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New Cambridge History of India #1.5
The Mughal Empire
The Mughal empire was one of the largest centralized states in the premodern world and this volume traces the history of this magnificent empire from its creation in 1526 to its breakup in 1720. Richards stresses the dynamic quality of Mughal territorial expansion, their institutional innovations in land revenue, coinage and military organization, ideological change and the relationship between the emperors and Islam. He also analyzes institutions particular to the Mughal empire, such as the jagir system, and explores Mughal India's links with the early modern world.
340 pages, Paperback
First published January 26, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
June 7, 2019
one of the most amazing dynasties of India. great read. i love this time, their monuments and their stories.
December 3, 2011
This is a sturdy, academic history (it is part of the Cambridge History of India series) of the Mughal Empire, a topic of which I knew nothing before reading Monsoon and which formed a gapping whole in my knowledge.
It's far more academic than I personally have the need (at this point in my life) for -- given that the topic is not really pressing for me (hence the 4-stars) - but it allowed for a quick review (with some skimming) and it is very good and not terribly dry. Richards seems to be a very competent historian. His account of Akbar is quite remarkable -- Akbar was clearly one of the most enlightened rulers in history - and his model of an enlightened and cosmopolitcan Islamic ruler may set an important canon for the 21st century -- where Islam's attempt to modernize itself, especially in the Indian Ocean littoral and in Central Asia, and its need to adapt to the rise of India and China especially..., will be key, perhaps, to the survival (or not) of all of us.
It's far more academic than I personally have the need (at this point in my life) for -- given that the topic is not really pressing for me (hence the 4-stars) - but it allowed for a quick review (with some skimming) and it is very good and not terribly dry. Richards seems to be a very competent historian. His account of Akbar is quite remarkable -- Akbar was clearly one of the most enlightened rulers in history - and his model of an enlightened and cosmopolitcan Islamic ruler may set an important canon for the 21st century -- where Islam's attempt to modernize itself, especially in the Indian Ocean littoral and in Central Asia, and its need to adapt to the rise of India and China especially..., will be key, perhaps, to the survival (or not) of all of us.
February 13, 2018
Pretty good and informative for the most part! However, the author does fall into the tired "Akbar Good Aurangzeb Bad" line towards the end.
May 25, 2025
A good read that could have been much better.
Although I realize that summarizing 200 years of rich and complex history into 300 pages is a daunting task, it seems to this reader that this book breezes past many important episodes (especially during the reign of Akbar) that deserved at least a few more sentences.
The book certainly would have profited from illustrations and the absence of any is surprising. More and better maps would also be helpful to readers. Of the few maps included, a couple are trivial and the two principal maps are so convoluted that they are practically worthless.
Although I realize that summarizing 200 years of rich and complex history into 300 pages is a daunting task, it seems to this reader that this book breezes past many important episodes (especially during the reign of Akbar) that deserved at least a few more sentences.
The book certainly would have profited from illustrations and the absence of any is surprising. More and better maps would also be helpful to readers. Of the few maps included, a couple are trivial and the two principal maps are so convoluted that they are practically worthless.
September 29, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #World History and Civilizations # Empires, Trade, and Cultural Exchange
John F. Richards’s *The Mughal Empire* (New Cambridge History of India 1.5) is the kind of book that makes you feel the weight of a historiographical tradition: erudite, patient, encyclopedic. Richards stitches together administration and agrarian structure, court culture and religious policy, fiscal machinery and literary production, and in doing so gives you a Mughal state that looks coherent, intense, and monstrously effective. Read straight through, his account produces that familiar image in our heads — a glittering court, Persian chancery, imperial mansions, sprawling pargana maps, armies that could be raised and fed on a scale few early modern polities could match.
If you want to understand how the Mughal machine was made — its revenue logics, its judicial structures, its marriage of military and bureaucratic power — Richards is indispensable. But if you want an unvarnished portrait of the violence that underwrote that machine, or a critique of why certain polities get lovingly re-told while others are reduced to footnotes, you’ll need to press his book and the discipline that produced it a little harder.
