Looking beyond the Military Revolution: Variations in Early Modern Warfare and the Mughal Case

The Military Revolution debate has dominated histories of early modern warfare for over sixty years. This essay searches for new analytical avenues by charting the nature, causes, and implications of variations in Mughal warfare in early modern South Asia. It argues that a range of factors—including environmental conditions, military pragmatism, financial considerations, and distance from the imperial heartland—caused Mughal war-making to become heterogeneous over time and across space and produced variations in strategy, tactics, and deployment of technologies. These variations affected the broader processes of Mughal war-making and empire-building. This line of investigation bears potential to influence the writing of comparative military histories and the study of early modern warfare while looking beyond the Military Revolution framework.