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 rejects this hypothesis but not the term, modifying it to mean simply “empires of the gunpowder era.” For Streusand, the continued utility of the term lies in its suggestion of the three empires' “fundamental similarity” (3) as inheritors of a shared tradition of statecraft facing comparable challenges, and in its underscoring of the importance of military superiority to their success. Although this fundamental similarity applies equally for the social, cultural, and intellectual histories of the three empires—areas of study which have seen some of the most exciting developments of the past thirty years—here, Streusand is primarily concerned with accounting for the relative success of the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids in establishing and maintaining large, durable, centralized states.

After a brief introduction, the second chapter, titled “Common Heritage, Common Dilemma,” traces the development of Islamic political ideology starting with the Abbasids (from 750 CE), describing the gradual genesis of “Turko-Irano-Islamic statecraft” (25), the struggle for legitimacy in the post-Abbasid Islamic world, and the characteristics of and challenges posed by the military patronage state and Turko-Mongol ideas of collective sovereignty. The next three chapters cover the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals in turn. Each chapter begins with an overview and a chronological narrative of the main political and military events (which, for the Ottomans, ends in 1730), followed by sections on sovereignty, ideology and law; military organization, strategy, and expansion; central administration; provincial administration; economy; very brief discussions of “society and popular religion” and “cultural and intellectual history”; and then a concluding section on decline (or, in the case of the Ottomans, “stress and adaptation”) and a summary. The analytical sections reflect the many advances in the scholarship since Hodgson and are persuasively written. Comparison with other empires is incorporated into the analysis starting with the Safavid chapter, bringing both the shared and unique aspects of the empires' histories and institutions into greater relief. Finally, in each chapter, Streusand sensitively handles the loaded question of decline and, in the Ottoman case, follows many Ottoman historians' rejection of the “decline paradigm” in favor of a more nuanced approach to the empire's later history.

Throughout, Streusand brings historiography into the discussion, providing the reader with notice of where scholars disagree, why previously prevailing views have in some cases been discarded, and the reasons for the persistent disparity of research on the three empires in favor of the Ottomans and the neglect of certain subjects due to chronic lack of sources or adverse research conditions. This is undoubtedly useful for undergraduates accustomed to reading “authoritative” textbooks and provides them with numerous avenues for further exploration.

There are, unfortunately, a number of factual errors: For example, beyond confusing dates (the Ottoman siege of Candia ended in 1669, not 1662 [56]), Streusand conflates the titles and duties of the enormously powerful chiefs of the Ottoman palace's two distinct corps of eunuchs, black and white, mistakenly referring to the darüssaade ağası and kapı ağası as synonymous titles for the chief white eunuch (93), rather than the titles of the chief black eunuch and chief white eunuch, respectively. Further, he refers repeatedly to the kadizadelis, members of a seventeenth-century Ottoman puritanical movement, as kadizelis (130).

This should not detract from what is otherwise an eminently usable, logically organized book. Islamic Gunpowder Empires is appropriate for upper-level undergraduate surveys with earlier Islamic history prerequisites, and it is especially well suited for students familiar with the first two volumes of Hodgson's Venture of Islam.