the region's legacy from Indo-Persian to one heavily affected by British colonial rule. She has written books on the military, medical and religious histories of India. Her most recent book is the Albert Hourani Award (Honorable Mention) winner Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire from Harvard University Press, USA.

This definitive book on the Sultans of Oman is a thrilling historical account of their action-packed battles, daring expeditions, epic triumphs and ingenious politics in the long nineteenth century. It puts the optic of 'micro-history' on their fascinating lives as they navigated the geopolitics of their time and propelled the politics of the Western Indian Ocean. It offers a comprehensive and in-depth examination of the ambitions of the Omani patriarch Sultan Sayyid Sa°åid and his four sons and shows how integral they were to the political culture of the region.