When Portuguese explorers first rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in the subcontinent in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little direct knowledge of India. The maritime passage opened new opportunities for exchange of goods as well as ideas. Traders were joined by ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars from Portugal, England, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany, all hoping to learn about India for reasons as varied as their particular nationalities and professions. In the following centuries they produced a body of knowledge about India that significantly shaped European thought.
Europe’s India tracks Europeans’ changing ideas of India over the entire early modern period. Sanjay Subrahmanyam brings his expertise and erudition to bear in exploring the connection between European representations of India and the fascination with collecting Indian texts and objects that took root in the sixteenth century. European notions of India’s history, geography, politics, and religion were strongly shaped by the manuscripts, paintings, and artifacts—both precious and prosaic—that found their way into Western hands.
Subrahmanyam rejects the opposition between “true” knowledge of India and the self-serving fantasies of European Orientalists. Instead, he shows how knowledge must always be understood in relation to the concrete circumstances of its production. Europe’s India is as much about how the East came to be understood by the West as it is about how India shaped Europe’s ideas concerning art, language, religion, and commerce.

本书是一本综合介绍天体和天文现象的书。它从一些最基本的天体出发，透彻地解释了天文现象如何发生，为什么发生，天文学家如何收集关于恒星、星系和太阳系的信息，并如何解释这些信息等。

编者考虑到国内读者对软物质物理学学习和研究兴趣的日益增加以及缺乏基本参考书的现实，应同行们的要求，编者们根据暑期学校的教学交流内容，邀请两位讲演人和部分专家根据自己的研究领域撰写了有关章节，编出了这本《软物质物理学导论》。本书共分三篇26章：第一篇5章为软物质物理学概论，介绍了软物质的基本特性和研究方法；第二篇9章论述了软物质的表面和界面物理；第三篇12章分别介绍了软物质物理学研究的若干领域，包括软物质的自组织、生物膜膜泡形状、胶体物理、电流变液、二维泡沫系统、生物大分子和颗粒物质等方向。、
本书的第一篇以英文文稿交稿，第二篇以法文文稿交稿。第三篇中也有两章以英文文稿。