The Ottoman and Mughal Empires: Social history in the early modern world

It is not easy to envisage a complex society such as the Otto1nan from the vantage point of another polity, with which the viewer/author is but moderately familiar, as is true in my case where the Mughal world is at issue. The idea gerininated during a series of introductory courses on Mughal history that I taught at Istanbul Bilgi University from 2014 onward. When in front of the class, I found that the best way of making the topic meaningful to the students (and to myself as well) was to step back and look at the manner in which the inhabitants of the Ottonman Empire approached a given problem, which albeit in a different shape, existed in the Mughal world as well. It was even more exciting to find that certain fundamental rules, with which Ottomanist historians are quite familiar, such as for instance the notion that the holders of tax assigrunents were responsible for law and order in the districts assigned to them, was not as central an issue in Mughal India, as it was in Ottoman history. The constant change from the familiar to the unfamiliar and back again, was one of the more stimulating experiences associated first with the classes that I taught and later with the writing of this book..