the Mughal Empire: From Babur to Aurangzeb, Dynasty That Shaped India

Mughal empire books usually follow a sequence of remarkable rulers, and the sequence is real enough. This one treats the state those rulers governed as the subject. It follows a conquest elite of Central Asian origin, never more than a small fraction of the population it ruled, as it built a system for measuring land, assessing the harvest, converting the surplus into cash and military service, and holding together one of the richest and most populous regions on earth. The institutions are the argument: the mansabdari ranks that turned service into office, the zabt settlement that fixed a cash demand on the fields, the zamindars and village headmen who delivered what the treasury required, and the Rajput and Deccan arrangements that kept a Muslim court in working order with a population that was overwhelmingly not Muslim.The book is built from the sources and honest about their limits. It reads the Baburnama, the Akbarnama and its statistical digest the A'in-i Akbari, the memoirs of Jahangir, the reports of European merchants and envoys, and the coins that survive in enormous quantities, each for what it can and cannot show. The claim that the emperor owned all the land, made famous by Bernier and later turned into a theory of oriental despotism, is set aside as the projection it was. The older European picture of the harem, the jewels, and the absolute ruler is treated as a misreading of institutions that were political before they were exotic, and the eighteenth century is read as a transformation rather than a simple fall.The result is a clear, structural account of how the Mughal state worked, where its power was strongest and thinnest, and why its three centuries still shape the writing of early modern Indian history.