Letters from a sinking sultan - The Mughals look beyond the winds - On the end of the Akbari dispensation - The Deccan frontier and Mughal expansion, c. 1600 - Faizi's Nal-Daman and its long afterlife - Catholics and Muslims in the court of Jahangir (1608-1611) - The making of a Munshi - Trade and politics in the Arcot Nizamat (1700-1732) - Eighteenth-century historiography and the world of the Mughal Munshi - The political thought of a late eighteenth-century Mughal prince