REVIEW ARTICLE 91 them the jagirdars and mansabdars formed the vital link between the state and the economy. The Aligarh historians also believed in the existence of a powerful and coercive centre at its apex with substantial revenue/fiscal flows from the periphery and hence the capacity of the centre to penetrate to all levels of society. This approach can be broadly termed as the 'centre-oriented approach13 which is different from the 'bureaucratic-despotism', 'patrimonial-bureaucratic' and the 'gun powder' theories. In our review we are not concerned with these theories as they do not fit into the medieval Indian reality. For example, the patrimonial state (of the Weberian model) restricts Mughal history to mere palace politics (see the introduction of the book under review). Nevertheless both the Aligarh framework and the other approaches apparently seem to meet on various grounds. For they believed in the bureaucratic formation of the empire and the overreaching role of the centre over the periphery. The 1970s saw the influence of the American sociologists' segmentary state approach (transposed African model) in the study of the Indian state.4 Their approach is very different from the centre-oriented approach in the sense that they rejected state-induced penetration into the periphery. They argued that the relationship between the centre and the periphery is not political but a ritual one. With the increasing distance between the centre and the periphery the role of the centre decreased. However the relationship between the two now got legitimised only by the ritual obligation of the periphery to the centre.5 According to the segmentary state approach, society is segmented into village, locality, supra-locality and finally the kingdom. In this pyaramidical structure each segment is in opposition to the other.6 So far this approach has been restricted to the analysis of South Indian history, with the possible exception of the book under review. It is in this background we propose to locate the work of Streusand. Douglas E. Streusand's book. The Formation of the Mughal Empire is focussed on the nature and development of the Mughal polity between 1556 and 1582. The precedents of the empire, both Islamic and Indian, the mechanisms of expansion and therefore the formation of the empire, the incorporation of various heterogenous groups into the military and fiscal hierarchy of the empire and the nature of sovereignty forms the crux of his book. More importantly the author questions the very central character of the Mughal empire and its crisis and also the compromises during the reign of Akbar. There is absolutely no doubt that Akbar introduced a set of new administrative institutions and practices, a new military system, norms of political behaviour, and a new conception of kingship. Streusand sees four levels of transformation: the increasing central power, acceptance of Akbar as sovereign and of the Mughal constitution, the development of the military-based mansabdari