Gagan D S Sood
Biographic Data
| ID | 1248088 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gagan D S Sood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gagan D S |
| FAMILY NAME | Sood |
| SIGNATURE | SOOD G D S |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3489-4877 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Sudev Sheth. Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India
Sudev Sheth. Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India. Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 379. Paper $39.99
A political sociology of empire: Mughal historians on the making of Mughal paramountcy
In this article, Mughal understandings of their own past are reconstructed from the standpoint of Mughal paramountcy in around 1700. That was the moment of the empire's greatest territorial reach, when it knew no peer nor threat. To reconstruct contemporary understandings of how this situation came about, histories of the Mughal empire composed by governing officials of the time are analysed using a novel approach rooted in a particular distincti…
Knowledge of the Art of Governance: The Mughal and Ottoman Empires in the Early Seventeenth Century
This article seeks to reconstruct the prevailing concepts, images and principles that framed sovereign governance in the Mughal and Ottoman empires in the early seventeenth century. Little is known about the subject. To help fill the gap, two contemporaneous advice-to-kings treatises—one Mughal by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlavī, one Ottoman by Koçi Bey—are analysed in juxtaposition. Such an analysis, never previously undertaken, is motivated and guided by …
India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange
Based on the chance survival of a remarkable cache of documents, India and the Islamic Heartlands recaptures a vanished and forgotten world from the eighteenth century spanning much of today's Middle East and South Asia. Gagan Sood focuses on ordinary people - traders, pilgrims, bankers, clerics, brokers, scribes, among others - who were engaged in activities marked by large distances and long silences. By elucidating their everyday lives in a ra…
Sovereign Justice in Precolonial Maritime Asia: The Case of the Mayor's Court of Bombay, 1726–1798
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, remarkable developments in the realm of law were witnessed throughout the world. They expressed and paved the way for a new type of dispensation. For those parts of Asia and the Middle East with a substantial European presence, the legitimate rules, principles, and procedures for resolving disputes were progressively assimilated into systems of state-sanctioned legal pluralism. The process—at once gra…
Circulation and Exchange in Islamicate Eurasia: A Regional Approach to the Early Modern World
Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World
The Informational Fabric of Eighteenth-Century India and the Middle East: Couriers, Intermediaries and Postal Communication
Mundane knowledge of how information flows is essential for a proper understanding of large organisations and complex activities. It gives us valuable insights into the prevailing constraints of the era and the creative responses that enabled the demands of its cosmopolitan residents to be met. Though the sinews of communication have been a major topic of historical inquiry in recent decades, the focus has been decidedly uneven; much of the atten…
Whence India's Present
When power and identity mix, the result is a potent brew. Add differing flavours of the past and the concoction may well threaten to bubble over. The struggle over power, contested identities, and opposed interpretations of the past underlies some of the most challenging and seemingly intractable problems facing today. With so rich and long a history, there have always been a welter of divergent views on the past on offer in the country, and they…
Correspondence is equal to half a meeting: The Composition and Comprehension of Letters in Eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia
This article details the social and cultural mechanisms by which correspondence in Arabic- and Latin-script languages was written, understood and preserved in mid-eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia. Aside from two major differences in letter-writing culture, which were embodied in the choice of script, the resident communities of Islamic Eurasia approached correspondence in a similar fashion. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no correlation between …
Circulation and Exchange in Islamicate Eurasia: A Regional Approach to the Early Modern World
The Informational Fabric of Eighteenth-Century India and the Middle East: Couriers, Intermediaries and Postal Communication
Mundane knowledge of how information flows is essential for a proper understanding of large organisations and complex activities. It gives us valuable insights into the prevailing constraints of the era and the creative responses that enabled the demands of its cosmopolitan residents to be met. Though the sinews of communication have been a major topic of historical inquiry in recent decades, the focus has been decidedly uneven; much of the atten…
Correspondence is equal to half a meeting: The Composition and Comprehension of Letters in Eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia
This article details the social and cultural mechanisms by which correspondence in Arabic- and Latin-script languages was written, understood and preserved in mid-eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia. Aside from two major differences in letter-writing culture, which were embodied in the choice of script, the resident communities of Islamic Eurasia approached correspondence in a similar fashion. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no correlation between …
A political sociology of empire: Mughal historians on the making of Mughal paramountcy
