The introduction sketches the history of literary internationalism in the communist East. Throughout much of Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East, modern socialist and anticolonial revolutionary movements have drawn on a shared non-European political, intellectual, and artistic culture whose canonical forms and models were born in Persian. For this reason, throughout the twentieth century, the fate of Persianate culture was deeply intertwined with the fate of communist internationalism in Eurasia. This introduction establishes the basis for the book’s basic conceptual categories: Persianate, Eastern, transnational, multinational, international, and world poetics. The Persianate functions in this book as a repertory of cultural forms rather than a civilizational unity. The distinction between transnational and international is also crucial to the book that narrates the process by which a transnational cosmopolitanism of ordinary people was replaced by an international friendship between nations performed by an elite corps of literary representatives and the practical commons of Persianate forms turned into the reified political unity of the revolutionary East. For this process, the introduction provides a periodization based on generations of Eastern internationalist writers, each illustrated by several short biographical examples.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

The book’s first section, “Connections,” maps the connections between modern Iranian and South Asian litterateurs. This Indo-Iranian exchange had a crucial impact on intellectuals modernizing the Persianate heritage. The intellectual networks they formed facilitated the exchange of ideas and scholarship, making possible the shared project of Persianate modernity described in the following chapters. This preliminary section demonstrates that South Asians were well-integrated into Iranian intellectual and literary circles.

The Introduction situates the issues discussed in the manuscript within the existing historiography of Iranian and South Asian Studies and provides an overview of the "Persianate" framework, focusing on Persian and Urdu languages and literatures. The central arguments of the book are presented: that Urdu should be seen as a continuation of the Persian tradition in India, and furthermore that Urdu played a crucial role for Iranians seeking to modernize the Persianate heritage. Therefore, Urdu is vital to the story of the emergence of Persian literary history. This argument disrupts the conventional, dominant view that Persian heavily influenced Urdu, but Urdu had no impact on Persian. The chapter concludes with an outline of the rest of the book.

This chapter shows how the judicial reforms of Governor Warren Hastings in 1772 attempted to recentre sovereign authority in the British settlement of Calcutta byco-opting and recasting late Mughal venues and practices of petitioning and dispute resolution. It explores how Hastings attempted to found the Company's legal system, not just on 'religious' forms of Muslim and Hindu law, but on Mughal practices of revenue administration. Even after 1772, the chief revenue office in Calcutta (khalisa sharifa or ‘khalsa’) – retained an important role as a site for investigating disputes over land and revenues, and for discovering a new form of ‘civil law’ based on the Company’s interpretations of late Mughal precedents.

This chapter explores how inheritance disputes involving landholders (zamindars) in early colonial Bengal became a site for the production of a Persianate form of Hindu law. By tracing in detail the process of judicial investigation in two complex cases of of zamindari inheritance involving elite Hindu zamindars, the chapter shows how British officials drew on the expert knowledge of khalsa revenue officials (especially qanungos) and of brahman pandits (experts on dharmashastra), and how the Company government tried to justify its judicial decrees on the basis of a reconstituted form of Mughal law. The records of judicial inquiries into zamindari tenures reveal the Persianate context for the Company’s early administration of Hindu law, as nawabi practices for hearing and deciding disputes among tax-paying zamindars were reformulated under the Company state.

This chapter explores the late Mughal context for colonial-state-formation, focusing on Persianate practices of claimsmaking and dispute resolution in nawabi Bengal. It examines Persian accounts of Mughal and nawabi governance circulating in the orbit of the East India Company government in late eighteenth century Bengal, as well as British views of Mughal institutions, highlighting the role of late Mughal tax officials administering justice to petitioning subjects in disputes about land and taxation. It shows how the central revenue office of the Bengal nawabs, the khalisa sharifa, became a key site for the Company's colonization and transformation of Mughal, Persianate practices of legal ordering.