There is a truth we must face up front: building empires in premodern South Asia involved force, coercion, and spectacle. Richards knows this and does not pretend otherwise, but the emphasis in his chaptering — the synthetic chapters on land revenue, court culture, and the imperial centre — can, if read alone, smooth over the sharpness of the blade. A Mughal victory in the field was often accompanied by a predictable ecology of ruin: sieges that starved cities, punitive plunder that replenished treasuries, deportations that reconfigured demographics, and public executions that functioned as political theatre. Inside the palace, cruelty could be intimate and personal — the confinement of Shah Jahan by Aurangzeb, the blinding or execution of rivals, the ruthless management of succession — all of which remind you that “statecraft” here often read as a licence for fratricide and spectacular retribution. When Aurangzeb tightened the screws — reimposing the jizya tax, sanctioning temple demolitions in some regions, executing religious dissidents and political opponents — the image of Mughal rule hardened in ways that have echoed into modern memory. These were not stylistic quirks; they were tools of governance and legitimization deployed when the centre felt threatened.
That reality needs nuance. Mughal rulers and elites also patronized art, built institutions, and practiced forms of negotiated accommodation. Akbar’s experiments with Sulh-i Kul, his expansive imperial household and alliances with Rajput chiefs, and the syncretic court culture documented in Abu’l-Fazl’s *Akbarnama* stand against the harsher instincts of later reigns. However, even the tolerant policy was not a sentimental embrace of pluralism for its own sake; it was a pragmatic scaffold for empire. So cruelty, when it comes, is less the odd aberration than a constitutive instrument of power — the violent flip-side of the administrative sophistication Richards so helpfully maps. To estimate Mughal cruelty critically is to recognize both its specificity and its function: it rooted authority where paper decrees and fiscal tables alone could not.
There’s an ethical trap here historians must dodge. It’s easy (and politically useful) to demonize the Mughals as uniquely barbaric, especially in the service of modern identity politics. Nevertheless, it is equally misleading to sanitize them into palaces and poetry only. The better move — the one Richards gestures toward but sometimes cannot sustain given the sweep of his project — is to treat violence as method and material: method because it made imperial rule legible to contemporaries; material because it stamped itself into the bodies and landscapes of the subcontinent. Public punishment, plunder, forced levies, and the crushing of rebellions were part and parcel of enforcing the very fiscal and territorial arrangements Richards charts.
If the Mughals loom so large in our historical imagination, part of the reason is archival and aesthetic. Persian court chronicles survive in abundance, European travelers wrote from mouths that European archivists would later preserve, and monumental architecture — the Taj, the Red Fort, the Shalimar gardens — gives historians and the public an arresting visual vocabulary. The Mughal state left behind libraries of paperwork and palaces of marble; these are seductive crumbs for the modern historian. Richards, who reads that paper and stone with impressive patience, can show us how the Mughal system worked because we have the sources that make it visible.
Contrast that with the Cholas and the Ahoms, two polities that were no less sophisticated in their own ways but have been treated very differently by history. The Cholas of medieval South India built an empire of temples, ports, and inscriptions rather than of imperial Persian chancery records; their power was expressed through monumental temple-building at Thanjavur and Brihadisvara, through maritime networks that reached Southeast Asia, and through administrative practices that left their traces in stone epigraphy and Tamil inscriptions. The Ahoms — the long-ruling dynasty of the Brahmaputra valley — created durable, adaptive institutions in a difficult ecological zone and famously halted Mughal advances in Assam (the Battle of Saraighat in 1671 is a stub of memory that evokes Lachit Borphukan’s leadership). Their bureaucracy — the paik system, their Buranji chronicles — was shaped to local soils and socialities and produced records in Tai-Ahom and Assamese that colonial collectors only partially translated.
Why, then, do the Mughals hog the historical stage while Chola reserves and Ahom chronicles are often treated as regional curiosities? The answer is partly material: Persian manuscripts collected by colonial administrators and missionaries were taken into metropolitan archives, cataloged in ways that made them accessible to Anglophone scholarship; temple inscriptions in Tamil remained buried in regional corpora and required a philology many Western universities were not prepared to support. The same colonial apparatus that made the Mughal archives visible also valorized the notion of a centralized state — something the British found a convenient mirror for their own administrative imagination. It is a historically awkward fact that the colonizer’s sources shaped the contours of modern historiography. Thus northern, Persianate, Delhi-centric histories fit neatly into the imperial templates of nineteenth-century scholars; southern, vernacular, or marginal polities did not.
Cultural glamour also matters. Marble makes better postcards than stone inscriptions. The Taj Mahal photographs beautifully; a field of epigraphs does not. The public face of the Mughals — courtly culture, Mughal miniatures, poetic Persianized Urdu — translated well for early modern European consumers, who then wrote further accounts that fed back into academic canons. The Cholas’ maritime exploits across the Bay of Bengal, and the Ahoms’ resilient local governance, were not necessarily less consequential; they were simply less legible to the people doing the legibility. And because legibility begets translation, and translation begets scholarship, and scholarship begets curricula, the historical narrative ossified with Delhi as its center and the south and northeast as peripheries.
