The judging panel are pleased to announce that the winner of the ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ Book Prize 2026 is Sudev Sheth’s Bankrolling Empire: Family Fortunes and Political Transformation in Mughal India (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Bankrolling Empire is a large and ambitious study of a family of Gujarati financiers and their entanglements with the Mughal Empire, which resolves a long-standing debate over the empire’s dependency on indigenous financiers, demonstrating how those who owned and mobilised capital shaped one of the largest and richest empires the world had ever seen. It brings historical debates to life through vivid accounts of the relationships, manoeuvrings, violent struggles, and bejeweled fashions of the rich and powerful of the period. The ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ judges felt that the archival ambition was the book’s chief strength, notably how it draws on unconventional primary sources in Asian and European languages presented in English translation for the first time, using these to plug some of the gaps in the written record of the Mughal empire.
Honourable mentions:
Although all the books were extremely interesting and valuable in their own ways, the judges also wanted to mention two further excellent books specifically:
Anuradha Sajjanhar’s The New Experts: Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises in Modi’s India (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offered remarkable insights into the marriage between data-driven technocrats and rightwing populists in contemporary India. An engaging organizational ethnography and perceptive interviews with a range of key influencers and agenda-setters makes this crucial reading for understanding the politics of policymaking in BJP-run India.
Arsalan Khan’s The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan (Cornell University Press, 2024) is an unusually beautiful book, a thoughtful and empathetic account of the life-worlds and practices of the followers of the Tablighi Jamaat, one of the largest religious movements in the world.