Contents: Preface and Acknowledgements.1. Introduction/Ebba Koch. Part One: From Jahangir to Shah Jahan: 2. From Jahangir to Shah Jahan: (Dis)continuities/Corinne Lefevre. 3. Contextualizing the Majalis-iJahangiri: Mughal strategies of legitimation and integration?/Anna Kollatz. 4. No man can serve two masters: conflicting loyalties in Bengal during Shah Jahan’s rebellion of 1624/Ali Anooshahr. 5. Erasure and exaltation: the coup of 1626 and the crisis of mughal imperial authority/Munis D. Faruqui. 6. Patronage as power, power in appropriation: constructing Jahangir’s mausoleum/Mehreen Chida-Razvi. Part Two: At the Court of Shah Jahan: 7. The politics of ceremonial in Shah Jahan’s court/Harit Joshi. 8. Presents given to and by Jahangir and Shah Jahan: a comparison/Stephan Popp. 9. How to obtain a Farman from Shah Jahan: the experience of Joan Tack at Delhi, 1648/Roman Siebertz. Part Three: Poetry and Court Rhetoric: 10. The death of the last mughal poet Laureate: Court Poetry under Shah Jahan/Sunil Sharma.11. Dibacha-nigari at the court of Shah Jahan: politics and literary culture/Chander Shekhar. Part Four: Architecture, Legal Practice, Ornament and Painting: 12. Palaces, gardens and property rights under Shah Jahan: architecture as a window into mughal legal custom and practice/Ebba Koch. 13. The Tomb of Madani at Srinagar, Kashmir: a case study of tile revetments in the reign of Shah Jahan/Susan Stronge.14. Dating the Dara Shukuh Album: The floral evidence/J.P. Losty. Part Five: Epilogue: 15. Modelling kingship: Shah Jahan in the Afghan imagination/R.D. McChesney. The reign of Shah Jahan (1628–58) is widely regarded as the golden age of the Mughal empire, yet it is one of the least studied periods of Mughal history. In this volume, 14 eminent scholars with varied historical interests-political, social, economic, legal, cultural, literary and art-historical-present for the first time a multidisciplinary analysis of Shah Jahan and his predecessor Jahangir (r. 1605–27). Corinne Lefèvre, Anna Kollatz, Ali Anooshahr, Munis Faruqui and Mehreen Chida-Razvi study the various ways in which the events of the transition between the two reigns found textual expression in Jahangir’s and Shah Jahan’s historiography, in subaltern courtly writing, and in art and architecture. Harit Joshi and Stephan Popp throw light on the emperor’s ceremonial interaction with his subjects and Roman Siebertz enumerates the bureaucratic hurdles which foreign visitors had to face when seeking trade concessions from the court. Sunil Sharma analyses the new developments in Persian poetry under Shah Jahan’s patronage and Chander Shekhar identifies the Mughal variant of the literary genre of prefaces. Ebba Koch derives from the changing ownership of palaces and gardens insights about the property rights of the Mughal nobility and imperial escheat practices. Susan Stronge discusses floral and figural tile revetments as a new form of architectural decoration and J.P. Losty sheds light on the changes in artistic patronage and taste that transformed Jahangiri painting into Shahjahani. R.D. McChesney shows how Shah Jahan’s reign cast such a long shadow that it even reached the late 19th- and early 20th- century rulers of Afghanistan. This creatively conceived collection of articles invites us to see in Mughal India of the first half of the 17th century a structural continuity in which the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan emerge as a unit, an inspired reconceptualization of the Mughal empire as visualized by Akbar on the basis of what Babur and Humayun had initiated. This age seized the imagination of contemporaries and, in a world as yet unruptured by an intrusive colonial modernity, Shah Jahan’scourt was regarded as the paradigm of civility, progress and development.