Empire as a Global Entity

Noted historian Athar Ali died in 1998. The only time I ever met him was at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1992 where he interviewed me for a job at the Center of Historical Studies. I had just returned from Cambridge with a brand new PhD degree, which had the stamp of his bete noire Professor C.A. Bayly. I was tense on seeing him as I thought that I would now have to answer for the academic ‘follies’ of Cambridge historians! I was pretty sure that I was not getting this job. I was surprised. Not only did Professor Ali engage me in a meaningful discussion on the politics and culture of the late Mughal society, but also selected me for the job. My first and last impression of him as a historian willing to listen and engage with the developments in the outside world is only reinforced as I read this compendium of his writings. This book brings together Ali’s varied interests in a long and distinguished career: The Islamic expansion into India and the consolidation of Empires, the ideological underpinnings of the Mughal state, the location of religion in the evolving political culture of the times, the wide cultural embrace of the Empire that connected it to both eastern and western politico-economic processes, and a culturally nuanced understanding of its decline in the early 18th century.