I first conceived of this book as a graduate student in the early 1980s, began it as a project in 1990,
and have taken twenty distracted years to complete it. Its purpose has remained constant: to provide a
coherent, current, and accessible introduction to the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, using
comparison to illuminate their distinctive features. Within that general mission, I sought to accomplish
the following objectives:
• to put the three empires in the context of their common background and political goals
• to incorporate current historiography into a new synthesis rather than recycle the findings of
earlier general accounts
• to reevaluate the concept of the gunpowder empire and provide a more accurate and complete
explanation of the growth and durability of the three empires
• to explain the complex, diverse, and dynamic political ideologies of the empires
• to present the empires as part of a connected Islamic world that was itself part of a more
broadly connected global system in which commercial and cultural networks crossed political
boundaries
• to assess the issue of the decline of the three empires without reference to the eventual global
superiority of the West
• to depict the historiography of the empires as dynamic rather than static
Islamic Gunpowder Empires is not a comprehensive history of the Islamic world in the early
modern era; it is both spatially and topically incomplete. It excludes Morocco, sub-Saharan Africa,
central Asia, and Southeast Asia and pays insufficient attention to social, cultural, and intellectual
history. As a study of power and political order, it focuses on political, military, and economic
history, on the problems of power and the burdens of power holders. It does not ignore social and
cultural history entirely but seeks to place those topics in political context.