It was the age of exploration, the age of empire and conquest, and human beings were extending their reach - and their numbers - as never before. In the process, they were intervening in the world's natural environment in equally unprecedented and dramatic ways. A sweeping work of environmental history, "The Unending Frontier" offers a truly global perspective on the profound impact of humanity on the natural world in the early modern period. John F. Richards identifies four broadly shared historical processes that speeded environmental change from roughly 1500 to 1800 c.e.: intensified human land use along settlement frontiers; biological invasions; commercial hunting of wildlife; and problems of energy scarcity. "The Unending Frontier" considers each of these trends in a series of case studies, sometimes of a particular place, such as Tokugawa Japan and early modern England and China, sometimes of a particular activity, such as the fur trade in North America and Russia, cod fishing in the North Atlantic, and whaling in the Arctic. Throughout, Richards shows how humans - whether clearing forests or draining wetlands, transporting bacteria, insects, and livestock; hunting species to extinction, or reshaping landscapes - altered the material well-being of the natural world along with their own.

The Mughal empire was one of the largest centralised states in pre-modern world history. It was founded in the early 1500s and by the end of the following century the Mughal emperor ruled almost the entire Indian subcontinent with a population of between 100 and 150 millions. The Mughal emperors displayed immense wealth and the ceremonies, music, poetry, and exquisitely executed paintings and objects of the imperial court created a distinctive aristocratic high culture. In this volume, Professor John Richards traces the history of this magnificent empire from its creation in 1526 to its breakup in 1720. He stresses the dynamic quality of Mughal territorial expansion, their institutional innovation in land revenue, coinage and military organisation, ideological change and the relationship between the emperors and Islam. Professor Richards also analyses institutions particular to the Mughal empire, such as the jagir system, and explores Mughal India's links with the early modern world.