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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative
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April, 2006
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Book Review

Asia



Farhat Hasan. State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572–1730. (University of Cambridge Oriental Publications, number 61.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 144. $70.00.

Farhat Hasan makes two significant contributions to the history of Mughal India. On the one hand, he brings an interest in recent European scholarship on the nature of power in the early modern world and the relationship of state and society. On the other, he has mined three important but overlooked sources—two collections of documents and a diary—for the history of Cambay and Surat, two west-coast commercial centers in the Mughal province of Gujarat. 1
      With this new scholarship in mind, Hasan suggests a new approach to the Mughal state. The two current interpretations, he argues, are static and synchronic, profoundly unsatisfactory. In the older view, the Mughal Empire was a centralized, bureaucratic leviathan penetrating into every corner of state and society. The newer paradigm, on the other hand, posits a patrimonial-bureaucratic empire, a Weberian model straddling the divide between the ancient patrimonial polity and the modern bureaucratic nation state. Drawing on both the theoretical work and the local evidence, Hasan introduces a new model that depicts Mughal power as an interaction between the imperial and the local, the outcome of daily struggles between Mughal officials and the local elite. . . .

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