The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (review)

The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. By Peter Jackson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 367 pp. $64.95

Meticulously analyzing the few surviving literary histories produced by officials of the Delhi Sultanate (1210-1526), Jackson reconstructs this court's Muslim worldview during its first two centuries. These Persian language sources recount a multitude of military expeditions by several dynasties, seeking to extend their power and Islam over the various regions of India. Much of Jackson's book consists of exacting efforts to reconcile often "vague and contradictory" histories into a chronological master narrative (97). Nevertheless, he punctuates his work with insightful discussions of the possible motives of the warlords and their historians, of such key institutions of the Sultanate as slavery and religion, and of the historiography of secondary interpretations by other recent scholars.

Focusing tightly on histories from the sultan's court, Jackson replicates many of their emphases, presenting a world in which Muslim power battled against "infidels" on all sides. To the west, various Mongol and Turkic peoples provided rich sources for slaves but also posed recurrent military threats. Within India, Hindu and other non-Muslim peoples had to be defeated before their hoarded temple and royal wealth could be seized, their agriculture and trade taxed, and their bodies enslaved or recruited into Sultanate armies. Although Jackson occasionally writes of Muslims and their adversaries as monolithic entities, he also demonstrates through detailed analysis how diverse and faction-ridden the Sultanate's court and armies proved. The ideology of his sources tends to bifurcate the world into Muslim and "infidel," but the practices that Jackson extracts from them proved highly complex.

We are fortunate to have two fine recent studies of the early Delhi Sultanate. Jackson's joins André Wink, Al-Hind, the Making of the Indo-Islamic World. II. The Slave Kings and the Islamic Conquest, 11th-13th Centuries (Leiden, 1997), in masterful examination of largely the same literary historical sources. Yet, the two studies differ in their emphases, and occasionally their interpretations. Wink presents a more general and thematic discussion, organized by geographical region and topic. Jackson concentrates on the sources themselves, largely following their dynastic chronology, and detailing a multitude of individuals, offices, and deeds. Historians of that time wished to record each name and title, but the plethora of names, titles, and battles, often only mentioned once, may seem like wasted detail to modern readers.

Unfortunately, Jackson never engages with Wink's book, barely mentioning it in occasional footnotes. Further, Jackson neither develops a strong overall thesis, nor has any conclusion; he simply ends with a brief epilogue sketching the Sultanate's last century.

Michael H. Fisher
Oberlin College

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