| 摘要註: |
"My intention with this book is to make the results of my previous andongoing research more easily accessible to both specialists and a largeraudience - all those interested in the fields of world history, Islamichistory, South-Asian and Southeast-Asian, Central-Asian and Mongol history,as well as European medieval and ancient history. This is a work ofsynthesis and interpretation, short on footnotes. For a more detailedtreatment of all issues covered here and extensive footnotes,acknowledgments and bibliographies I refer the reader to my Al-Hind, boththe three volumes already published and the two final ones which will dealwith the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and are now in the process ofbeing completed.1 The challenge has always been to strike a compromisebetween clarity and complexity, not to write a comprehensive work ofhistory"-- |