Wang Hui, editor of Dushu (Beijing), talked about the different historical narratives of China. He argued that the emergence of the modern nation state began in the Song Dynasty and thus the process was independent of European expansion into Asia. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Director, Center for India and South Asia, Department of History, UCLA, discussed theories on the modernization of India. He talked about challenges to the dominant view that modernity was exported to India via British rule. The accompanying audio files provide the complete recording and audience discussion of the talks given by the authors. No formal paper is included. Those who download the audio files must have their own software for playing and listening.

From the end of the sixteenth century, the overseas administrative arm of the Portuguese Crown, the Estado da ?ndia Oriental, sought to gain complete territorial control of the island of Sri Lanka and outlined the tenets of the military project dubbed in administrative letters, “the Conquest of the Island of Ceylon”. Such efforts however would be impeded by military rebellions (ie. mutinies and desertions) by native military personnel in Portuguese service, where a rebellion that occurred in 1630 severely weakened the Estado's position in the island from which it could not recover. The specific event, the death of a Portuguese general at the hands of his own Christianized native troop, left a deep imprint on Portuguese memory. Decades later, the chronicler Fern?o de Queiroz claimed the event, which paved the way for the European's eventual removal from the island by 1658, bore testament to the unbridgeable cultural and religious schism between the Portuguese and the native Sinhala people, an established viewpoint in current historiography.

This study focuses attention on the documentation in Portuguese, English, Spanish, and Sinhalese written during the more active moments of the conquest period (1580-1640) in order to test such well-established views. Starting with the more general question of how anyone captured and maintained territorial authority in the island, since native island kings were said to have encountered similar challenges in keeping the loyalties of their military personnel, the study argues that any person or group vying for territorial authority was required to engage with a military service market consisting of personnel from inside and outside the island. One's posterity depended on how well one could recruit, compensate, and keep such personnel in service.

This case study is influenced by the topics and themes of larger studies on war in early modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean World, from which common challenges regarding territorial expansion are identified. Such pervading themes are enveloped in the concept 'military economy'; a political and economic system of war that understands military personnel to be its central agents.

From 1636 to 1687, a paradoxical conquest unfolded in the Deccan region (south central India). The Mughal empire sought to annex peninsular India while its independent, regional Indo-Islamic courts – the sultanates of Bijapur and Golkonda - expanded towards the Karnatak frontier. This dissertation investigates the slow, extended, and contradictory processes of a nested, matrioshka of conquest, beyond and below well-known political narratives of the Deccan sultanates and the Mughal empire. It focuses on a stratigraphy of cultural encounters and negotiations between imperial and regional courts, which shared a common frontier and had a long history of cohabitation and borrowing. It investigates fractures and fissures in patronage networks during and literary representations of conquest within southern India’s layered political and polyphonic linguistic landscapes.

This study culls together materials produced in very different philosophical and linguistic traditions - Persian, Dakkani, and Dutch - to arrive at a stereoscopic view of the Karnatak conquest. In particular, it draws on two largely unexamined bodies of materials from the early modern Deccan. First, to explore new experiments in writing the history of conquest, it draws on the genre of razmīyah masnawī or battle poems in Dakkani, a form of ‘early’ Urdu from southern India. Through the practice of conquest ethnography, poet-historians articulated volatile affective and material ties between allies, friends, and rivals in the Deccan frontier. Second, this study incorporates provincial-level Mughal documents from the Deccan, to build an empire’s portrait from the frontier’s vantage point. Regional sultanates mitigated the Mughal empire’s precarious presence in an attrite frontier, fueling a protracted and uncertain conquest. Lastly, through the Dutch East India Company’s records from southern India’s coasts, this study investigates conflicts and negotiations within households of Indo-Muslim patron-commanders who controlled critical routes across the eastern and western Indian Ocean that fed into the frontier’s consolidation.

The process of conquest was never one of absolute political opposition between polities of different scales, but a much deeper phenomenon that entailed cultural shifts and constant negotiations between courtly elites, literati, and military personnel. Non-imperial regional polities tamed and constrained imperial ambitions in frontier zones. Together, the social operations and representations of conquest reveal self-similarity and co-constitution across regional and imperial courts of early modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean world.

