Did the empires of the eastern Islamic world—the Mughals and Safavids—care about the seas, and how might we imagine the Indian Ocean from the vantage point of these agrarian-bureaucratic states? Historians often argue that these empires lacked maritime archives, especially when compared to their extensive agrarian records. This talk challenges this assumption by foregrounding problems of method. Scholarship on the early modern period has relied heavily on colonial archives in Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French, reinforcing narratives of European expansion in Asia. Within these archives lie miscellaneous caches of copied and translated Persian documents that reveal everyday scribal encounters in Islamic port cities from Bandar ‘Abbas to Masulipatnam. Through cases of stolen ships and mercantile disputes across the Persian Gulf, the talk demonstrates a continuum of governance linking agrarian and maritime realms across these two empires. By emphasizing inter-Asian exchanges, it reflects on the category of the “global” without Europe.