Download PDF | Islamic Gunpowder Empires_ Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals-Westview Press (2010).
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Preface
I first conceived of this book as a graduate student in the early 1980s, began it as a project in 1990, and have taken twenty distracted years to complete it. Its purpose has remained constant: to provide a coherent, current, and accessible introduction to the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, using comparison to illuminate their distinctive features. Within that general mission, I sought to accomplish the following objectives:
* to put the three empires in the context of their common background and political goals
* to incorporate current historiography into a new synthesis rather than recycle the findings of earlier general accounts
* to reevaluate the concept of the gunpowder empire and provide a more accurate and complete explanation of the growth and durability of the three empires
* to explain the complex, diverse, and dynamic political ideologies of the empires
* to present the empires as part of a connected Islamic world that was itself part of a more broadly connected global system in which commercial and cultural networks crossed political boundaries
* to assess the issue of the decline of the three empires without reference to the eventual global superiority of the West
* to depict the historiography of the empires as dynamic rather than static
Islamic Gunpowder Empires is not a comprehensive history of the Islamic world in the early modern era; it is both spatially and topically incomplete.
It excludes Morocco, sub-Saharan Africa, central Asia, and Southeast Asia and pays insufficient attention to social, cultural, and intellectual history. As a study of power and political order, it focuses on political, military, and economic history, on the problems of power and the burdens of power holders. It does not ignore social and cultural history entirely but seeks to place those topics in political context.
Although a history of power, this volume developed in the light of a history of conscience, Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Though Hodgson died more than forty years ago, The Venture of Islam remains the greatest study of Islamic civilization. Book 5, in which Hodgson propounds his conception of gunpowder empires, suffers more from the incompleteness caused by his sudden death than any other part of the book. I undertook this project in hope of providing a current and coherent alternative to that section of Hodgson.
In doing so, I sought to continue Hodgson’s enterprise of presenting the complexity and diversity of Islamic civilization. Like Western civilization, Islamic civilization is, and has been, a composite of different elements in tension. The equation of Islamic civilization with Islam and of Islam with the Shariah obscures, distorts, and oversimplifies complex realities. The emphasis on the wide variety of principles of political legitimacy operating in the three empires draws attention to this complexity. I intend this book as “history-minded” history,” as J. H. Hexter explains the concept in his well-known essay “The Historian and His Day,” but historyminded history inevitably illuminates the present.!
The target audience for the book is upper-level undergraduates, who have taken a world history survey. The book will fit into an Islamic civilization survey course, the original venue for which Hodgson produced Venture, or serve as the nucleus for a course on the three empires. It differs from most undergraduate texts in that it encompasses historiographic controversy. I believe that students will benefit from knowing that historians disagree and interpretations change.
In the two decades since I began the project, the historians of all three empires have been extremely productive. I have been hard put to keep pace with them and have tried to do so systematically only with works published up to 2006; I have consulted later works for clarification of particular problems or simple convenience.
Because I have completed the book while on the faculty of the Marine Corps Command & Staff College, a unit of Marine Corps University, I must include the mandatory disclaimer that it does not speak for Marine Corps University or for any agency of the U.S. government. I have, in fact, the same, if not greater, academic freedom here as at a civilian university. The college and university leadership has been strongly supportive of my research but expressed little interest in its content.
Although at various times I have studied original sources, both documents and texts, on all three empires, I have conducted extensive research only on the Mughals. The Mughal chapter is derived in great part from my Formation of the Mughal Empire and from further research that I hope will appear in a later book on the Mughals. The Ottoman and Safavid chapters depend on the work of other historians. Some of the interpretation is original, but none of the research is. My many professional colleagues who have spent untold hours deciphering Ottoman archival documents may resent my intrusion into their field; I can only respond that if my book succeeds in its purpose, its readers will swiftly progress from my work to theirs. Like most general works, it is likely to satisfy its readers in its treatment of everything but their own specialties.
