1 Mirrors and Masks of Sovereignty: Imperial Governance in the Mughal World of Legal Normativism, c. 1650s–1720s by Naveen Kanalu Ramamurthy Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2021 Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Chair In the seventeenth century, the Mughal Empire in South Asia witnessed a remarkable political experiment of imperial centralization taken to its apogee, similar to global early modern trends elsewhere such as French Absolutism or Habsburg rule. The dissertation examines the Great Timurid emperor, Aurangzeb ʿAlamgir’s (r. 1658–1707) peripatetic statecraft and reconstructs how Hanafi legal canonization and juridical attitudes forged imperial governance and its everyday operations. While contemporary scholarship focuses on cosmopolitan mobility and exchange during the “first globalization” to the neglect of early modern state formations, this study turns our attention towards legal systems that made land-based empires resilient well into the eighteenth century. It illustrates how Mughal centralization was molded by layered interactions with local elites, gradations in property regimes, and flexible bureaucracies across the Indian subcontinent. It covers Rajasthan and Gujarat in the west to Kashmir in the north, large swathes of the Indo- Gangetic plains to the east and central India to the Deccan in the empire’s southern fringes. I analyze the configuration of Mughal sovereignty around the Hanafi “law of the land,” showing how the imperial canonization, Al-fatawa al-ʿalamkiriyya (“The Institutions of the World Conqueror”) formed the pivot for reforming the empire’s legal architecture. From a transregional perspective, the study articulates the Central Asian heritage of the Mughals and compares their