Introduction

This chapter offers a broad panorama of early modern India, starting with a description of India’s geography and broad zones of settlement (and other lifeways). It surveys the steadily expanding frontiers of state power in the centuries after Timur’s invasion of India in 1398, encompassing the last of the Delhi Sultanates in the north, the Bahmani Sultanates, Vijayanagara Empire, Deccan Sultanates, and Nayaka kingdoms in the south, before turning to the emergence and expansion of the Mughal Empire and its successor states. This is set in the larger context of exploration and globalisation in the early modern centuries, and in dialogue with phenomena like the Little Ice Age and Occidental/tribal ‘breakouts’. The different frameworks employed in this book –the (Indo-)Persianate and (Indo-)Islamicate, and the Indian Ocean or Eurasian arenas, for instance – are also critically discussed.