Following the great upheavals wrought by the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there emerged the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal dynasties in the Near East, Iran and India. The ‘Islamic’ empires they founded would go on to rank among the wealthiest and most powerful regimes of the early modern world. Supported by an array of provincial and local elites, they were at the zenith of their power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, spanning a region that extended from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal, from the Yemen to the Crimea. Their populations were producers, consumers, importers and exporters of goods critical for global trade; their location accorded them a vital role in the flow of ideas and information; there was a remarkable flowering of the arts in the period; and conversion to the region’s dominant religion, Islam, continued apace, breaching new frontiers. By the eighteenth century, however, the empires had been reduced to a shadow of their former selves, with power monopolised by a kaleidoscope of smaller regimes vying with each other for supremacy. This struggle paved the way for the region’s later subordination to Europe’s global empires, and the creation of today’s Middle East and South Asia.