Sayyid Ghulam Husain Khan Tabataba’i (b. 1727) is best known as the author of the most comprehensive Persian history of eighteenth century India – the Siyar-ul-muta’akhkhirin. This chapter situates Ghulam Husain’s well-known history in the context his much less well-known political career as a late Mughal official and landholder (jagirdar). It argues that this history, sometimes read as a precociously ‘anti-colonial’ text, also constituted a kind of petition of appeal, a form of legal self-representation, designed both to defend Ghulam Husain’s family landholdings (jagirs) in Bihar as a form of hereditary property, and more broadly to persuade the East India Company government to restore the once-great Mughal system of intizam, or proper order, including Mughal practices of responsive and consultative rulership.Ghulam Husain’s history gives a petitioner’s-eye view of the Company state, showing how state-oriented late Mughal elites turned to the Company government after the destruction of the nawabi regime in an effort to secure their rights and status – drawing on the historical memory and documentary record of Mughal practices of legal entitlement.

Chapter 7 looks at the place of the recognised orientalist William Jones in the longer history of British interpretations of Hinduism sketched out in this book. It argues that his work represents a significant turning point in the formulation and reception of British accounts of Indian philosophical religion. In the first instance his religious outlook, which it identifies as closest to the Rational Dissent of late eighteenth-century Unitarianism, preferred an account of Indian religion that posited it as mystical and sublime, and therefore more malleable to Biblical scripture. This, in turn, made it particularly attractive to those seeking to redefine Britain’s relationship with India in the wake of war with Revolutionary France as one paternalist guardianship of ancient customs and traditions. At the turn of the century, British interpretations of Indian religion were thus to be stripped of any heterodox implications, and aligned with the institutionalisation of orientalist knowledge, as a branch of imperial governance.

Kingship in India, as elsewhere, was often tied to a specific set of religious beliefs and a carefully defined religious community. However, Persian kingship, as it was performed in the Islamic world, had no religious identity. It functioned on a set of ethical principles and qualities of leadership considered essential for legitimate rule. This chapter seeks to understand the processes at work that permitted the transmission of Persianate norms of governance from Central to South Asia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and how to overcome significant areas of neglect in our historical knowledge of this process.

The first chapter examines the British East India Company’s transformation into Bengal’s territorial sovereign in 1764 as an embodied history. The British men who worked for this trading monopoly adopted Persian titles that recall the polite historical protocols of Perso-Turkic-Mongol empires since the fifteenth century. These titles personified a corporate English body as an individual nobleman who was the imperial family’s only and most powerful patriarch – the ultimate mimic men. A shared ethical and linguistic orientation inspired Asian travelers and their British hosts to imagine an ethnic kinship, as mediated by the Indo-Persian political treatises that Company lexicographers had translated into conduct books for genteel Englishmen aspiring to a career in India. This trans-imperial masculinity was what empowered Asian travelers to climb social rank and challenge the Company’s claim to Mughal sovereignty as they befriended metropolitans in public showplaces – theaters, salons, and drawing rooms. The chapter proposes that orientalism and occidentalism are inadequate paradigms for understanding these travelers’ multimedia engagements in Britain.

In the late 1620s, Prince Khurram was serving his punishment posting as governor of Deccan, while his sons were held hostage at the imperial court by his own father, Emperor Jahangir. Prince Khurram, who would eventually assume the imperial Mughal throne as Shah Jahan in 1628, was being punished for armed rebellion, which had also seen him attempting to build a military and political base in the sūba (province) of Malwa, until he was chased across the country by the imperial army and eventually defeated. While embroiled in imperial high politics, Prince Khurram found the time to issue a nishān (a princely order) confirming the appointment of a man called Mohan Das to the post of qānūngō (local official maintaining tax records) of the pargana (district) Dhar.

This chapter introduces the political geography of the region called Malwa in central India: a sultanate from the thirteenth century, a Mughal province from the sixteenth, a Maratha state from the eighteenth, and a British-controlled princely state from the nineteenth. It traces the area of operations of the book's protagonists, relating that area to key commercial and military routes that traversed the region, and the petty Rajput domains that dotted and shaped the territory. The chapter serves to evoke the context of entrenched knots of military-political pwer together with the shifting of empires, within which the family of landlords staked their claims.