This dissertation studies Muslim women’s participation in the local and transregional economic life that converged in India in the early modern period, focusing primarily on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Piecing together a wide array of archives in Persian, Arabic, English, and Dutch, this dissertation argues that elite and sub-elite Muslim women from merchant and landholding households were not simply confined to the home and economically marginalized. Rather, they regularly negotiated with male kins, jurists, judges, and officials in seemingly mundane areas of Islamic law, especially inheritance and property management. In doing so, they played constitutive roles in an economy of mobility that current scholarship often presumes to be dominated by men. Muslim women’s economic life thus defies any easy conceptions of patriarchy, as patriarchal regimes of agricultural production, trade, finance, and empire-making all relied on appropriating women’s capital and labor input. This dissertation also shows how the attempts by male Muslim scholars and the British colonial state to tame women’s unruly economic practices shaped hegemonic conceptualizations of Islam in various discursive traditions. Situated at the intersection of history, gender and sexuality studies, and Islamic studies, this dissertation challenges existing gender-insensitive narratives of how trade and travel contributed to the making of global Islam.