introduction

We appear to be in the midst of a convergence of sorts. Never before have so many parts of the globe been studied within the framework of the early modern world. This approach, long cultivated by scholars working on European expansion overseas, has within the past two decades been adopted by a growing number of Sinologists, South Asianists, Persianists and Ottomanists. Their contributions, often innovative, certainly challenging, have forced historians to look anew at the world in this period and at the narratives which bind it to modern times.

That is the spirit in which I introduce the idea of ‘Islamicate Eurasia’. As I try to show in this essay, Islamicate Eurasia was a regional entity which formed part of the early modern world. The nature and potential value of the idea may be understood in two ways. For one, it offers a new analytical orientation to clarify or help resolve a number of outstanding historiographical issues. Those to do with the fate of the routes across continental Eurasia in early modern times, the relationship of states to their broader environment in the period, and the differentiated impact of European colonization are discussed in the concluding section. But to do that, Islamicate Eurasia needs to be empirically and historically substantiated; this is the second way in which the nature and value of the idea may be grasped. It can be thought of as an organizing category or, alternatively, a research paradigm which tries to make sense of certain recent findings derived from the historical record. And it does so, I argue, in a manner that marks an advance on what has been attempted thus far.

Scholarship of the past few decades has employed a wide range of geographical notions in exploring that part of the world over which the Ottoman, …