Respond to ONE of these two questions below in 3-4 pages. Please read the questions carefully, and indicate CLEARLY which one you are answering. Please try to use your own words as much as possible.

1.) “In such a state of affairs and with such strength, we put our trust in God, turned our back on one hundred thousand old Uzbek enemies, and faced a ruler with a huge army and vast realm like Sultan Ibrahim.”

This passage translated from Chagatai Turkish is taken from the memoir of a young Central Asian military adventurer who came from a small kingdom from beyond the Oxus river. How did he outwit and defeat the Afghan rulers of Delhi and establish a new empire in Hindustan? What did he think about his newly adopted country?

2.) How did Akbar revive the empire his father had almost lost? How did he reorganize his nobility, his army and the collection of land revenue?

3.) How did the English East India Company become involved in the internal political affairs in India during the second half of the eighteenth century? Discuss in this context the military and political significance of the British victory at the Battle of Buxar fought in 1764.

A note on citations

You can use footnotes such as:

R. K. Narayan, Gods, Demons and Others, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1993. After the first citation you can use an abbreviated form: Narayan, Gods, Demons, pp. 23-24

Alternatively, you can use parenthetical citation, such as:

(Keay, p. 11) or (The Edicts of Asoka, Canvas, p. 24)

Guidelines

• Please try to avoid long quotes from the textbook.
• Use resources on the Internet discriminately. Remember, you can use the web for basic information, but most of these sites cannot replace the textbook, reader or class lectures on which this assignment is based.
• Reproducing material from unsolicited websites will not help you in writing this essay. Doing so without citation would amount to plagiarism.