The rise of the field of nonhuman history in recent years has helped us realize that our understanding of all empires in world history has been overwhelmingly anthropocentric. The historiography of the Mughal Empire in early modern South Asia is no exception to this. The present article takes stock of the importance of nonhuman animals in different fields of the imperial experience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By foregrounding their roles in warfare, economy, kingship, and culture, I underline the nature of involvement of various species in the working of the empire, thereby bringing out the multispecies nature of this polity. I also reflect briefly on the means and limits of human control over nonhuman animals, and on the question of animal agency. Finally, I discuss the impact that smaller nonhumans—insects and germs—had on the populations of the empire to reveal the limits of human control over nonhuman species.
