The Mughal Empire in South Asia and the Ottoman Empire spanning Southeast Europe, Anatolia and the Middle East each reached their peak power at roughly the same period in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, together governing an enormous share of the world's population at the time. Each empire ruled genuinely diverse populations, spanning multiple religions, ethnicities and languages, and each built administrative systems specifically designed to hold that diversity together under a single governing authority, standing as a genuine counterexample to any simple historical narrative that centres early modern global power on Europe alone.
Both empires had to actually govern religious and ethnic diversity, not just conquer it
The Mughal Empire, ruling a predominantly Hindu population under a Muslim ruling dynasty, developed administrative practices under rulers like Akbar that deliberately incorporated non-Muslim officials and extended real religious tolerance in an effort to actually govern that diversity stably rather than simply suppress it. The Ottoman Empire similarly governed a genuinely diverse population across its vast territory, developing its own administrative systems, including formally organised religious communities with real internal autonomy, specifically built to manage that diversity within one overarching imperial structure. In both cases, sheer military conquest alone couldn't have sustained such large, diverse empires without genuine administrative innovation built specifically to actually hold them together afterward.
Both empires' scale and sophistication challenge a Europe-centred picture of the period
At their respective heights, both the Mughal and Ottoman empires commanded resources, populations and administrative sophistication that rivalled or exceeded contemporary European states, producing major achievements in architecture, administration and culture that stand as genuinely significant on their own terms rather than as a footnote to European history. This is exactly why historians studying the early modern period increasingly emphasise these empires' own scale and internal complexity, treating the period as one of several simultaneously flourishing major world powers rather than a story where Europe alone was the primary centre of consequential historical development.
What we're still unsure about
That both empires reached comparable peak power in the same broad period, governing genuinely diverse populations through deliberate administrative systems, is well established, extensively documented history confirmed through both empires' own substantial administrative and architectural records. What's more genuinely a matter of ongoing historical debate is exactly how to weigh the relative significance of each empire's internal administrative innovation against external factors, trade routes, military technology, in explaining their respective periods of peak strength and subsequent decline, and historians continue to actively debate the balance of internal versus external causes for each empire's specific historical trajectory.
This sits inside The Mughal & Ottoman Empires at Their Height, one of eight topics in Early Modern History, one of seven domains in History, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.