Ali Akbar’s red horse – collecting Arab horses in the early modern culture of Empire.

The Islamicate world has barely featured thus far in the new academic study of collecting, collectors and collections, certainly nowhere in proportion to its vast geographical and temporal extent. My chapter contributes to this nascent bibliography with a study of the relationships between merchant brokers and court collectors in seventeenth century India, as they emerge through the case study of ‘Ali Akbar Isfahani and his provision of ‘jewels and horses’ to the Mughal emperor of India, Shah Jahan. Using ‘Ali Akbar’s career as a case study, this chapter discusses what is known, and not known, about the role of merchants as patrons and brokers, providing in the process a survey of the existing literature. The second part of this chapter addresses is the place of the horse in collections as an animate ‘collectable.' The study of a particular 'red' horse supplied by ‘Ali Akbar to Shah Jahan queries and disrupts some of Asian art’s more established taxonomies and argues for a less object-centric, more holistic view of what was collected, by whom, how and why, in early modern Eurasia.