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Marshall Hodgson's three-volume Venture of Islam, published posthumously by his student Reuben Smith in 1974, changed the shape, periodization, and even vocabulary of contemporary Islamic studies, and his work is still widely assigned to undergraduates. However, the final volume, covering the early modern Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids, was the one least complete upon his sudden death in 1968, and significant developments in the historiography of all three polities over the succeeding decades have rendered it inadequate to the task of introducing undergraduates to the period. Enter Douglas Streusand's Islamic Gunpowder Empires, explicitly conceived to provide "a current and coherent alternative to that section of Hodgson" (p. x). In it, Streusand replaces Hodgson's broad sketch of early modern Islamic history with separate chronologies and a detailed exposition of the administrative and military structures and political ideologies of each empire.
The term "gunpowder empire," coined by Hodgson and his Chicago colleague William H. McNeill, originally implied that the success and comparative longevity of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals was owed to their adoption of gunpowder weapons and especially artillery. Streusand largely...