The Indian Ocean arena has been a zone of circulation and network for people, capital and commodities since centuries. People from the Indian subcontinent had been traveling to Burma as part of this network as court priests, merchants, pilgrims, travelers and soldiers. During the early twentieth century this figure was transformed in the official discourse and popular imagination to immigrant, or a "bird of passage" that was seen as draining the wealth of an incipient Burmese nation. My dissertation questions the process through which the archival and linguistic category of the immigrant emerged at the turn of the twentieth century in the Indian Ocean arena. Specifically, I investigate how did the Indian immigrant come to be associated with such negative connotations.

Some of the indications of this transformation were the increasing number of people who left the Indian ports on the newly introduced steamship to work in the rice industry in Burma. It was also due to the politics of enumeration and classification that the state imposed on the new arrivals at the Rangoon port and in the city. Instead of accepting the inevitability and the all-encompassing quality of these labels that have continued to be part of our present vocabulary, my objective is to use these particular historical developments as a lens to understand how did the word immigrant emerge? At the other end, how did this category itself create further historical change? While acknowledging the important role of the colonial economic framework, one must still ask what were the other social and political developments taking place during this period? Who were the actors in this narrative and how did they comprehend, receive, use, or reject these categories? Did the immigrant see himself/herself as a foreigner or an outsider? Bringing together volumes of colonial government archival material, popular literature, and newspaper articles, advertisements and cartoons, in English, Burmese, Bengali and Tamil, my aim is to unpack the label of the immigrant and hear and uncover the many different voices and stories about people who boarded the ship to Burma.

This dissertation examines the processes through which a regional community of learned Muslim men - religious scholars, teachers, spiritual masters and others involved in the transmission of religious knowledge - emerged in the central plains of eastern Gujarat in the fifteenth century, a period marked by the formation and expansion of the Gujarat sultanate (c. 1407-1572). Many members of this community shared a history of migration into Gujarat from the southern Arabian Peninsula, north Africa, Iran, Central Asia and the neighboring territories of the Indian subcontinent. I analyze two key aspects related to the making of a community of learned Muslim men in the fifteenth century - the production of a variety of texts in Persian and Arabic by learned Muslims and the construction of tomb shrines sponsored by the sultans of Gujarat. The texts memorialized the lives of many of the Muslim spiritual figures (sufi shaykhs) who migrated and settled in Gujarat in the early part of the fifteenth century while the royal interest in and sponsporship of tomb shrines of pious, charismatic Muslim men like Shaykh Ahmad Khattū (d. 1445) in Sarkhej, Sayyid Burhān al-Dīn `Abdullāh (d. 1453) in Vatwa and Sayyid Sirāj al-Dīn Muhammad (d. 1475) in Rasūlābād contributed to the creation of a Muslim sacred geography in eastern Gujarat. Through a re-reading of contemporary and near-contemporary court-chronicles produced in the region and a tapping of hitherto under-investigated sufi literature in Persian and Arabic, I show how textual narratives and tomb shrines were important elements that tied the memory of many fifteenth-century migrant learned Muslims to their specific regional context in Gujarat for posterity. In turn, the region acquired part of its distinctive identity through the memorialization of these learned figures. The dissertation attempts to bring attention to several crucial political, social and cultural processes that shaped the region of Gujarat in the late medieval and early modern period, and seeks to highlight the importance of integrating sufi texts to our understanding of these processes.

In the seventeenth century, the Mughal Empire in South Asia witnessed a remarkable political experiment of imperial centralization taken to its apogee, similar to global early modern trends elsewhere such as French Absolutism or Habsburg rule. The dissertation examines the Great Timurid emperor, Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir’s (r. 1658–1707) peripatetic statecraft and reconstructs how Hanafi legal canonization and juridical attitudes forged imperial governance and its everyday operations. While contemporary scholarship focuses on cosmopolitan mobility and exchange during the “first globalization” to the neglect of early modern state formations, this study turns our attention towards legal systems of land-based empires that remained resilient well into the eighteenth century. It illustrates how Mughal centralization was molded by layered interactions with local elites, gradations in property regimes, and flexible bureaucracies across the Indian subcontinent. It covers Rajasthan and Gujarat in the west to Kashmir in the north, large swathes of the Indo-Gangetic plains to the east and central India to the Deccan in the empire’s southern fringes.