The introduction explains the historiographic setting and interpretive themes of the book. The second chapter, “Common Heritage, Common Dilemma” explains the shared political traditions and structures and the political impasse in the Islamic world that the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal polities overcame. The three substantive chapters begin with a brief description of the history and institutions of each empire, followed by chronological summaries and sections on the military political institutions, economies, societies, and cultural forms. The conclusion deals with overall interpretive issues.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Twenty years have passed since Peter Kracht, the original editor for the project at Westview, called me about writing this book. The reader may have no interest in the circumstances that caused the long delay but is at least entitled to an explanation. For my part, I received no outside funding to support the project and spent most of those years engaged in child rearing as well as other professional pursuits. I have had a full-time university affiliation only since 2005 and never had ready access to a major research library. The only form of institutional support I have received has come from the Institute of World Politics (IWP), where I have taught as an adjunct professor since 2006, which provided me with research assistance in the summers of 2008 and 2009.
Much has changed over those two decades. My parents, Jane and Alan Streusand, who were enormously supportive of my aspirations in general and of this project in particular, have passed from the scene. My daughters, Deb and Rachel, have grown from cute little girls into formidable young women. I do not rue the time I spent nurturing them rather than this book. My wife, Esther, has been the constant; I hope she shares in the satisfaction of the project’s completion.
Quite a number of people have provided concrete assistance over the years. I take great pleasure in acknowledging the contribution of my dear friend Rochelle Kessler, who is responsible for the selection of the illustrations, their captions, and the note on the cover. Ernest Tucker of the U.S. Naval Academy has read multiple versions of the manuscript and given me unflagging support from beginning to end. Michael O’Neal, my former student at the IWP, read most of the text and provided valuable,
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detailed feedback and numerous corrections. Linda Darling commented on the Ottoman chapter and provided invaluable assistance. William R. (Vijay) Pinch, Cornell Fleisher, and John Woods spared me time. Alexander P. Cohen, Mart-Stewart Smith, and Margaret Harley, my research assistants from TWP, saved me many hours of moving electrons around. Some of the reviewers for Westview Press were more anonymous than others; I thank Ernest Tucker and Colin Mitchell by name and the others with equal sincerity. Cornell Fleisher and John Woods also provided valuable assistance and encouragement. My Quantico colleague Paul Gelpi read the introduction and preface. David Wurmser and Ian Snyder read and commented upon early drafts. Sholeh Quinn, Fariba Zarinbaf, Madeline Zilfi, and Sara Nur Yildiz offered insight and encouragement.
Because of the overlap between the research for this book and my graduate training, my intellectual acknowledgments must include my teachers. John Woods taught me Iranian, including Safavid, history. His understanding of the politics in the greater Iranian world during the era of TurkoMongol dominance underlies much of my interpretation of the three empires. Halil Inalcik, the greatest historian of the Ottoman Empire, taught me Ottoman history and encouraged me to take a comparative approach to the Ottomans and their contemporaries. The late Bernard S. Cohn supervised my study of the Mughal Empire and, with Ronald Inden, taught me of Indian society and culture. Messrs. Woods, Inden, and Cohn encouraged me to focus on doctrines of kingship. Susanne H. Rudolph and Lloyd Rudolph encouraged my use of comparative methodology in approaching problems of state formation. William McNeill contributed to the work in several ways. At the University of Chicago, he encouraged my interest in military organization and steadily directed my attention to crucial questions and variables I had missed. As editor, with Ross Dunn of the University of California, San Diego, of the Essays in World History series, he developed the concept of the book. Lastly, when it became clear that my work did not fit the original profile, he supported the completion of the project as I envisioned it. My other professors at the University of Chicago, Richard Chambers, Walter Kaegi, Heshmat Moayyad, C. M. Naim, and John R. Perry; R. Stephen Humphreys, now of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Bruce Lawrence of Duke University; and Richard Eaton of the University of Arizona also assisted in the development of my ideas.
Of course, none of these worthy scholars is responsible for any errors of commission or omission.
At Marine Corps University (MCU), I am grateful to Maj. Gen. Donald R. Gardner, USMC (Ret.), president emeritus; Maj. Gen. Robert B. Neller, USMC, current president; Dr. Jerre Wilson, vice president for academic affairs; Maj. Gen. John A. Toolan, USMC, and Col. Tom Greenwood, USMC (Ret.), past directors of the Command & Staff College (C&SC); Col. Ray Damm, the current director; and especially Dr. Charles D. (Doug) McKenna, the dean of academics, for making MCU and C&SC a wonderful and nurturing place to work. I also appreciate the assistance of Rachel Kingcade and Cynthia Evans of the university's Gray Research Center.
