Volume I In this volume, Andre Wink analyzes the beginning of the process of momentous and long-term change that came with the Islamization of the regions that the Arabs called al-Hind--India and large parts of its Indianized hinterland. In the seventh to eleventh centuries, the expansion of Islam had a largely commercial impact on al-Hind. In the peripheral states of the Indian subcontinent, fluid resources, intensive raiding and trading activity, as well as social and political fluidity and openness produced a dynamic impetus that was absent in the densely settled...

In this volume, Andre Wink analyzes the beginning of the process of momentous and long-term change that came with the Islamization of the regions that the Arabs called al-Hind--India and large parts of its Indianized hinterland. In the seventh to eleventh centuries, the expansion of Islam had a largely commercial impact on al-Hind. In the peripheral states of the Indian subcontinent, fluid resources, intensive raiding and trading activity, as well as social and political fluidity and openness produced a dynamic impetus that was absent in the densely settled agricultural...

During the early medieval Islamic expansion in the seventh to eleventh centuries, al-Hind (India and its Indianized hinterland) was characterized by two organizational modes: the long-distance trade and mobile wealth of the peripheral frontier states, and the settled agriculture of the heartland. These two different types of social, economic, and political organization were successfully fused during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and India became the hub of world trade. During this period, the Middle East declined in importance, Central Asia was unified under the Mongols, and Islam...