This chapter is a reflection on the political economy of South Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period that often carries the epithet ‘early modern’. It seeks to interrogate the processes of state formation in this period and asks whether the peculiarities and specificities of these allow a useful invocation of the term ‘early modern’. I investigate this through the prism of a small region, Hugli, during the period c. 1580–1633 and approach the theme through the somewhat unusual case of a South Asian empire.

The Portuguese Estado da India is mostly regarded as a pre-modern European empire, akin to other contemporary pre-capitalist Iberian imperialisms, and distinct from its North European colonial successors. Correspondingly, contemporary Asian empires such as the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal have traditionally been studied as distinct species of the same genus, namely medieval South Asian empires. I suggest that there existed important similarities between the Portuguese and Mughal states, which allow us to contemplate certain political processes and features in the centuries immediately preceding the arrival of colonial modernity in South Asia. I argue that while they originated in entirely different worlds, these states shared broad ‘family resemblances’. These commonalities can be seen through an unusual point of contact: freelancing adventurers who moved between well-defined imperial spaces.

One of the key formulations of early modernity – as it has been defined in recent years – in South Asia has been the emergence of large and stable empires unprecedented since ancient times. It is sometimes regarded as an ‘age of empire’ between ages without empire – the unsettled fifteenth and the long eighteenth centuries. Some scholars have emphasized the assertion of regional identities as a conjunctural development of the second millennium. This leads us to a picture in which empires of impressive size and strength loomed large over discernibly strong regions. In the sphere of political economy, early modernity has been characterized by regional players having a great say in determining imperial structures – something that vastly diminished in times to come. This becomes especially visible in peripheral areas, far removed from the core imperial zones. Here, we find a political scene crowded with numerous political players whose activities shaped empires from the margins.