John F. Richards, Professor of History at Duke University, and
a long-time supporter of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies,
died at home in Durham, NC on August 23, 2007 at the age of 68.
John was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2005.
John began his career as a historian of the Mughal Empire, and
later expanded his interests widely. Building from his initial
interest in Mughal India, John developed into a leading world historian
of the early modern era. His career was marked by a combination
of careful historical research and a concern for broad and innovative
new historical approaches. Though South Asia remained a central
focus of John’s academic interests throughout his career,
he was one of the leading bridge-builders across academic divides,
collaborating on a range of topics that cut across disciplines
and across regions of study. His prolific academic output was matched
by his leadership in a range of academic projects.
John received his doctoral degree in History from the University
of California, Berkeley in 1970, writing his doctoral dissertation
on Mughal rule in Golconda in the late 17 th and early 18 th centuries
under the direction of Prof. Thomas Metcalf (later published as Mughal
Administration in Golconda in 1975). This established him
as one of the leading historians of the Mughal Empire in the United
States. He published in 1993 a survey of Mughal history in the
The New Cambridge History of India Series, which remains one of
the most widely referenced surveys of Mughal history. He also edited
two critically important collections of articles on the Mughals
and their era, The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India (1987)
and Kingship and Authority in South Asia (1998).
John’s interests, however, expanded from Mughal India to
include the larger transformations that shaped the modern world.
He always insisted that the Mughal Empire should be considered
an early modern empire (rather than a “medieval” empire,
as it had often been treated previously) as its structure and influence
were intimately linked to the world-wide transformations of the
early modern era. John’s interests thus broadened to include
world trade, which led him to begin a course at Duke on the importance
of the trade in opium and narcotics in world history. He also maintained
an interest in the comparative importance of structures of state
finance, including not only those of the Mughals, but the British
colonial state as well. Perhaps most significantly, these interests
pushed him into the study of world environmental history during
the early modern period, which led first to an innovative course
on this at Duke University and ultimately to the publication of
the pathbreaking, The Unending Frontier: Environmental History
of the Early Modern World (2003).
To recount John’s important academic projects is hardly
to sum up his career. He was a man of extraordinary energy and
played an important role in the institutional structure of the
field of South Asian studies. He served for many years as Chair
of the Board of Directors of the Council of American Overseas Research
Centers, from which position he was a strong supporter of the activities
of AIPS. More directly, he played an active role in the reform
and reorganization of AIPS during some of its most difficult years.
He was also the driving force behind the establishment of the American
Institute of Afghanistan Studies and convened the inaugural meeting
of the Institute at Duke in 2003.
John was also an unfailingly generous mentor to a large number
of students and colleagues in the field. He was a man with strong
academic opinions and a love of intellectual argument. He will
be greatly missed by all who had the good fortune to know him.
