The late Professor M. Athar Ali was one of the foremost authorities on Mughal history. This book is a selection of some of his best essays on a wide range of themes from the realm of ideas (including religion) to polity, administration, society and culture of the Mughal period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries). Some essays are interpretative, others represent detailed research, and rest share both elements. What unites them is his critical approach and consistence proximity to the Persian source material. The book includes a critique of 'revisionist' approaches in the study of the Mughal polity, and a section on sources. Professor Irfan Habib has provided the preface. This selection of thirty-one essays on the Mughal period (with a few on the pre-Mughal period) will be extremely useful to students and researchers of history and scholars of Islam.

This paperback edition of a classic not only tests a number of popular hypotheses about the Mughal Empire during the reign of Aurangzeb by examining the composition and the role of nobility under his rule, but also assesses afresh the material and questions that have been thrown up since 1966.