I analyze the configuration of Mughal sovereignty around the Hanafi “law of the land,” showing how the imperial canonization, Al-fatawa al-ʿalamkiriyya (“The Institutions of the World Conqueror”) formed the pivot for reforming the empire’s legal architecture. From a transregional perspective, the study articulates the Central Asian heritage of the Mughals and compares their shared legal affiliation with the Ottomans. Weaving an intellectual history around the effects of canonization, this study evaluates different registers in which Hanafi law proliferated. Starting from the compilation of the fatawa by a team of imperial jurists under Shaikh Nizam’s supervision in 1660s, the dissertation moves to its everyday application across the empire. It demonstrates that a critical appraisal of the place of law in Mughal India must proceed from canon to practice, that is, the translation of the Muslim learned scholars’ legal opinions into daily habits in society. It draws on an extensive corpus of hitherto unexamined materials ranging from jurisprudential treatises to volumes of correspondence and sundry documentary genres in Arabic, Persian, and several regional languages. This study shows that Mughal legal culture remained highly resilient during the empire’s collapse and continued to provide templates for transitory post-Mughal polities and the British East India Company rule in the fragmented world of the eighteenth century.

This study intervenes in two longstanding controversies in South Asian historiography—first, the nature of precolonial land tenures and second, the mechanisms through which precolonial states shaped the political economy. I establish the absence of allodial property in agrarian tracts; instead, the Mughal State nominally owned all land like the Ottoman miri in West Asia and Northern Africa. Explaining the practice of leasing state lands to agrarian communities for a contractual rent, I unearth the Hanafi juridico-economic principles behind Mughal revenue settlements. This reinterpretation opens new perspectives to provide reasons for India’s agrarian crises generated by tectonic shifts towards freeholding under colonial rule.

Next, in a predominantly agrarian economy, the study reveals how unprecedented suburban expansion took place through imperial privileges given to elite military officers, who incentivized artisan migration from rural to peri-urban settlements. During this expansion, judicial courts became key sites for offering legal intermediation and adjudication for ensuring the claims of lower-rung subjects. I show how the Mughal system of legal brokerage molded the legal subjectivity of the empire’s inhabitants belonging to diverse ethnic and caste communities. The diffusion of Hanafi law in the subcontinent’s ecological landscape, at the intersection of regional dynamics and the imperial order, secured autonomy and entitlements to local communities overseen by middling officials. The dissertation thus uncovers multiple notions of liability as well as forms of financial intermediation and representation that proliferated among trading groups, rural chieftains, and soldiers. Centralized state management was set within a normative Hanafi understanding of political economy, which enabled macroeconomic interventions through monetary policy and public credit by the late seventeenth century.

This dissertation thus challenges the prevalent historiographical orthodoxy that reduces Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir’s rule to an umbrella term called “Muslim orthodoxy.” Based on contemporary reified notions of the shariʿa and an instrumental view of the emperor’s decisions, it is often argued that he radically altered Mughal public culture. Instead, I excavate two tendencies that demarcate the logic of Mughal relations to their subjects during his long reign. First, non-Muslim castes and communities—the “protected communities” of the Muslim State—were treated as autonomous in personal affairs while being legally equal in public life. This dichotomy, the study argues produced a legal normativism of a distinct treatment where “Hindus” were ironically less controlled by the State than “Muslims” in their social life. Second, contractual procedures mirrored degrees of standardization across the empire with regular bureaucratic reforms responsive to ground-level realities. Through instructions from above and intelligence reports from below, the imperial court produced, accessed, and transmitted information to state agents; thereby it was never distant from local concerns. Questioning colonial and postcolonial narratives of custom, this dissertation demonstrates that written Hanafi juridical doctrine—whose living historical memory is an embodied vernacular knowledge to this day in “Indian” mentalit�—shaped South Asia’s public legal system well until the mid-nineteenth century when English Common law eclipsed it under British colonial rule.