It’s also worth being blunt about disciplinary habits. For decades, the study of “big empires” prioritized courtly sources, political narrative, and the diplomats who wrote for posterity. Social history, subaltern voices, and vernacular materials were cast as secondary. Richards’s great strengths come from working skillfully within that tradition: he maps the machinery. But that same tradition has a blind spot for ordinary suffering and for the alternative logics of non-Persianized polities. The Cholas managed oceanic power and temple economies that reconfigured social relations, while the Ahoms developed an adaptive polity that balanced kinship, ritual, and military readiness to survive multiple centuries. Both deserve the same synthetic respect Richards gives the Mughals, not because we must equalize them into a flat comparativism but because a fuller South Asian history requires plurality of scale and source.
So what is the corrective? First, read Richards and read him hard: use his structural clarity as a scaffold, then fill in the cracks with regional and vernacular studies. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri’s work on the Cholas remains a foundation for South Indian political and cultural life; the epigraphic record in Tamil — the land grants, the temple accounting — is a different kind of archive that tells us about state formation from the bottom up. For the Ahoms, the *Buranjis* and later Assamese chronicles, and recent scholarship attentive to northeast histories, open a window into how an organic polity governed frontiers, marshes, and polities that did not mimic Mughal modes. Combine those sources, and a more complicated map appears: the Mughal centre was one model of statecraft, but not the only one, and cruelty — as practice — is visible everywhere imperial power consolidated itself. The Cholas could be brutal in warfare and in subjugating subject populations; the Ahoms committed harsh punishments and conducted ruthless political purges when necessary. The point is not to compare cruelty like some perverse leaderboard but to see how different political economies produced different violences and different legacies.
We also need more translation, more archaeology, and more comparative frameworks that refuse to take “centrality” as axiomatic. Digital humanities, epigraphic corpora, and cross-regional partnerships are already helping. Repatriating vernacular archives into global conversation is a slow cultural labor of translation and institutional support, but it is the only way to ensure that temple economies or swamp-frontier bureaucracies are not forever overshadowed by Persianate paperwork. Crucially, a generated history that foregrounds the Mughal centre without engaging the Chola maritime networks or the Ahom frontier resilience is incomplete in method and ethically blinkered.
If we return to Richards with all this in mind, his book feels less like a single authoritative script and more like a key chapter in a larger, ongoing conversation. He reminds us how central the Mughal experiment was to South Asian political imagination — how it set templates of revenue extraction, princely legitimation, legal administration, and courtly culture that would be referenced and contested for centuries. But to take his narrative as the whole is to be seduced by paper and marble and to ignore the many other ways people organized, resisted, and imagined power across the subcontinent.
A final, sharper estimate of Mughal cruelty: measured against contemporary early modern polities, the Mughals were neither uniquely monstrous nor a cuddly alternative to later empires. They were an empire of staggering capacity, which meant they also had an especially potent capacity to harm. The scale of their coercion was often proportional to the scale of their organization. What makes them stand out in modern memory is not merely their brutality but the confluence of archival preservation and aesthetic visibility that allowed later generations to narrativize them as the central actor of Indian premodern history. Correcting that narrative is both an intellectual duty and a remedial act of cultural justice: give the Cholas, the Ahoms, the Vijayanagara polities, the Maratha confederacies, and the myriad local polities space in the grand story. Translate their stones, read their chronicles, let their administrative forms speak. Only then will the “cruelty” we attribute to Mughal power be understood in context — as one set of practices among many — and the diversity of South Asian political life be accounted for in its full, sometimes ugly, sometimes brilliant, humanity.
Read Richards for the big machinery; read the inscriptionalists for the village ledgers; read the regional historians for the seaways and wetlands. Put them together and you get a subcontinent that resists single-story grandeur and rewards complexity: an empire of marble and massacre, of poetry and prisons, but never the only story worth telling.
Read this and encourage others to read it too.
John F. Richards’s *The Mughal Empire* (New Cambridge History of India 1.5) is the kind of book that makes you feel the weight of a historiographical tradition: erudite, patient, encyclopedic. Richards stitches together administration and agrarian structure, court culture and religious policy, fiscal machinery and literary production, and in doing so gives you a Mughal state that looks coherent, intense, and monstrously effective. Read straight through, his account produces that familiar image in our heads — a glittering court, Persian chancery, imperial mansions, sprawling pargana maps, armies that could be raised and fed on a scale few early modern polities could match.
