Professor Michael Fisher's A Short History of the Mughal Empire comes in the publisher I.B. Tauris's intended series of “edgy” (read argumentative and analytical) introductory texts for university students and general readers alike. To both introduce a subject and explore the limits of previous historiography is a daunting task for any historian, and the task is made all the more difficult with the abundance of recent scholarship on the Mughals. We can now (soberly) label an American School of Mughal Studies—founded and propagated by scholars such as John F. Richards, Stephen F. Dale, and André Wink in the 1970s and 1980s. With the arrival of Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam in the early 2000s, a range of exciting and innovative new scholarship on the Mughal empire has arrived from US-based scholars like Munis Faruqui, Lisa Balabanlilar, A. Azfar Moin, Ali Anooshahr, Rajeev Kinra, and Audrey Truschke, and much more is on the horizon. These new histories, led by Alam and Subrahmanyam themselves, have opened up cultural, social, and intellectual history as dominant frameworks for thinking about political lives in South Asia in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. These scholars foreground the discovery of new sources, sub-imperial subjects, analytically diverse approaches, and a critical attention to undermining the colonial and nationalist frameworks of thinking about South Asian pasts along sectarian grounds. The fruits of some of this scholarship are summarized in this survey textbook.

Fisher argues that the Mughal empire emerged from a “dense,” dynamic,” and “uneven” process and was “never an indigenous national empire” (p. 3). The themes of both dynamism and indigeneity follow through in the ten substantive chapters, which are grouped under regnal rulers, with Akbar (1542–1605) as the centralizing force for both the Mughal imperium and the book's structure. The chapters focus heavily on detailing political history, with various thematic discussions interlaced. Fisher is successful in laying out wider perspectives—geographical or structural—at the beginning and end of each chapter, which likely would help the undergraduate reader summarize or digest the wealth of information contained within. The best example is the chapter titled “Emperor Akbar Makes Himself the Center of the Mughal Empire,” which begins with an arresting mise-en-scène from Akbar's youth, continues with an engaging reading of secondary scholarship and primary sources to lay out Akbar's “personal power” (p. 83) and his military-fiscalist and military-administrative networks, and concludes with his marital practices and the details of his “vast women-centered world” (p. 92). In twenty pages, Fisher illustrates Akbar's strategic rule via judicious use of primary quotations and helps the reader construct a theoretical framework for understanding this particular king. Some of the other chapters—particularly on Jahangir and Shahjahan—are much in this vein. Less successful are the chapters on Babur, Akbar, and Alamgir's wars, which—overabundant with names and places—are likely to overwhelm the general reader.

Fisher suggests that organizing the book by regnal succession allows the reader to follow the imperial sources, and there is much sense in that argument. However, the consequence of that decision is that military and political teleology becomes the hegemonic engine for narrative movement in the text. Fisher's Mughal rulers have to continuously contend with the distant future of their inevitable fall even as they proclaim policies and build structures that are meant to be ever-lasting. A fruitful comparison is to the textbooks on the Mughals written in the recent past: Annemarie Schimmel's Im reich der großmoguln: Geschichte, kunst, kultur (The empire of the great Mughals: History, art, culture) and Harbans Mukhia's The Mughals of India.Footnote ¹ Both of these textbooks restrict the political temporality to an opening chapter or two and focus the rest of the book on thematic issues such as “Religion,” “Household,” “Etiquette,” or “Folklore.” The reader is thus able to think broadly and across the various Mughal formations with attentive details to the histories of previously subsumed subjects such as gender or the subaltern. While Fisher is able to bring these issues to bear in his text, they remain at the margins of the text. The choice forces the reader to contend, without help from the author, with certain questions: What constituted “Indian” across this time and space? What, if anything, can be labeled the Mughal political theory? What role did “contingency” play in Mughal governance? What of this is the result of recent advancements in the scholarship? In short, the structure of the book hinders the reader's ability to grasp what is, what changes, and what remains across a wide swath of history and historiography.

A general reader looking for a cogent overview of the political history of early modern South Asia with ample documentation from Mughal primary texts would benefit from A Short History of the Mughal Empire. However, scholarship is consistently evolving in thinking of Mughal imperial formation with an emphasis on cultural or sacral power, borderland spaces, and subaltern perspectives, and this volume does not fully represent that evolution.