Stephen Dale's book on early modern Muslim empires is, regrettably, a missed opportunity. Writing a comparative history of the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids is such an obviously good idea and an endeavour much to be welcomed. But readers of this book can hardly avoid putting it down without a sense of disappointment. However, there are lessons to be learned from failure.

In recent years, the comparative study of pre-colonial land empires has experienced quite a flowering. One might point to Walter Scheidel's Rome and China (2009), Björn Forsén and Giovanni Salmeri's The province strikes back: imperial dynamics in the eastern Mediterranean (2008), or Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's Empires in world history (2010), among others. This is clearly a broad and diverse trend. In a classic essay, Marc Bloch long ago identified the great advantage of such work:Footnote ¹ the value of comparison lies in its ability to liberate historians from the limitations imposed by conventional historiographical divisions, to sharpen their perception of problems, to widen their questioning horizon, and to teach them to approach their topic from new angles. In short, comparison engages the historian in continuous reflection on how to conceptualize and frame the analysis.

But conceptualization is precisely the Achilles heel of the current work; this task only receives scant attention. Empire, for instance, means nothing more than rule over ‘extensive territories and diverse populations’ (p. 4). That is very broad. It is not at all clear, at least to this reviewer, that the tribally segmented domains of the Safavids constituted an empire in anything close to the same sense as the centralized Ottoman state; and there were other Muslim dynasties ruling diverse populations in this period. There is little, then, to distinguish Dale's theme from a general history of Muslim statecraft, not only during the early modern period but from the time of the fragmentation of the Abbasid caliphate. This is also, in fact, what the reader gets for much of the book. An extensive part of it is dedicated to narrating the medieval precursors of Dale's empires. Here, incidentally, both the strength and the very real limitations of Dale as a historian are revealed. One might think that he would follow in the footsteps of a pioneering world history work such as Marshall Hodgson's Venture of Islam. But inspired generalization and imaginative synthesis is not what interests him. Rather, detailed dynastic narrative is what is on offer. The bread and butter of his account lies in relating the fates of great men and the poets (and other artists) whom they sponsored. There is a strangely traditionalist air clinging to the story given in this book of the rise and fall of Muslim dynasties. The focus is emphatically on the early and so-called classical eras and on their emblematic rulers. Dale's empires are those of Selim the Conqueror and Süleyman the Magnificent, of Shah Abbas, of Akbar and Shahjahan. After the golden age of their reigns, corruption and inexorable decay sets in with the bigotry of Aurangzeb, the energetic but austere Mughal, the weakness of the harem that affected later Ottoman sultans, and the alcoholism of the last Safavids.

This reduction of empire to personal biography is all in the classical mould and reminiscent of nineteenth-century historicist scholarship. The material is organized in a very conventional manner. Individual chapters portray the three empires in synchronic fashion, but most of the time each is dealt with separately in its own subsection. Sustained comparison is only sporadically attempted. The favoured topics are high politics, Muslim religious strands, and court art. It is remarkable that a rather narrow survey of the last takes up a good third of the book, when very little time is spent on understanding the process of rule in provincial communities, many of which were not Muslim. This is simply inadequate. Who, today, would want to write a history of European imperialism with scant or no attention to the dynamics of colonial societies, but solely seen from a similarly metropolitan perspective? Nor is it representative of the way in which scholarship on these empires has developed during the last two generations. Historians have largely changed our perception of the so-called ages of decline, and have uncovered dynamic and vigorous developments across the board of provincial societies. Inevitably, one will find the occasional nod here in the direction of these more recent trends, or the odd concession. But it remains a surface phenomenon; the results of this scholarship has not really affected the basic way in which the narrative is organized and the analysis is structured. In the case of the Ottomans, the effects, as is well known, are particularly unfortunate. Subsuming everything after Süleyman the Magnificent under a heading of decline reduces most of its history – that is, the three centuries after 1600 – to a sorry appendix, quickly expedited by Dale in the last pages of the final chapter.

The study of pre-modern empires has grown in recent years, with a willingness to experiment, not least in addressing a global history agenda. At the same time, however, there is a clearly discernible trend towards re-traditionalization of these often philologically dominated fields. Dale's book, in spite of its broadly comparative framing, belongs more in the latter category. Perhaps, in spite of the intuition of most historians, the intent to compare empires that are coeval and belong to the same civilization has worked as a straitjacket for this author. As I have written with C. A. Bayly on another occasion, this ‘synchronic approach often appears to constrain its practitioners within a single explanatory mode, because historians of contiguous empires tend to think in the same way’.Footnote ² Roaming more widely for comparative cases might have produced a more interesting result. Less familiar comparanda may seem more artificial, but they probably stimulate reflection better.