Includes bibliographical references and index.

"My intention with this book is to make the results of my previous and ongoing research more easily accessible to both specialists and a larger audience - all those interested in the fields of world history, Islamic history, South-Asian and Southeast-Asian, Central-Asian and Mongol history, as well as European medieval and ancient history. This is a work of synthesis and interpretation, short on footnotes. For a more detailed treatment of all issues covered here and extensive footnotes, acknowledgments and bibliographies I refer the reader to my Al-Hind, both the three volumes already published and the two final ones which will deal with the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and are now in the process of being completed.1 The challenge has always been to strike a compromise between clarity and complexity, not to write a comprehensive work of history"--