If you want to understand how the Mughal machine was made — its revenue logics, its judicial structures, its marriage of military and bureaucratic power — Richards is indispensable. But if you want an unvarnished portrait of the violence that underwrote that machine, or a critique of why certain polities get lovingly re-told while others are reduced to footnotes, you’ll need to press his book and the discipline that produced it a little harder.
There is a truth we must face up front: building empires in premodern South Asia involved force, coercion, and spectacle. Richards knows this and does not pretend otherwise, but the emphasis in his chaptering — the synthetic chapters on land revenue, court culture, and the imperial centre — can, if read alone, smooth over the sharpness of the blade. A Mughal victory in the field was often accompanied by a predictable ecology of ruin: sieges that starved cities, punitive plunder that replenished treasuries, deportations that reconfigured demographics, and public executions that functioned as political theatre. Inside the palace, cruelty could be intimate and personal — the confinement of Shah Jahan by Aurangzeb, the blinding or execution of rivals, the ruthless management of succession — all of which remind you that “statecraft” here often read as a licence for fratricide and spectacular retribution. When Aurangzeb tightened the screws — reimposing the jizya tax, sanctioning temple demolitions in some regions, executing religious dissidents and political opponents — the image of Mughal rule hardened in ways that have echoed into modern memory. These were not stylistic quirks; they were tools of governance and legitimization deployed when the centre felt threatened.
That reality needs nuance. Mughal rulers and elites also patronized art, built institutions, and practiced forms of negotiated accommodation. Akbar’s experiments with Sulh-i Kul, his expansive imperial household and alliances with Rajput chiefs, and the syncretic court culture documented in Abu’l-Fazl’s *Akbarnama* stand against the harsher instincts of later reigns. However, even the tolerant policy was not a sentimental embrace of pluralism for its own sake; it was a pragmatic scaffold for empire. So cruelty, when it comes, is less the odd aberration than a constitutive instrument of power — the violent flip-side of the administrative sophistication Richards so helpfully maps. To estimate Mughal cruelty critically is to recognize both its specificity and its function: it rooted authority where paper decrees and fiscal tables alone could not.
There’s an ethical trap here historians must dodge. It’s easy (and politically useful) to demonize the Mughals as uniquely barbaric, especially in the service of modern identity politics. Nevertheless, it is equally misleading to sanitize them into palaces and poetry only. The better move — the one Richards gestures toward but sometimes cannot sustain given the sweep of his project — is to treat violence as method and material: method because it made imperial rule legible to contemporaries; material because it stamped itself into the bodies and landscapes of the subcontinent. Public punishment, plunder, forced levies, and the crushing of rebellions were part and parcel of enforcing the very fiscal and territorial arrangements Richards charts.
If the Mughals loom so large in our historical imagination, part of the reason is archival and aesthetic. Persian court chronicles survive in abundance, European travelers wrote from mouths that European archivists would later preserve, and monumental architecture — the Taj, the Red Fort, the Shalimar gardens — gives historians and the public an arresting visual vocabulary. The Mughal state left behind libraries of paperwork and palaces of marble; these are seductive crumbs for the modern historian. Richards, who reads that paper and stone with impressive patience, can show us how the Mughal system worked because we have the sources that make it visible.
Contrast that with the Cholas and the Ahoms, two polities that were no less sophisticated in their own ways but have been treated very differently by history. The Cholas of medieval South India built an empire of temples, ports, and inscriptions rather than of imperial Persian chancery records; their power was expressed through monumental temple-building at Thanjavur and Brihadisvara, through maritime networks that reached Southeast Asia, and through administrative practices that left their traces in stone epigraphy and Tamil inscriptions. The Ahoms — the long-ruling dynasty of the Brahmaputra valley — created durable, adaptive institutions in a difficult ecological zone and famously halted Mughal advances in Assam (the Battle of Saraighat in 1671 is a stub of memory that evokes Lachit Borphukan’s leadership). Their bureaucracy — the paik system, their Buranji chronicles — was shaped to local soils and socialities and produced records in Tai-Ahom and Assamese that colonial collectors only partially translated.
