André Wink. The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, c. 700–1800 CE.

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Among the polities and cultures of Islam, the realms east of Baghdad have received increasing attention since the publication of Marshall Hodgson’s monumental Venture of Islam (1975), which offered an unprecedented panorama of the histories of the three “great empires” of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Since then, historians have continuously reshaped the geographic frame of analysis beyond the boundaries of the contemporary national states in which the histories of these empires had heretofore been written, whether the “Balkans to Bengal” complex proposed by Shahab Ahmed or the “Persianate Cosmopolis” described by Richard Eaton. An inventive and exciting attempt in this vein is promised in the work under consideration, itself a distillation of the author’s monumental Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (1990–), a five-volume history (three so far completed) of what the author has described as the Indo-Islamic world. The frame is not limited (as is conventional) to the Indian subcontinent but aims to integrate the diverse landscapes around the Bay of Bengal and maritime Southeast Asia. Wink argues that the region was recognized as integrally comprised of Indias of various numbers and designations by Hellenic, Arabic, and European geographers, and marked, before the advent of Islam c. 700 CE, by Hindu and Buddhist polities. It was defined by two great frontiers: one, an arid zone dominated by nomads from central to south-central Asia (present-day Afghanistan), and the other, more amorphous maritime frontier of the Indian Ocean. Dominated by these zones of fluidity and mobility lay the settled agrarian inland and island states of the region. The nomadic conquest of the subcontinent in the early second millennium and the seaborne expansion of itinerant traders led to the birth of postnomadic Islamic subcontinental polities and commercially oriented maritime Muslim kingdoms; both these great frontiers closed with the consolidation of colonial power in the region by the beginning of the nineteenth century.