Tracing the genealogy of Hanafi ideas in Mughal public culture, “Mirrors and Masks of Sovereignty” charts the contours of a new-style imperial governance perfected during the empire’s middle phase (1630s–1720s)—a break from conventions of its earlier iterations under Akbar and Jahangir—that created one of the strongest dirigiste states in the early modern world. This dissertation rejects both king-centered paradigms that overemphasize the emperor, Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir’s personality and notions of fluid precolonial legal pluralisms that fail to situate law in a functional mode of social regulation and economic control within Mughal society layered with hierarchical stratifications of entrenched inequities. Rather, by examining gradations of proprietary rights and how they functioned through the state legal infrastructure, it reinterprets Mughal sovereignty as a juridical and financial relation of the governing elite to the governed. Examining Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir’s theological-legal authority as much as his strategic acumen geared towards a holistic appreciation of state affairs, the dissertation conceptualizes the institutional mechanisms that went into wielding the greatest concentration of public power the Indian subcontinent witnessed in its precolonial past. In conclusion, I argue that it is high time to move beyond reductive caricatures of the emperor’s image—modern inventions that have little to do with Mughal subjects’ quotidian experiences. Instead, I propose an analytical framework for rethinking afresh the dynamic interplay between power, law, and political economy at the height of Mughal rule.

In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire was marked by constant polemical disputes over Islamic religious practices. By the end of the century, these debates, which covered topics as varied as the permissibility of smoking tobacco or saint worship, had become so heated the many Muslims in the empire were willing to declare their co-religionists heretics. I use these polemical disputes as a setting in which to explore theories and approaches of religious transformation in the Islamic world. Rather than emphasize religious change driven by socio-economic forces or the disciplinary mechanisms of the state, I focus instead on how Islamic religiosity changed as it became increasingly entangled in the material world of the Eastern Mediterranean. I argue that intensified regimes of circulation of objects and people, especially between the Arabic and Turkish-speaking (Rumi) segments of the empire, were generative of key developments of Ottoman religiosity such as novel forms of reading and writing, a culture of pilgrimage centered on the hajj, and, indeed, the bitter polemicism itself. I do this through four detailed case studies of heresy, manuscript “pamphlets,” pilgrimage, and travelogues. The dissertation thus makes two contributions. The first is to integrate discussions of materiality and circulation into our understanding of the transformation of Islamic religiosity in the early modern Ottoman Empire. This is reflected not only in my analysis but also in my research method, in which the materiality of the manuscripts themselves helps me uncover unknown writers and topics and connect a myriad of unrelated works. The second contribution is to highlight how the sustained encounter, exchange, and connectivity between Rumis and Arabs became an important motor of religious and cultural change in the empire.

Drawing upon the writings of service professionals, including soldiers, scribes, legal officials and petty bureaucrats, Writing the Inter-Imperial World in Afghan North India (ca. 1774 – 1857) is a study of perspectives on political and social change during the transition to colonialism. From 1774, as the East India Company conquered the semi-autonomous Rohilla state and introduced new administrative measures, service professionals—who were key mediators of changes in governance—were faced with a choice: should they implement, actively resist or escape this development? Departing from historiography that has seen such figures through the eyes of the Company archive, this dissertation seeks to investigate how they documented their encounter with incipient modes of colonial rule. In a range of original works, comprising Persian and Urdu memoirs, biographies, chronicles and poetry, they elaborated their circumstances within and beyond the former Afghan principalities, reflecting on the regional frontiers that were constantly shifting in their lifetimes as an older skein of imperial provinces was being eroded. My dissertation argues that through their writings these figures generated a political discourse centered on distinctive conceptions of regional and imperial politics, history, service, and customary law. This discourse continued to echo in the provinces through the nineteenth century, even as the history of these actors was obscured by the rise of colonial and nationalist modernity.