A community of others, old friends and new, sustained me through the project In alphabetical order, they are Erica Anaya, Bruce Bechtol, Marcy Bixby, Patrick Clawson, Linda Feldman, Jocelyn Gebhardt, Paul Gelpi, Kit Goldman, Bill Gordon, the late William C. Green, John Gregory, Richard Horowitz, Ken Katzman, Rochelle Kessler, Andy and Julie Klingenstein, Barbara Lane, Chris Lay, John Lenczowski, Michael and Claudia Lewis, Mark Mandeles, Frank Mavlo, Mark Moyar, Jim Phillips, Daniel Pipes, Robert Schadler, the late Lt. Gen. Robert L. Schweitzer, USA (Ret), Jack Tierney, Alan Tonelson, Dalton West, and John Zucker. To my friends at Congregation Or Chadash, this book provides a partial resolution to the mystery of what I do every day. My office mates at C&¢SC, CDR Joe Arleth, USN, and Lt. Col. Loretta Vandenberg, USMC, have been wonderful company. My students at C&SC have been a tremendous source of inspiration and pleasure. I will name one from each category of students— each of the U.S. services, interagency, and international—to stand for all the others: Lt. Col. Robert E. McCarthy, USMC; Maj. Eric M. Johnson, USA; CDR Alexander R. Mackenzie, USN; Maj. Matthew R. Modarelli, USAF; Mr. Curt Klun of the Drug Enforcement Agency; and Lt. Col. Per Olav Vaagland, Norwegian Army.
At Westview Press, Peter Kracht brought the project to life, Steve Catalano revived it, and Karl Yambert saw it to completion. Michelle WelshHorst ably saw it through production, and Jennifer Kelland Fagan did a superb job of copyediting an extremely demanding text.
Tim McCranor helped me review the page proofs.
David Audley and Richard Sharpe have marched with me through the completion of the project. I am grateful to Anthony Price and Bernard Cornwell for their company.
Note on Transliteration and Dating
There is no standard system of representing Arabic, Persian, and Turkish words in English, and even if there were, it would not solve the problem of transliteration for this book. The Safavids and Mughals used Modern Persian as the language of politics, administration, and high culture. The Ottomans used Ottoman Turkish, a form of Western Turkish written in Arabic script with many Persian words and expressions. Most academic writers use one of the scholarly systems of transliteration for Persian and use Modern Turkish, which began as a phonetic transliteration of Ottoman, for Ottoman. But most students find the diacritical marks used in scholarly transliteration confusing, and Modern Turkish uses a variety of characters unfamiliar to English readers. Using different transliteration systems for the two languages would obscure the essential similarity of the vocabularies the empires used. For this reason I have employed a simplified form of the International Journal of Middle East Studies system of transliteration, omitting diacritical marks entirely, and transliterated all words of Arabic or Persian origin in the Persian form, with some minor exceptions, such as using the Turkish Mehmed rather than Muhammad. I have formed plurals with the English s, but put the s in roman, not italic, font, to indicate that it is not part of the foreign word. I have transliterated words of Turkish origin used only in Ottoman in a simplified Turkish form. But in order to facilitate further reading in Ottoman history, I have put the Modern Turkish forms of Ottoman words in parentheses after their use and in the glossary, unless the form is identical to my Persianate transliteration. The Modern Turkish transliterations are always given in the singular. Students must appreciate, however, that the absence of a standard transliteration system means that they will encounter different forms of the same words. Safavid is sometimes Safawid; Mughal is sometimes Moghul.
I have given dates only in the Gregorian calendar. Since most Hijri years straddle two Gregorian years, it is in some cases uncertain in which Gregorian year an event took place. I have joined the two Gregorian years with a dash in these cases.
INTRODUCTION
oes is no list of seven wonders of the early modern world. If there were, it would certainly include the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, the royal complex in Isfahan, Iran, and the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. These architectural and artistic achievements alone would justify the study of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires that produced them. The importance of the three empires, however, goes far beyond what they wrought in stone.
