Mughal hegemony and the emergence of South Asia as a “region” for regional order

The region known as South Asia today emerged as the locus for order-building only in the early modern period (~1500–1750) as a “region” of Islamicate Asia. I demonstrate this through a cognitive-strategic process based on the interactions between polities and resources within and outside of South Asia. While the practices associated with the primary institutions of warfare, great power management, diplomacy, and political economy did not meaningfully differentiate South Asia from Eurasia in the pre-Mughal millennium, the deep rules associated with them marked South Asia off from Islamicate Asia after the rise of the Mughals. The practices of these four primary institutions were co-constituted with Mughal hegemony. Unlike recent scholarship, I show that the regional level existed before the emergence of a global-scale international system. My analysis has two major theoretical implications. First, I clarify the distinction between hegemonic and imperial orders, and argue that coercive hegemony must be understood as a primary institution of an international/regional society. Since all hegemonies are not alike, I explain why some hegemonic orders are based on coercion while others mix coercion with legitimacy/acquiescence by elucidating the structural differences between Mughal and Ming/Qing hegemonies. Second, I advance the debate on balance of power versus hegemony by providing a historically grounded explanation that demonstrates why the injection of extra-regional resources into early modern South Asia produced hegemony while fostering systemic balancing behavior in Europe (post-1500). My findings raise questions related to regionalization (order-building) without regionalism (shared identities/threat perceptions), while showing that region (trans)formation effects order