Iqtidar Alam Khan is a retired professor of history from Aligarh Muslim University in Aligarh, India. He was the General President of the Indian History Congress' 59th session held at Bangalore in 1997.

Speculation has often outrun research in that staple of South Asian military historiography, the introduction and spread of gunpowder weapons in the subcontinent. Not so in the work of Iqtidar Alam Khan. His new book, Gunpowder and Firearms: Warfare in Medieval India, sets the capstone on more than three decades of assiduous study. Khan, who recently retired from Aligarh Muslim University, offers a solid survey of the textual evidence for the introduction, spread, and military consequences of gunpowder and firearms in India, based on critical readings of sources in several languages and a careful review of modern English-language works. Nearly half of the twenty-page bibliography lists Persian and Asian primary sources, plus European travelers' accounts. On questions associated with the diffusion of gunpowder weaponry in India, Khan's conclusions seem unassailable.

Khan's views on the larger consequences of gunpowder weaponry seem equally valid. He argues that gunpowder weapons contributed vitally to the formation of regional states in fifteenth-century India before they became crucial factors in the establishment and expansion of the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the battlefield use and effects of gunpowder weapons, however, his text-based conclusions seem less persuasive, especially with regard to such matters as the accuracy of matchlock muskets, their extensive use by Mughal cavalry, and their large role in rural resistance to Mughal rule. Such caveats should not, however, detract from the overall importance of this erudite work.

Khan belongs to a generation that has radically altered the study of South Asian military history by dispelling the clouds of mythology and British imperialist propaganda that long obscured India's so-called medieval period, from the Islamic conquest to the British conquest, or roughly from 1000 to 1800. Western historians, as well as South Asian, have contributed to this historiographical transformation of medieval South Asian military history. Two such contributors, Dutch scholars Jos J. L. Gommans and Dirk H. A. Kolff, who both teach at Leiden University, have assembled a sterling collection of articles published between the 1940s and the 1990s to illustrate the range of research. The editors' introduction (pp. 1–42) is itself worth the price of admission, a splendid historiographical essay that provides both an entree to the subject and useful background for the selections presented.

Space precludes anything but a cursory description of the book's contents. The first section, "Conquest and Society," comprises three selections: M. Habib's Marxist analysis of the Muslim conquest (1949), B. N. S. Yadava on the conquest as more a failure of Hindu chivalry than a triumph of Muslim prowess (1973), and A. Wink on the tension between territorial state and religious domain in South Asia (1984). Topics addressed in the second section, "Military Labour Market," include V. N. Rao et al. on the uneven effects of the spread of gunpowder weaponry in South India (1992), C. E. Bosworth on the military organization of an Indo-Iranian state (1963), W. G. Orr on armed religious ascetics in northern India (1940), Kolff on Mughal military recruitment and the seasonal nature of warfare (1990), M. A. Ali on Mughal military organization (1997), and S. Alavi on the East India Company's co-optation of indigenous military institutions (1993).

The final part, "Military Revolutions," includes a discussion by S. Digby of the sources of military power in the Delhi Sultanate (1971), I. A. Khan on the early use of gunpowder weapons in India (1981), D. Streusand on the differential character of Mughal field and siege operations (1989), and Gommans on indigenous versus European innovations in eighteenth-century North Indian warfare (1995). Even so brief a survey will suggest the range of topics and viewpoints, some contradictory, that enliven the present scene and contribute to vital intellectual endeavor.