To a world historian, they were among the most powerful and influential polities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the case of the Ottomans, the fifteenth century as well. They dominated much of the environment that Europeans encountered in their first era of exploration and expansion; their history is inextricably intertwined with that expansion. The image and influence of these empires affected Western views of non-Western societies profoundly. To a historian of Islamic civilization, they represent an era of cultural achievement second, perhaps, only to the first flowering of Islamic civilization in the time of the Abbasid caliphate, as well as a new form of polity that produced a level of order and stability not achieved for some five centuries before. For political historians, the empires offer an example of the evolution of new political doctrines, institutions, and practices in response to continuing challenges. For military historians, they were among the first to use firearms effectively. Significant developments in popular piety and religious identity took place under their sponsorship. Their impact on the contemporary world also garners attention. Much of the disorder in the post-Cold War world, in the former Yugoslavia and in Iraq, reflects the difficulty of replacing the Ottoman regional order. The Safavid dynasty set the pattern of modern Iran by combining the eastern and western parts of the Iranian plateau and establishing Shii Islam as the dominant faith. The idea of political unity in South Asia passed from the Mughals to the British and into the present. For all these reasons, the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires deserve and demand close attention.
This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the three empires, intended for students and other readers with some general familiarity with world history and Islamic civilization. It attempts to bridge the gap between general texts on world and Islamic history, such as Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam and Ira Lapidus’s A History of Islamic Societies, and the specialized literature on the three empires. As the title implies, this book is a study of empire, an analysis of power and order. It is not a comprehensive history of the early modern Islamic world or even of the areas ruled by the empires. I focus on political and military history, with economic history not far behind. Social, cultural, and intellectual history receive much less attention, except when they pertain to political matters, though I do not neglect them entirely. I do not pretend, however, to give all components of society equal attention; the inequality of my treatment reflects, I hope accurately, the inequalities of the time.
INTERPRETIVE THEMES
Comparison of the three empires began with the Western travelers that visited them. They form a natural unit for study because of the sharp disparity between them and their predecessors in the Islamic world. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the exception of the steadily expanding Ottoman principality in Anatolia and the Balkans and the distinctive, nondynastic Mamluk kingdom of Egypt and Syria, most principalities lasted only a few generations. Their rulers—dynasties like the Aqquyunlu, the Qaraquyunlu, the Tughluq, the Lodi, and the Muzaftarid— have fallen into obscurity. No evidence of their fluid boundaries remains on modern maps. Instability was chronic. To paraphrase Hodgson, politics had reached an impasse. The extent, durability, and centralization of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires show that their regimes broke that impasse.' Hodgson and his University of Chicago colleague William H. McNeill label them “gunpowder empires.” Following the distinguished Russian scholar V. V. Bartold, they attribute Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal political success to their ability to use artillery to take stone fortresses. The term gunpowder empire has remained current, but as the book explains, the gunpowder-empires hypothesis, as Hodgson and McNeill articulate it, is not an adequate or accurate explanation. The phrase “gunpowder empires” in the title means “empires of the gunpowder era” not “empires created by gunpowder weapons.”
The concept of gunpowder empire implies a fundamental similarity among the three polities. Despite immense geographic, social, and economic differences, the three empires faced similar political, military, and administrative problems and carried the same set of political and institutional traditions. Politically, the doctrine of collective sovereignty and the appanage system, established in the Islamic world by the Saljuqs in the eleventh century and a vital part of the political legacy of the Chingiz Khanid Mongols, prevented lasting political unity. The impossibility of the central collection and distribution of revenue in vast empires with incompletely monetarized economies made fiscal decentralization inevitable, thus fostering political disunity. In Anatolia, Iraq, and Iran, tribes of pastoral nomads dominated political life, and empires consisted of tribal confederations; the patrimony of such confederations affected politics elsewhere. The three empires overcame these common problems, but in different ways, under different conditions, and along different timelines. Gunpowder empire is a convenient classification that facilitates comparison and contrast, not an ideal type that the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals approximated.
