Suspended in 2025/26
HY243      One Unit
Islamic Empires, 1400 - 1800

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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Following the great upheavals wrought by the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there emerged the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal dynasties in the Near East, Iran and India. The ‘Islamic’ empires they founded would go on to rank among the wealthiest and most powerful regimes of the early modern world. Supported by an array of provincial and local elites, they were at the zenith of their power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, spanning a region that extended from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal, from the Yemen to the Crimea. Their populations were producers, consumers, importers and exporters of goods crucial for global trade; their location accorded them a vital role in the flow of ideas and information; there was a remarkable flowering of the arts in the period; and conversion to the region’s dominant religion, Islam, continued apace, breaching new frontiers. By the eighteenth century, however, the empires had been reduced to a shadow of their former selves, with power monopolised by a kaleidoscope of smaller regimes vying with each other for supremacy. This struggle paved the way for the region’s later subordination to Europe’s global empires, and the emergence of today’s Middle East and South Asia.

This course will examine the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal regimes, and the larger world to which they belonged, from their formation in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to the ‘unscripted possibilities’ of the eighteenth century. We will study the ways in which temporal power was institutionalised; the patterns of daily life in urban and rural settings, as well as on the frontier; Islam in theory and in practice, and its relationship to the region’s other major religious traditions; diplomacy within and without the region; the prevailing techniques and technologies of warfare; inherited and collective knowledge of other lands, near and far; the everyday movement of people, goods and news; the signal achievements in the literary, visual and architectural realms; material changes to the region’s societies and economies; early modern millenarianism, fundamentalism and reformism; the eighteenth-century demise of the Islamic empires; and the concomitant rise of successor regimes which shaped the paths to modernity embarked upon within the region.

2 hours of classes in the Spring Term.
10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the Winter Term.
10 hours of lectures and 9 hours of classes in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

As no prior knowledge is either assumed or required, it is essential for students to attend the lectures, do the weekly readings and assignments, and actively engage in class discussions. The core topics will be introduced in the lectures. These will be reinforced and elaborated in class discussions.

Students are expected to submit two 2000-word essays (one in the AT, one in the WT), give an oral presentation in class, and take an optional 1-hour mock exam in the ST.

Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (2004)

Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (2010)

Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765 (2019)

Joseph F. Fletcher, ‘Integrative history: Parallels and interconnections in the early modern period, 1500-1800’, Journal of Turkish Studies 9 (1985), 37-57

Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (2nd edn, 2009)

Ira M. Lapidus, ‘State and religion in Islamic societies’, Past & Present 151 (1996), 3-27

Rudi P. Matthee, Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan (2012)

Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 (2005)

David Morgan, Medieval Persia, 1040-1797 (1988)

John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (1993)

Francis Robinson, ‘Ottomans-Safavids-Mughals: Shared knowledge and connective systems’, Journal of Islamic Studies 8:2 (1997), 151-184

Gagandeep S. Sood, India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange (2016)

Exam (100%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period