An original and deeply researched work on a key period of Javanese history, by a world expert.

The book examines major developments and recent trends in the historiography of the Mughal Empire and post-Mughal state systems. The aim is to integrate the research of the past twenty to thirty years in a theoretical framework in order to achieve a better understanding of the transition period of the late 17th and early 18th century in India. The book outlines organizational structures and power relationships in the Mughal Empire and accounts for the redistribution of power on the Indian subcontinent in the context of long-term stuctural change in the Indian Ocean region. Rather than signalling social stagnation and decay, the decline of the imperial order and the transformation of the political system appear to reflect a process in which the state dynamically adjusted to changes in Indian society and economy. By integrating new social groups and incorporating various new technical means of resources mangagement, the state significantly enhanced its organizational power and its capacity for social control.

The spread of Islam eastward into South and Southeast Asia was one of the most significant cultural shifts in world history. As it expanded into these regions, Islam was received by cultures vastly different from those in the Middle East, incorporating them into a diverse global community that stretched from India to the Philippines. In Islam Translated, Ronit Ricci uses the Book of One Thousand Questions—from its Arabic original to its adaptations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries—as a means to consider connections that linked Muslims across divides of distance and culture. Examining the circulation of this Islamic text and its varied literary forms, Ricci explores how processes of literary translation and religious conversion were historically interconnected forms of globalization, mutually dependent, and creatively reformulated within societies making the transition to Islam.