Nader Shah, the Delhi Loot, and the 18th-Century Exotics of Empire

The famous plunder of Delhi that followed the 1739 defeat of the Mughals at the Battle of Karnal by Nader Shah (r. 1736–1747) represents, in retrospect, the last world-conquering design to have risen from the Islamicate world before the 20th century. This chapter argues that Nader Shah’s building projects, initiated after the Indian campaign, introduced a self-consciously historicized articulation of an Indo-Persian empire in the 18th century. His venture, echoing those of Timur in his post-Indian conquest, included looting of building materials and technologies that were made available by hundreds of Indian craftsmen and artists taken as booty and assigned to work with locals to make a spectacularly hybrid monument as the centerpiece of an urban retreat at a natural fortress famed as Kalat-e Naderi in northeastern Iran. Nader Shah’s patronage represents an unexpectedly un-European visualization of the exotics of empire on the eve of colonial expansions.