The starting point for this volume is 1526, the date of Babur's victory at Panipat. The ending point is 1720, the date of Muhammad Shah's accession in Delhi. By the latter date the essential structure of centralized empire was disintegrated beyond repair. Behind my choice of 1720, rather than 1739, or 1761, or even 1803, is the belief that the collapse of the centralized formal apparatus of the Mughal empire was an important turning point in Indian history. Three decades of study have convinced me that Mughal centralized power was a reality and that its effect on Indian society was considerable. Whether this was good or bad is a different question. After 1720 the Mughal empire became a substantially different entity.

Within these dates I have tried to describe the construction of the Mughal empire, its operation, and its destruction. One of my aims has been to explain as clearly as possible the design and operation of the imperial system. This is no small matter, for generations of scholars have worked hard to try and decipher the intricacies of this enterprise.

Another goal has been to write a concise, coherent narrative history from 1526 to 1720. The narrative is conventional in that I trace the large public events, primarily political and military, that shaped imperial history. Partly this is because I believe that we ought to take the military history of the Mughal empire more seriously than is our current custom. After all, war was the principal business of the Mughal emperors, who committed by far the bulk of their resources to the military.

An integrated analysis of the themes of demography, commercialization and agrarian social structure makes possible an assessment of their role as determinants of the direction and nature of socio-economic change over the long term in colonial and post-colonial Bengal. Some of the conclusions to emerge have broader theoretical and comparative relevance.

Dramatic changes in the river system of rural Bengal should modify the belief of historians of the longue durée that geographical structures represent constants in historical time. While the Bengal delta may well have been prone to extraordinary ecological turbulence, recent research is making clear that colonial India as a whole was subjected to substantial environmental change in the nineteenth century largely as a result of human agency in the form of state interventions. Demographic trends set broad parameters within which rural production occurred, but showed no concordance with output after the mid nineteenth century. Even in the early phase it is important not to elevate correlations to the status of causal relationships. From the 1820s fluctuations in the wider economic systems cast a stronger influence on the regional agrarian economy than movements of population. Changes in prices and the availability of credit flowing from supra-regional economic systems based on capitalism had a significant bearing on even the subsistence concerns of peasant labour. Peasants who had resorted to cash-cropping were especially vulnerable to downturns and periodic crises in the world economy. Population increase generally provided a positive impulse to innovation in agricultural techniques but was blocked or aborted by social and political obstacles embedded in the complex layers of property and possessory rights to the land which underpinned the agrarian power structure.

In 1978 Eric Stokes, the doyen of agrarian historians at Cambridge, welcomed ‘the return of the peasant to South Asian history’. He berated historians and political scientists for their ‘laggardliness’ in recognizing that ‘the balance of destiny in South Asia rests in peasant hands’ but expressed satisfaction that ‘among the students of the colonial revolution in South Asia the city slickers [we]re at last quitting town’. The difficulties in achieving a meaningful intellectual engagement with peasant history stemmed partly from the misperception of a discontinuity between state structures and politics on the one hand and agrarian economies and societies on the other that had been one of the most lasting legacies of nineteenth-century theorists and comparative sociologists. Besides, there was the vexing problem of sources associated with studying social groups who left few written records of their own and were mere objects in the enquiries of external observers, especially colonial officialdom. During the 1970s and 1980s new empirical research and innovative methodologies enabled not only an historical reconstruction of agrarian economy, society and politics and their interrelations in various regions of colonial India but, through a critical evaluation if not deconstruction of colonial texts, restored to the peasantry their subjecthood in the making of history.

A study of the historical experience of the labouring classes in the Indian countryside during colonial rule is of vital importance and general relevance to historians in two ways. First, the nature and extent of the ‘colonial revolution’ in South Asia cannot be grasped without addressing the question of agrarian transformation.

Division I of Being and Time contains the complete account of early Heidegger's quarrel with and departure from the philosophical tradition. In spite of the attempts by many, beginning with Husserl, to incorporate Heidegger's insights into a more traditional framework, that departure was a radical one. For Heidegger the tradition that began in ancient Greece finds what may be its ultimate expression in Husserl's phenomenology.

As Føllesdal and his successors have argued, Husserl's phenomenology can be understood as the joint product of two influences. From Brentano he took the insight that the defining characteristic of consciousness is its intentionality - that is, its “of -ness” or directedness toward some object. But the model he uses for understanding this intentionality or directedness is essentially the same as Frege's model of linguistic reference, with the basic notion of meaning or sense (Sinn) suitably generalized so as to apply to all acts of consciousness, linguistic and nonlinguistic. As Figures 1 and 2 suggest, just as Frege distinguishes the sense of a linguistic expression from its referent, so Husserl distinguishes the meaning of a conscious act from the object it is about. For both, the meaning is that in virtue of which we can refer to or intend objects.