How the Mughals built their empire on conquest and contracts

This timely book reminds us that the fate of nations has always been written as much in account books as in battles

- Sundeep Khanna

Guru Nanak seems like an unlikely starting point for a book on trade and commerce in India during the Mughal period.

The founder of Sikhism is among the many figures of history that author Jagjeet Lally deploys to bring us a fascinating glimpse of the daily rhythms of religious and commercial life in this era, from the time that Babur set up the Mughal dynasty to its ignominious end by the middle of the 18th century. The cast of characters who act as our eyes into the past is equally intriguing: failed merchants, court munshis, foreign diplomats and Jain traders, whose accounts of their travails have been expertly deployed for insights into a world where the sacred and the commercial were inseparably entwined.

Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar isn’t an academic treatise or a tedious chronicle. Lally, an associate professor of the history of early modern and colonial India at University College, London, possesses the adventurer’s keen eye and the wayfarer’s leisurely tone. Portions of the book unfold like a mystery novel. The final chapter, provocatively titled Twilight, opens with a scene worthy of a thriller: “Shahjahanabad. 14 January 1757. A conqueror is but a few days’ march from the imperial court. The Mughal emperor’s envoy has returned from the enemy’s encampment at Sirhind....” It’s a narrative gambit that pulls readers into the drama of decline.