The difference in timelines requires clarification. Because the reigns of the Ottoman sultan Sulayman I (1520-1566), known in the West as Sulayman the Magnificent and in the Islamic world as Qanuni-Sulayman (Sulayman the Lawgiver), the Safavid shah Abbas I (1588-1629), and the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556-1605) overlapped, many historians have seen them as comparable figures. But Akbar and Abbas did for their dynasties what the Ottoman sultans Murad II (1421-1451) and Fatih Mehmet (1451-1481) did for theirs. They gave Safavid and Mughal institutions mature form nearly a century after the Ottomans achieved it. The Mughal ruler most comparable to Sulayman I was Shah Jahan (1628-1658).
Explaining the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal success in maintaining larger, more centralized, and more enduring polities than their predecessors is the fundamental interpretive theme of the book. Three aspects receive particular attention: military organization, weapons, and tactics; political ideology and legitimacy; and provincial government. The gunpowderempires hypothesis, though inadequate as Bartold, Hodgson, and McNeill present it, correctly draws attention to the significance of military superiority. Discussion of the military systems of these empires raises another question. For some fifty years, the concept of a European military revolution in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has dominated the study of warfare in this era. The three empires did not go through the same transition. This book addresses the question of why.
Success in battles and sieges could not, however, have won and held the loyalty and cooperation of the diverse populations that the three empires ruled. The Christian subjects of the Ottomans and Hindu subjects of the Mughals did not regard themselves as captive populations. The three empires had complex, multifaceted, and dynamic forms of legitimacy that reflected several separate political traditions and evolved over time. The implementation of the ideological programs of the three empires had a profound effect on the religious life of their populations and thus on religious affiliation and identity throughout the Islamic world today. This process resembles what European historians call confessionalization. In Susan Boettcher’s words,
Confessionalization describes the ways an alliance of church and state mediated through confessional statements and church ordinances facilitated and accelerated the political centralization underway after the fifteenth century—including the elimination of local privileges, the growth of state apparatuses and bureaucracies, the acceptance of Roman legal traditions and the origins of absolutist territorial states.’
The concept of confessionalization asserts that church and state efforts to enforce the Peace of Augsburg principle of cuius region eius religio (the religion of the ruler should be the religion of the ruled) led to the development of national and linguistic, as well as religious, identities. The Safavids, from the beginning, imposed a new religious identity on their general population; they did not seek to develop a national or linguistic identity, but their policy had that effect. The text develops this theme in analyzing all three empires.
In addition to explaining imperial consolidation, the book emphasizes two other themes: the place of the empires in a connected world and the nature and causes of the changes in the empires in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Western historiography has generally de-fined the boundaries between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe on the west and the Safavid Empire on the east not only as zones of conflict but also as serious barriers to the movement of commerce, ideas, and individuals. The conflicts were not chronic; nor were the barriers impermeable. The Safavid imposition of Shiism fractured, but did not destroy, the cultural unity of the Islamic world. Even after the Portuguese established themselves in the Indian Ocean, most East Asian and South Asian products reached Europe through the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean. The Ottoman efforts to impose commercial blockades on the Safavids in the early sixteenth century had little lasting effect. There was a vast disparity between the cultural and intellectual lives of Renaissance and Reformation Europe and the Islamic world, but some ideas, especially those associated with esoteric learning, had influence in both regions.
A generation ago, the last of the interpretive themes would have been decline. Since the Safavid and Mughal empires effectively disappeared in the first third of the eighteenth centuries, the word “decline” is indubitably appropriate for them. But the Ottoman Empire survived, and Ottoman historiography has begun to emphasize transformation under stress, rather than decline, as the best categorization of the changes it underwent. Without question, Ottoman power and wealth declined relative to European rivals, but the current generation of historians emphasizes their resilience rather than degeneration. For most of the last century, historians paid more attention to the ends of these empires than to their establishment and consolidation. Some have done so simply because they could rely more heavily on materials in European languages.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European colonial historians recounted imperial triumphs. A book title from the thirties, Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India, exemplifies this type of literature. As resistance to colonialism developed and colonies began to gain independence, nationalist historians looked back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explain their loss of independence and find lessons for the future.
