Map - Sultanpur district (Sultānpur)

Sultanpur district is a district in the Awadh region of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. This district is a part of Faizabad division (officially Ayodhya division) in Uttar Pradesh. The administrative headquarters of the district is Sultanpur city. The total area of Sultanpur district is 2672.89 Sq. km.

As of 2011, Sultanpur district has a population of 2,249,036 people.

At the time of the Ain-i-Akbari, the area now covered by Sultanpur district was divided between the sarkars of Awadh, Lucknow, and Jaunpur, all in the subah of Awadh, as well as the sarkar of Manikpur in the subah of Allahabad. Sultanpur itself was one of the mahals, or parganas, that made up the sarkar of Awadh; it corresponded to the later pargana of Miranpur, minus its southern portion which in Akbar's day formed part of the Kathot mahal in Manikpur. It may have also included some of the later pargana of Baraunsa, which was also called Sultanpur-Baraunsa. The mahal of Sultanpur provided a force of 7,000 infantry and 200 cavalry to the Mughal army and was assessed at a tax value of 3,832,530 dams. The rest of Baraunsa then belonged to the small mahal of Bilahri, which supplied a military force of 2,000 infantry and 50 cavalry and was assessed at 815,831 dams. Like Sultanpur, the mahal of Bilahri was held by the Bachgotis and had a brick fort at its capital. The two mahals of Kishni and Sathin (or Satanpur) were also in the sarkar of Awadh; they remained separate entities until 1750, when they were amalgamated into the pargana of Jagdishpur. The last of the mahals in the sarkar of Awadh was Thana Bhadaon, a small mahal which appears to correspond with the later pargana of Asal. There is still a village called Bhadaon in this area; it used to give its name to a tappa in pargana Sultanpur.

Two mahals in the Lucknow sarkar would later form part of Sultanpur district: Amethi and Isauli. Amethi was later transferred into the sarkar of Manikpur. In Akbar's time, Manikpur also had two mahals in the present district: Jais, which was broken up beginning sometime before 1775, and Kathot, which as mentioned above covered the southern parts of pargana Miranpur. Finally, there were two more mahals in the sarkar of Jaunpur: Chanda and Aldemau.

Sultanpur district remained split between the two subahs of Awadh and Allahabad until the late 1700s, when the latter was finally broken up. By this time, the entire district had come under the Nawabs of Awadh. Nawab Saadat Ali Khan II enacted an administrative reform that replaced the subahs and sarkars with new divisions, called nizamats and chaklas. Under this new arrangement, Sultanpur was made the seat of a large nizamat with four component chaklas: Sultanpur, Aldemau, Jagdishpur, and Pratapgarh. The last of these corresponds with the present-day Pratapgarh district.

From 1793 to 1856, 27 nizams held office in Sultanpur, although several of them held office twice or were only in office for a very short time. Among the more significant nizams were Sital Parshad (in office 1794–1800), Mir Ghulam Hussain (1812–14 and 1818–23), Raja Darshan Singh (1828–34 and 1837–38) and his son Raja Man Singh (1845–47), and Agha Ali Khan (the final nazim, in office from 1850 to 1856). The nizams themselves were fairly powerless to deal with the district's powerful landowners, whose power had become so entrenched that they could get away with merely paying the ordinary revenue demands and otherwise being left alone to do as they pleased.

After the British annexation of Awadh in 1856, Sultanpur remained the seat of a district, although the administrative boundaries in the region were redrawn — Aldemau, for example, now formed part of Faizabad district. Under the original British arrangement, Sultanpur district comprised 12 parganas, but this was changed in 1869: three parganas were transferred into the district from Faizabad, while five parganas were transferred out of the district. The new parganas were Isauli, Baraunsa, and Aldemau; while the ones that were removed were Subeha (which was transferred into Barabanki district), Inhauna, Rokha-Jais, Simrauta, and Mohanganj (which were all transferred into Raebareli district). The resulting setup would remain in place through the 20th century, with four tehsils: Sultanpur (including the parganas of Miranpur and Baraunsa), Amethi (including Amethi and Asal), Musafirkhana (including Musafirkhana, Isauli, Jagdishpur, and Gaura Jamun), and Kadipur (including Chanda and Aldemau).