Why, then, do the Mughals hog the historical stage while Chola reserves and Ahom chronicles are often treated as regional curiosities? The answer is partly material: Persian manuscripts collected by colonial administrators and missionaries were taken into metropolitan archives, cataloged in ways that made them accessible to Anglophone scholarship; temple inscriptions in Tamil remained buried in regional corpora and required a philology many Western universities were not prepared to support. The same colonial apparatus that made the Mughal archives visible also valorized the notion of a centralized state — something the British found a convenient mirror for their own administrative imagination. It is a historically awkward fact that the colonizer’s sources shaped the contours of modern historiography. Thus northern, Persianate, Delhi-centric histories fit neatly into the imperial templates of nineteenth-century scholars; southern, vernacular, or marginal polities did not.
Cultural glamour also matters. Marble makes better postcards than stone inscriptions. The Taj Mahal photographs beautifully; a field of epigraphs does not. The public face of the Mughals — courtly culture, Mughal miniatures, poetic Persianized Urdu — translated well for early modern European consumers, who then wrote further accounts that fed back into academic canons. The Cholas’ maritime exploits across the Bay of Bengal, and the Ahoms’ resilient local governance, were not necessarily less consequential; they were simply less legible to the people doing the legibility. And because legibility begets translation, and translation begets scholarship, and scholarship begets curricula, the historical narrative ossified with Delhi as its center and the south and northeast as peripheries.
It’s also worth being blunt about disciplinary habits. For decades, the study of “big empires” prioritized courtly sources, political narrative, and the diplomats who wrote for posterity. Social history, subaltern voices, and vernacular materials were cast as secondary. Richards’s great strengths come from working skillfully within that tradition: he maps the machinery. But that same tradition has a blind spot for ordinary suffering and for the alternative logics of non-Persianized polities. The Cholas managed oceanic power and temple economies that reconfigured social relations, while the Ahoms developed an adaptive polity that balanced kinship, ritual, and military readiness to survive multiple centuries. Both deserve the same synthetic respect Richards gives the Mughals, not because we must equalize them into a flat comparativism but because a fuller South Asian history requires plurality of scale and source.
So what is the corrective? First, read Richards and read him hard: use his structural clarity as a scaffold, then fill in the cracks with regional and vernacular studies. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri’s work on the Cholas remains a foundation for South Indian political and cultural life; the epigraphic record in Tamil — the land grants, the temple accounting — is a different kind of archive that tells us about state formation from the bottom up. For the Ahoms, the *Buranjis* and later Assamese chronicles, and recent scholarship attentive to northeast histories, open a window into how an organic polity governed frontiers, marshes, and polities that did not mimic Mughal modes. Combine those sources, and a more complicated map appears: the Mughal centre was one model of statecraft, but not the only one, and cruelty — as practice — is visible everywhere imperial power consolidated itself. The Cholas could be brutal in warfare and in subjugating subject populations; the Ahoms committed harsh punishments and conducted ruthless political purges when necessary. The point is not to compare cruelty like some perverse leaderboard but to see how different political economies produced different violences and different legacies.
We also need more translation, more archaeology, and more comparative frameworks that refuse to take “centrality” as axiomatic. Digital humanities, epigraphic corpora, and cross-regional partnerships are already helping. Repatriating vernacular archives into global conversation is a slow cultural labor of translation and institutional support, but it is the only way to ensure that temple economies or swamp-frontier bureaucracies are not forever overshadowed by Persianate paperwork. Crucially, a generated history that foregrounds the Mughal centre without engaging the Chola maritime networks or the Ahom frontier resilience is incomplete in method and ethically blinkered.
If we return to Richards with all this in mind, his book feels less like a single authoritative script and more like a key chapter in a larger, ongoing conversation. He reminds us how central the Mughal experiment was to South Asian political imagination — how it set templates of revenue extraction, princely legitimation, legal administration, and courtly culture that would be referenced and contested for centuries. But to take his narrative as the whole is to be seduced by paper and marble and to ignore the many other ways people organized, resisted, and imagined power across the subcontinent.
A final, sharper estimate of Mughal cruelty: measured against contemporary early modern polities, the Mughals were neither uniquely monstrous nor a cuddly alternative to later empires. They were an empire of staggering capacity, which meant they also had an especially potent capacity to harm. The scale of their coercion was often proportional to the scale of their organization. What makes them stand out in modern memory is not merely their brutality but the confluence of archival preservation and aesthetic visibility that allowed later generations to narrativize them as the central actor of Indian premodern history. Correcting that narrative is both an intellectual duty and a remedial act of cultural justice: give the Cholas, the Ahoms, the Vijayanagara polities, the Maratha confederacies, and the myriad local polities space in the grand story. Translate their stones, read their chronicles, let their administrative forms speak. Only then will the “cruelty” we attribute to Mughal power be understood in context — as one set of practices among many — and the diversity of South Asian political life be accounted for in its full, sometimes ugly, sometimes brilliant, humanity.
