Ideology, Empire, and the Cultural Climate of War

This chapter investigates the cultural climate of conquest at the Mughal court. It begins by discussing how the Mughals conceptualized the nature and meanings of kingship. It then goes on to probe the location of war and conquest within this ruling ideology. It argues that inspired by Nasirean akhlāq, the Mughals conceptualized the sovereign as a divinely-mandated instrument for establishing equilibrium, order, and—above all—justice across the world. They looked upon war as an unavoidable means of achieving this. This conceptualization of war in terms of the vague concept of justice allowed the empire a great degree of flexibility in terms of applying and legitimizing military violence. By studying different imperial narratives of war from the period under study, the chapter argues that this flexibility in turn fed a particular approach to war, whereby the empire expanded more by defeating and co-opting its adversaries than by eliminating them completely.