In this article, Mughal understandings of their own past are reconstructed from the standpoint of Mughal paramountcy in around 1700. That was the moment of the empire's greatest territorial reach, when it knew no peer nor threat. To reconstruct contemporary understandings of how this situation came about, histories of the Mughal empire composed by governing officials of the time are analysed using a novel approach rooted in a particular distincti…
Knowledge of the Art of Governance: The Mughal and Ottoman Empires in the Early Seventeenth Century
This article seeks to reconstruct the prevailing concepts, images and principles that framed sovereign governance in the Mughal and Ottoman empires in the early seventeenth century. Little is known about the subject. To help fill the gap, two contemporaneous advice-to-kings treatises—one Mughal by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlavī, one Ottoman by Koçi Bey—are analysed in juxtaposition. Such an analysis, never previously undertaken, is motivated and guided by …
Sovereign Justice in Precolonial Maritime Asia: The Case of the Mayor's Court of Bombay, 1726–1798
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, remarkable developments in the realm of law were witnessed throughout the world. They expressed and paved the way for a new type of dispensation. For those parts of Asia and the Middle East with a substantial European presence, the legitimate rules, principles, and procedures for resolving disputes were progressively assimilated into systems of state-sanctioned legal pluralism. The process—at once gra…
Whence India's Present
When power and identity mix, the result is a potent brew. Add differing flavours of the past and the concoction may well threaten to bubble over. The struggle over power, contested identities, and opposed interpretations of the past underlies some of the most challenging and seemingly intractable problems facing today. With so rich and long a history, there have always been a welter of divergent views on the past on offer in the country, and they…
Correspondence is equal to half a meeting: The Composition and Comprehension of Letters in Eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia
This article details the social and cultural mechanisms by which correspondence in Arabic- and Latin-script languages was written, understood and preserved in mid-eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia. Aside from two major differences in letter-writing culture, which were embodied in the choice of script, the resident communities of Islamic Eurasia approached correspondence in a similar fashion. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no correlation between …
Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World
The Informational Fabric of Eighteenth-Century India and the Middle East: Couriers, Intermediaries and Postal Communication
Mundane knowledge of how information flows is essential for a proper understanding of large organisations and complex activities. It gives us valuable insights into the prevailing constraints of the era and the creative responses that enabled the demands of its cosmopolitan residents to be met. Though the sinews of communication have been a major topic of historical inquiry in recent decades, the focus has been decidedly uneven; much of the atten…
Circulation and Exchange in Islamicate Eurasia: A Regional Approach to the Early Modern World
Sovereign Justice in Precolonial Maritime Asia: The Case of the Mayor's Court of Bombay, 1726–1798
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, remarkable developments in the realm of law were witnessed throughout the world. They expressed and paved the way for a new type of dispensation. For those parts of Asia and the Middle East with a substantial European presence, the legitimate rules, principles, and procedures for resolving disputes were progressively assimilated into systems of state-sanctioned legal pluralism. The process—at once gra…
India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange
Based on the chance survival of a remarkable cache of documents, India and the Islamic Heartlands recaptures a vanished and forgotten world from the eighteenth century spanning much of today's Middle East and South Asia. Gagan Sood focuses on ordinary people - traders, pilgrims, bankers, clerics, brokers, scribes, among others - who were engaged in activities marked by large distances and long silences. By elucidating their everyday lives in a ra…
Knowledge of the Art of Governance: The Mughal and Ottoman Empires in the Early Seventeenth Century
This article seeks to reconstruct the prevailing concepts, images and principles that framed sovereign governance in the Mughal and Ottoman empires in the early seventeenth century. Little is known about the subject. To help fill the gap, two contemporaneous advice-to-kings treatises—one Mughal by ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Dihlavī, one Ottoman by Koçi Bey—are analysed in juxtaposition. Such an analysis, never previously undertaken, is motivated and guided by …
A political sociology of empire: Mughal historians on the making of Mughal paramountcy
In this article, Mughal understandings of their own past are reconstructed from the standpoint of Mughal paramountcy in around 1700. That was the moment of the empire's greatest territorial reach, when it knew no peer nor threat. To reconstruct contemporary understandings of how this situation came about, histories of the Mughal empire composed by governing officials of the time are analysed using a novel approach rooted in a particular distincti…
Sudev Sheth. Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India
Sudev Sheth. Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India. Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 379. Paper $39.99
History (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Islamic Studies and History (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · History (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Ancient history (4 works) · Geography (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Sociology (4 works)