Nationalist historiography has overlapped with Marxist historiography of varying levels of sophistication, which depicts European expansion as the spread of global capitalist exploitation. The most influential Marxist scholar of the early modern period in recent decades, Immanuel Wallerstein, depicts the development of a “modern world system,” in which the capitalist economies of Europe form the capitalist center and reduce the rest of the world to an economic periphery.’ In contrast to this approach, I emphasize the internal dynamics of the three empires. The political transformation of the Islamic world affected European overseas expansion more than European commercial and maritime activities contributed to the decline of the three empires.
HISTORIOGRAPHY
The three empires have spawned vast and disparate historiographies, which of course form the basis of this volume. This book rejects the postmodernist/deconstructionist assumption that objective scholarship is impossible because no one can escape the restrictions and compulsions of his personal, political, and cultural biases. In the specific case of Western studies of the non-Western world, deconstructionists contend that those biases have made such studies, especially of the Islamic world, the intellectual component of Western imperialism and neocolonialism. This rejection is not, however, a complete dismissal. Shorn of the political agenda, extreme claims, and shrillness that typify this type of scholarship, it can be a fruitful line of inquiry. Long before the bitter controversy over Edward Said’s Orientalism, Martin Dickson demonstrated the fallacy of using cultural or civilizational degeneracy as a mode of historical explanation. Bernard Cohn’s judicious studies of British intellectual attitudes toward India provide significant insights into the nature of British rule.
The literature on the Ottomans is far vaster and more diverse than the literatures on the Safavids and Mughals for several reasons. From the fifteenth century onward, the Ottoman Empire was an integral part of the European power structure and drew attention from European historians from the beginning. The depth and variety of sources on the Ottomans far exceed what is available on their contemporaries. An immense number of Ottoman archival documents exist in collections in Turkey and the Ottoman successor states in the Balkans and the Middle East. There are many European documents, diplomatic and commercial, in various collections. European travelers’ accounts, the Ottoman chronicle tradition, and European accounts of the European wars with the Ottomans provide the narrative framework. Those narrative works formed the basis for the beginning of Ottoman studies in the West. Three massive histories, produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, Johann Wilhelm Zinkeisen, and Nikolai Iorga, embody the fruits of this tradition. These works provide a more complete chronological framework than any narrative work on the Safavid or Mughal empires.
Even as the tradition of narrative history reached its height and the Ottoman Empire came to an end, a new school of Ottoman studies appeared. Mehmet Fuad KGpriilii (1890-1966) brought the social and economic concerns of what became the French Annales School to Turkey in the twenties and thirties. He and his students, most importantly Halil Inalcik, have advanced the study of Ottoman history far beyond that of any other Islamic society and moved historical studies within Turkey far ahead of those in any other part of the Islamic world. The existence of the Ottoman archives made this school possible. Omer Lutfi Barkan began the exploitation of the archives in the 1940s and 1950s. In the half century since then, the use of the Ottoman archives has led to the development of an extensive scholarly literature on Ottoman social and economic, as well as political, history.
Halil Inalcik has been the most influential Ottoman historian for halfa century. The Ottoman section of this book follows his studies in almost all areas, more because of his stature within the field than because he was my teacher. Three of his articles, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” “The Socio-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Fire-arms in the Middle East,” and “Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire,” inspired this book. In the last several decades, numerous historians, imitating the examples of Inalcik and Barkan and frequently instructed by them, have advanced every aspect of Ottoman historiography. Suraiya Faroqhi discusses this historiography at length in her Approaching Ottoman History.
To master Ottoman historiography is a lifework; Safavid historiography takes a year. There are still only four comprehensive accounts of the Safavids in English. Prior to 1993, literature on the Safavids was extremely sparse. There is much less Safavid history than Ottoman history—roughly two centuries compared with six—and the scarcity of documents makes much of the history of the dynasty inaccessible. The Pahlavi regime’s exaltation of the pre-Islamic past, the disruption caused by the Iranian Revolution, and the diplomatic difficulties of the Islamic Republic have also hindered Safavid studies. Since 1993, however, a new generation of historians has transformed Safavid historiography. Because of the lack of archival documents, this literature differs significantly from most contemporary research on the Ottomans. These works either deal with the Safavid regime and ruling class or with international trade, about which European documents provide much of the information.
