Al Hind The Making Of The Indo Islamic World

This is the second of a projected series of five volumes dealing with the expansion of Islam in "al-Hind," or South and Southeast Asia. It analyses the conquest of the eleventh-thirteenth centuries, the migration of Muslim groups into the subcontinent, and maritime developments in the same period.

The growth and development of a world economy in and around the Indian Ocean - with India at its center and the Middle East and China as its two dynamic poles - was effected by continued economic, social, and cultural integration into ever wider and more complex patterns under the aegis of Islam.

A major reinterpretation of the rise of the Indo-Islamic world rooted in world history and geography.

This book is the first of a projected series of five which aims to analyse the process of momentous and long-term change which came with the Islamization of the regions which the Arabs called al-Hind, that is India and large parts of its Indianized hinterland. The series is set up in a chronological order, starting with the early expansion of the caliphate in the seventh and eight centuries and ending with the beginnings of European colonization. In this millennium of Islamic expansion five successive stages are distinguished, taking into account the world-historical context. Each stage will be covered by a separate volume. The present volumes covers the period of the seventh to eleventh centuries, the early medieval period in which the Islamic Middle East acquires economic supremacy while establishing new links between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Subsequent volumes will cover the periods of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries (volume 2), the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries (3), the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries (4), and the eighteenth century (5).

In this volume, Andri Wink analyzes the beginning of the process of momentous and long-term change that came with the Islamization of the regions that the Arabs called al-Hind -- India and large parts of its Indianized hinterland. The growth and development of a world economy in and around the Indian Ocean was effected by continued economic, social, and cultural integration into ever wider and more complex patterns under the aegis of Islam.

Inchoate and instable urbanism, highly volatile and itinerant elites of nomadic origin, far-flung merchant diasporas, and a famine- and disease-prone peasantry whose life was a gamble on the monsoon.

The first part of the long-awaited fourth volume of André Wink’s monumental Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World introduces a new perspective on the rise of the dynasty of the Great Mughals and the transition of the Indo-Islamic world from the medieval to the early modern centuries. Eschewing the conventional military and technological explanations, the book adopts an institutional explanation that emphasizes the Central and Inner Asian post-nomadic heritage of the dynasty and, in the context of persistent rivalry with the Indo-Afghans, its successful politics of incorporation and accommodation of Muslim and non-Muslim constituencies alike.

Islamic conquest and trade laid the foundation for a new type of Indo-Islamic society in which the organizational forms of the frontier and of sedentary agriculture merged in a way that was uniquely successful in the late medieval world at large, setting the Indo-Islamic world apart from the Middle East and China in the same centuries.