BADSHAH, BANDAR , BAZAAR — Commerce And Everyday Life In The Mughal World By JAGJEET LALLY

Forget the peacock throne. Forget jeweled diadems and the gossip of courts. If you really want to understand the Mughal Empire, follow the paperwork. In Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar, Jagjeet Lally upends the familiar story of emperors and edicts to show how the empire was held together not by sheer force but by contracts, coins, and the choreography of the bazaar.

What sets this book apart is not just the archive, but its wager: that power flows as much through ledgers as through lances. With vivid portraits drawn from sources as diverse as the Sikh gurus, the Jain merchant Banarasidas, and English envoys like Sir Thomas Roe, Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar breathes new life into Mughal history. It rewrites a familiar past in the language of receipts, reminding us that the empire was notarized in neighborhood courts, priced in copper, silver, and gold, and negotiated daily in bazaars whose reputations traveled farther than imperial edicts.

With an introduction by Gurcharan Das, Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar is that rare economic history with a reporter’s nose: names, places, denominations; a ledger of who paid what to whom, and why it mattered. It rewrites a familiar past in the language of receipts. The book refuses to leave commerce to abstraction. We meet sarrafs testing coins on touchstones and banias advancing credit; we walk the city that Jahanara Begum built into a brand, Chandni Chowk, with its canal and squares, where imperial patronage doubled as urban development. By the 1560s, a standardized trimetallic coinage put small purchases and large remittances on the same monetary grid; more uniform transit dues lowered the friction of moving goods across long distances.

The Mughal story, as Lally tells it, is less about crowns and conquest than about the quieter authority of documents and the steady shimmer of silver. Even in the 1750s, the global economy was still decisively tilted toward Asia. In Bengal’s silk markets, Asian merchants continued to outbid the English and Dutch, demonstrating where the real economic power lay. The book also provides a more nuanced view of the Mughal fiscal system, revealing that levies like zakat were often a modest 2.5% and adjusted to circumstances, not rigidly imposed.

Through these threads, Lally demonstrates a simple but contentious truth: that empires endure when ordinary people find them useful, and contracts often consolidate power more effectively than campaigns. And at a moment when India is re-examining the longer arcs of its economic past, this book provides a striking provocation: if you really want to see power, don’t look at the throne, look at the bazaar.

About the Author

Jagjeet Lally is Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and Colonial India at University College London, where he is also Director of the UCL Centre for Transnational and Global History and Co-Director of the UCL Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. He studied the social sciences at Oxford before training as a historian, first at the London School of Economics and then at Cambridge. A historian of South Asian economic and material life, and the author of two other books, among them the prize-winning India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World(2021), Jagjeet is now embarking on the study of late Mughal bazaars and the kinds of people and pleasures to be found within them.

Badshah, Bandar, Bazaar

Publishing October 2025 | Penguin Business