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Muzaffar Alam's latest book should transform the scholarship on Mughal India. This statement needs to be made at the outset because the author's modesty in staking his claims, as well as the nature of his writing, sometimes obscure the departures Alam makes from the historiography. The book is organized as a series of loosely connected essays rather than as a single, authoritative monograph, and it is this that seems to have forced Alam to express his conclusions so tentatively. The attentive reader, however, is likely to derive more intellectual sustenance from this modestly presented work than from many an authoritative tome on the political language of premodern Islam.
Although this book deals with both the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire, the former seems to exist more as a foil against which to set off the latter's novelty. Yet the unfairness of treating the Delhi Sultanate as a standard-issue Muslim kingdom bearing the label "Made in Baghdad" is more than excused by what Alam writes about the Mughals. To begin with, he moves decisively beyond the received schools of Mughal historiography, which for our purposes we can call the religious, the economic, and the comparative. Since they do not count for much in Alam's book, we can...