Mughal historiography occupies an intermediate position. Though the Mughal Empire never challenged the European powers the way the Ottomans did, it was immensely important to the British, who explicitly perceived themselves as the imperial heirs to the Mughals in India. Their concern with the Mughals led them to produce a series of narrative histories, culminating in the Cambridge History of India dealing with the Mughals, studies of institutional and administrative history, and, perhaps most importantly, a massive series of editions and translations of chronicles.
Studies of Mughal history in the subcontinent developed in parallel with the Indian independence movement. In the twentieth century Indian authors produced a series of narrative works on the reigns of the major Mughal rulers. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the most famous and accomplished of the Indian narrative historians, produced massive accounts of the reign of Aurangzeb (1658-1707) and later Mughal history. These authors view the principle of religious toleration, established by Akbar, as the key to the Mughals’ success and Aurangzeb’s abandonment of that principle as the step that doomed the empire. They see this understanding of Mughal history as a guide for the future politics of the subcontinent. Sarkar, for example, ends his work on Aurangzeb with a chapter called “Aurangzeb and Indian Nationality,” with a final section headed “The Significance of Aurangzeb’s Reign: How an Indian Nationality Can Be Formed.” Pakistani historians invert this interpretation, condemning Akbar for abandoning Islam and lauding Aurangzeb for returning to it, despite the political cost.
Since the independence of India and Pakistan, most work on the Mughals has taken place at Aligarh Muslim University, the leading Muslim educational institution in the subcontinent despite its location in India. The Aligarh historians, including K. A. Nizami, Irfan Habib, Iqtidar Hussein Siddiqui, Iqtidar Alam Khan, M. Athar Ali, Shirin Moosvi, and most recently Farhat Hasan, have produced a broad range of works on political, economic, and social history, focused primarily on Mughal decline. Satish Chandra, the one major Indian historian of the Mughals not affiliated with Aligarh, had been extremely productive. Not surprisingly, since most of these historians are Muslims with a secular orientation and many are Marxists, they absolve Aurangzeb—and thus Islam—of causing the fall of the empire and focus instead on economic factors. Some of the Aligarh historians have also focused on the study of the Mughal ruling class, collecting and classifying vast amounts of data. Two American historians, John F. Richards and I, have focused attention on the patterns of behavior of the ruling class. There is a steady flow of research on the Mughals, generally within the framework of the historiography already described, and several new general works on the topic have appeared recently. Richards’s contribution to The New Cambridge History of India, however, remains the best comprehensive treatment of the Mughals.
This book, then, seeks to integrate these disparate historiographies in a form accessible to undergraduates and even, should they be so inclined, general readers. It consists of five chapters in addition to this introduction. The second chapter, “Common Heritage, Common Dilemma,” describes the common heritage of political ideas and the governmental and military institutions and practices that the three empires shared. The next three chapters, the main body of the book, cover the three empires. They each provide a chronological narrative and discuss topics such as sovereignty, faith, and law; expansion and military organization; central and provincial administration; economy, society, and culture; and transformation or decline. The concluding chapter addresses major interpretive issues.
Although the three main chapters have the same structure, they do not correspond exactly. The Ottoman chapter is significantly longer than the other two, and the Mughal chapter longer than that for the Safavids. The Ottoman chapter deserves its length for several reasons. The history of the Ottoman principality dates to circa 1300, two hundred years before the Safavid and Mughal empires developed. Although both the Safavids and the Mughals had precursors dating from the late fourteenth century, the two empires did not develop directly from those roots, as the Ottoman Empire did. The Ottoman Empire survived beyond the third decade of the eighteenth century essentially intact because it evolved what amounted to a new regime: a new military organization, new tax system, and new provincial elite. Neither of the other empires underwent such a transformation.
The Ottomans had a far more complex geopolitical environment than the others. In the first half of the sixteenth century, their grand strategic concerns extended from the eastern Mediterranean to Sumatra. Theirs was a global empire on interior lines. Only the Ottoman Empire had a significant navy. The Mughal chapter is longer than that for the Safavids because the empire was larger in area and population, more diverse, and wealthier. The Safavid Empire, unlike the other two, did not expand steadily through its history.
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