Each of the Islamic empires of West and South Asia – the Safavid, the Ottoman, and the Mughal – had a unique history, but the three had many features in common. They were all built on the combined heritage of past Middle Eastern imperial Islamic societies and the heritage of Inner Asian, Mongolian, and Turkic political institutions. In the Iranian tradition government was entrusted to hereditary rulers. The Turkish conception of society was based on military competition. Rulership in Turkish society was achieved by victory in battle and was maintained by active struggle against rivals. In the three empires, Iranian traditions of kingship, social hierarchy, and justice were combined with Turkish concepts of mythical heroes and glorious ancestors.

Whereas Mongol and Timurid precedents called for partitioning an empire among the sons of the ruler and allowed them to fight one another for power, the Safavids, Ottomans, and Mughals established, with some exceptions, a routinized dynastic succession. Each empire was built around a patrimonial or household government, elements of a centralized bureaucracy, a quasi-feudal assignment of tax revenues to support the military and to carry on local administration, and finally the extensive farming out of tax collection and other governmental functions to create patronage networks that bound soldiers, provincial officials, and local notables to the central government. All three empires had the support of royal armies (sometimes slave military forces and sometimes lower-class recruits), bureaucratic personnel, provincial feudal and tribal notables, landowners, merchants, and religious elites. There were important differences in the weight and balancing of the several bases of imperial power. The Ottomans probably had the most centralized regime; the Mughals were notably more patrimonial and less bureaucratic; the Safavid regime, the most patrimonial, was dependent on religious prestige and on the support of administrative and tribal notables. From the fourteenth century, the Ottomans relied on slave military forces; the Safavids introduced such forces in the sixteenth century, but the Mughals by and large depended on freeborn Muslims and Hindus.