Three of the largest early-modern empires, the Ottomans across the eastern Mediterranean, the Mughals in South Asia and the Qing in China, governed vast territories through centralised land grants, court patronage and imperial workshops and bureaucracies. Each invested heavily in capital cities: the Mughals laid out Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi) from 1639 around the Red Fort and Jama Masjid, while the Ottomans monumentalised Istanbul and the Qing rebuilt and elaborated Beijing. Imperial authority was expressed through palace complexes, congregational mosques or temples and ordered ceremonial precincts. Court order, not market forces, set the plan of these capitals.
They demonstrated the non-Western imperial capital, laid out by court decree around palace, mosque or temple, as a dominant early-modern urban form. These cities show that monumental, planned capital-building was a global phenomenon, not a European one.