This chapter analyzes how the empire of the Great Mughals worked on the ground, beginning by dismissing the widespread idea that it was more powerful than its medieval predecessors because it adopted artillery and gunpowder weapons. Cavalry and horsemanship, not artillery or infantry, remained its chief military asset. Moreover, methods of cavalry warfare were disseminated to segments of Indian society previously dominated by infantry. As a result, a culture of chivalry prevailed. This was a culture of a horse-riding nobility, both Muslim and Hindu, and of institutionalized dissidence and privilege that developed under conditions of growth and the monetization of the economy that accompanied the expansion of world trade and the influx of American and Japanese silver through the sea trade. If the constitution of the Mughal empire was thus grounded in Turko-Mongol customary law, this chapter goes on to show that the entire system of Mughal governance and the administration of justice broadly evolved within the same matrix of customary law, not the canonical or prescriptive texts of the Sharia.

The Epilogue elaborates briefly the transformation of the Indo-Islamic world in the colonial and postcolonial centuries.

Exploring the concept of India, the absence of a continuous tradition of urbanism there was due to general environmental instability. The important long-term secular development that lay at the foundation of Indian civilization was not urbanization; it was agricultural expansion and the rise of peasant villages. This process occurred relatively late. Not until the early medieval centuries does agricultural expansion become truly significant anywhere in India or the “Indic” realm that comprised South and Southeast Asia. The ancient Indian empires of the Mauryas and the Guptas were in no way the counterparts of the Roman and Achaemenid empires but, in contrast, mostly ideological, vaguely Buddhist constructions of ritual sovereignty providing only loose, extensive, and horizontal modes of integration along nodal points of long-distance trade. There was no prehistoric or ancient urban and imperial heritage that shaped the historical development of the Indo-Islamic world in medieval and early modern times. This sets it apart from the Islamic Middle East.

This chapter describes and analyzes the medieval Mongol origins of the dynasty of the Great Mughals that ruled much of the subcontinent in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. It was the successful development of the institution of the corporate Turko-Mongol clan and the Mongol imperial heritage that went with it that allowed the Great Mughals to overcome the normal limitations of nomad tribes in a way their Afghan opponents and medieval predecessors could not.

This chapter charts the major changes in trading and navigation patterns in the Indian Ocean as well as the concurrent shifts of political power in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that ultimately led to the closing of the maritime frontier. Recognizing the importance of new developments in naval warfare associated with artillery and other innovations introduced by the Portuguese and the Dutch, English, and French East India Companies, this chapter argues that the maritime frontier remained an open frontier, like the nomadic frontier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but that it closed in the eighteenth century. What happened in these centuries is by no means a simple story of Indo-Muslim trade not being able to compete with European trade, or being overwhelmed by superior European naval force. For two more centuries, Indian Ocean trade flourished and expanded significantly in most parts of the Indian Ocean. The ultimate closing of the maritime frontier in the eighteenth century, and as early as the final two decades of the seventeenth in Java, resulted from the interplay of many different factors.

The historical development of India was not only driven by the long-term expansion of agriculture and settled civilization but as much by the proximity of the vast open spaces of the great Saharasian arid zone and the Indian Ocean – the pastoral nomadic frontier and the maritime frontier. Together, these open and unsettled realms of nomadic and seafaring people represented the frontier of mobile wealth and the major external source of change and dynamism in land-based society. This chapter explores some of the reasons why these open frontier zones became especially important in the medieval and early modern centuries and what their impact was on settled society.

Outside the Indus borderlands, the expansion of agriculture and settled society occurring hand in hand with population growth led to a new medieval dispensation that had little continuity with the prehistoric and ancient past. These combined processes occurred relatively late in comparison with developments in other major world regions such as the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia-Persia and are here traced region by region. Once they did take off, they showed greater potential than almost anywhere else in the world. The chapter goes on to show how in the early medieval period the expansion of agriculture and settled society began to give rise to a fragmented landscape of monarchies of varying dimensions and importance in the plains of all great river systems of India (South and Southeast Asia). This more vertical and hierarchical political order emerging in the zones of nucleated agricultural settlement of early medieval India superseded the thinly spread, mostly ritual sovereignty of the ancient empires. Typically, it was based on a condominium of Hindu kings and the Brahman priesthood and thrived in the context of a newly arising medieval Hinduism and caste order characteristic of settled society.

In the medieval period, the twofold frontier of mobile wealth, nomadic and maritime, largely developed under the aegis of Islam. This chapter analyses the establishment of Indo-Islamic conquest states by post-nomadic Turks, Mongols, Afghans, and others. Mass conversion to Islam only occurred in the Indus borderlands under the impact of widespread nomadic destruction over extended periods of time. In the post-nomadic states of the subcontinent there was no nomadic destruction but instead a fusion of frontier and settled society and little or no conversion to Islam. In the same centuries, the rise of Islam in the littoral regions and island archipelagos of the Indian Ocean took place in the context of the steadily expanding trade and increased dynamism of the medieval centuries – largely beyond the pale of settled Hindu society.

The Indo-Islamic world: What it is and how it came about, its geographical range and foundations, the origins and spread of agriculture and settled society, its world-historical context, the medieval centuries, and the transformations of the early modern centuries.