Sindh under the Mughals: Some Glimpses from Tarikh-i-Masumi and Mazhar-iShahjahani

The Mughal period (1592-1737 CE) rightly claims to produce an abundant amount of literature on history and culture of Sindh. This article aims to highlight impacts of Mughal rule on politics, administration and society of Sindh. There were a number of official writers emerged, who endeavored for drawing a plausibly adequate picture of the Mughal administration. Their narrations have been qualified by the quality and expanse of available information. Studies of the Mughal administration in Sindh are, for the most part, relied upon notable works significantly include some indigenous historical sources. This article fundamentally based upon the two such masterpieces titled Tarikh-i-Sindh alias Tarikh-i-Masumi (c. 1593 CE) and the Mazhar-iShahjahani (c. 1634 CE). Both of these compilations offer an overview of the dynamics of the Mughal politics concerning different administrative units and offices. Besides the political history, some new aspects in terms of socioeconomic conditions are also evident on the basis of the first hand record. I anticipate that this endeavor would reveal some extent the true perception about the politics and society in Sindh under the Mughals.

The Relationship Between Usability Characteristics and Technology Acceptance Model: An Emperical Case of Web Based Transactional Systems

In today’s era of technological competitiveness, the world has witnessed an unprecedented enhancement and technological expansion in electronic market. This tough competition has made it really difficult for the firms to survive without introducing technological modifications within existing business processes and structure. Therefore, it was wise enough for the companies across the globe to invest huge part of their capital in launching web-based systems, thus making sure that more users are involved and have access to the systems globally. Nevertheless, the key factors that play the most vital role in making such systems successful, is solely the will of users as to much extent they are comfortable using these systems. If users are not willing to fully utilize given systems then this will not help firms to generate revenue on their investment. It was therefore necessary to systematically understand users’ decision making process towards acceptance of such systems. In this regard this research was aimed to design and develop a framework of influential factors that were expected to improve efficiency, acceptability and usage of web-based transactional systems. The model developed in this study was based on well-established technology acceptance model. Despite the popularity of technology acceptance model, there was not a single study, as per author’s knowledge, that has studied and extended it from usability perspective. Although usability has been considered in prior work as a dominant factor for success of the system. Little efforts, however, were devoted to the fundamental issues such as what specific usability characteristics are expected to have an impact on users’ acceptance behaviour or how the acceptance or usage of such systems would be influenced by usability features. This is so because if usability related dimensions/factors are indeed confirmed to show an effect on users’ decision behaviour, online vendors and their design team would be able to focus on those specific dimensions and to positively motivate users towards such systems’ acceptance and usage.