Read Richards for the big machinery; read the inscriptionalists for the village ledgers; read the regional historians for the seaways and wetlands. Put them together and you get a subcontinent that resists single-story grandeur and rewards complexity: an empire of marble and massacre, of poetry and prisons, but never the only story worth telling.
Read this and encourage others to read it too.
March 7, 2019
Informative but very dry. Richards suffers from the same problem that a lot of scholarly writers have in that his writing is just not pleasant to read. While reading this book I almost skimmed right over my favorite story of Akbar the Great (in which he has a dissident thrown down the stairs repeatedly until dead) because it was written so dryly. Despite this I did learn from the text so I can't reasonably rate it any lower than 3 stars. It served its purpose.
I would not recommend this for anyone who knows nothing of the Mughal Empire nor for anyone who already knows a lot about it. The text is too specific for the former and not specific enough for the latter. I would say it is good for someone who has a decent pre-existing knowledge but is still learning which was the case for me. Best use of the text I can see is as a source for taking note of significant people and events to look into in more detail later.
I would not recommend this for anyone who knows nothing of the Mughal Empire nor for anyone who already knows a lot about it. The text is too specific for the former and not specific enough for the latter. I would say it is good for someone who has a decent pre-existing knowledge but is still learning which was the case for me. Best use of the text I can see is as a source for taking note of significant people and events to look into in more detail later.
November 21, 2024
(really a 3.5/5 or 7/10) !!
well written and covers a LOT of ground, I think Richards was limited research wise in that he only read Persian and none of the vernacular languages, def a couple anachronisms/biases/contradictions come up. The narrative parts on specific wars/periods were really engaging, but I wish the parts about bureaucracy/economy were more integrated instead of appearing as really dry standalone chapters. Lots of very interesting stuff about people of higher status but very little on popular culture/art/theology and lower status people (again, not a lot of multilingual or visual sources) overall enjoyable and informative and a good summarization of a constantly evolving time and place with a lot of factors and people at play.
well written and covers a LOT of ground, I think Richards was limited research wise in that he only read Persian and none of the vernacular languages, def a couple anachronisms/biases/contradictions come up. The narrative parts on specific wars/periods were really engaging, but I wish the parts about bureaucracy/economy were more integrated instead of appearing as really dry standalone chapters. Lots of very interesting stuff about people of higher status but very little on popular culture/art/theology and lower status people (again, not a lot of multilingual or visual sources) overall enjoyable and informative and a good summarization of a constantly evolving time and place with a lot of factors and people at play.
August 31, 2024
A very useful survey that tracks Mughal hegemony from Babur to the post-Aurangzeb decline. The chapters on Akbar and Aurangzeb, in particular, give some wonderful insights into these figures’ dispositions to show why they governed as they did. The most pleasant surprise here is Richards’ lucid explanation of the zabt system and centralization of the agrarian economy – a helpful reference that grants continual revisiting. Too many names, dry prose, and a rushed narrative hinder the closing chapters, a shame since the rest of the book is so well written and organized.
June 23, 2025
For a rather neglected focus of history, Richards provides a great history of the Empire( though, I question to call it it an empire, after Akbar's reign, it basically is downhill, from his drug addict son to later an hier in open civil war to dethrone and imprison his own father). It is amazing how this such a state existed.
December 1, 2022
An interesting book disseminating knowledge about the dynasty, their individual outlook, the building and collapse of the empire, the governing infrastructure, their views on religion and social networking, and the Indian demography of that time.
May 1, 2020
The book is more of a political history. From the point of narration the author has done a fantastic work.
Read
May 16, 20206 volumes
February 13, 2022
Richard's comprehensive monograph on the Mughals is an important work for the history of the period, but comes up lacking in style and presentation. I appreciate the perspective of a well-trained and objective historian in a field muddled with intense nationalist belief and vested interests but this book is just so damn boring.
October 28, 2012
the perfect analysis of the most aristocratic high culture during the medieval India.
February 26, 2013
While not the most scintillating book, it offered the history in a clear read.
Read
October 23, 2018Good book😁😁😁
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews