Safya Morshed

I am a postdoctoral Research Associate in Global History for the INTRECCI project exploring the link between globalisation and institutional and commercial change across Asia and Africa. I am a Mughal historian and an expert in theories of institutional development and state formation. My contribution to the project is to bring my expertise in global patterns of institutional development, especially for early modern South Asia and the Islamic World which have been studied less in a comparative framework.  I look forward to uncovering new dimensions to the history of globalisation through exploring regions and institutions which were different to those that were known in the Western world. I am especially interested in learning how global interactions and exchanges created an impetus for change within an already very diverse and interconnected commercial space.

 My work to date has sought to bring the Mughal empire into comparative debates on state formation, where my approach has included comparisons of the Mughal empire with that of the Ottoman Turkic and Qing Chinese empires. My doctoral dissertation studied the relationship between conflict and state formation in the Mughal empire, demonstrating the state faced considerable conflict pressure in the seventeenth century which resulted in a restructuring of state institutions and relationships with local groups. My published work has questioned why the Mughal empire kept reincorporating and forgiving rebellious elites, where I argue these elites were administratively important to the empire, thus the need for them restrained the state from exacting harsh punishments on rebels. My dissertation won the Gino Luzzatto Prize awarded by the European Historical Economics Society (2023) and the Best Poster Prize awarded by the Economic History Society (2021). Alongside my work on the INTRECCI project, I have been developing my dissertation into a monograph which situates the Mughal empire into a global debate on patterns of state formation.