The general introduction reconstructs how Islamic history became a subject for European scholars. Medieval Christendom had built a badly distorted picture of Islam; the teaching of Arabic in early modern universities, the publication of texts by Dutch and English orientalists, and Pococke's compact survey of 1650 gradually displaced it, and by the time Gibbon gave nine chapters to the subject it stood alongside ancient and modern history.

The editors are candid about limits. Archives are thin, most chapters are political rather than social or economic because that is where sources and scholarship lie, and the work is offered as a report on present knowledge rather than a settled account.

The section printed here treats the Indian sub-continent: the Ghaznavid and Ghurid campaigns against the Hindu Shahi kingdoms, the sultanates that followed, and Mughal rule from Babur to Awrangzeb's wars with Rajputs and Marathas.