The Mughal Empire

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Mughal Empire's cultural peak arrived under Shah Jahan, who ruled from 1628 to 1658 and used the enormous revenue of an empire at its territorial and economic height to fund one of the most ambitious architectural programmes in world history. The Taj Mahal, built at Agra between roughly 1632 and 1653 as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, is the best known result, a white marble complex blending Persian, Central Asian and Indian architectural traditions with such precision that Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it among the most celebrated examples of Mughal art in the world, but it was one project among many. Shah Jahan also built the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid in his new capital, Shahjahanabad, the walled city that is now Old Delhi, projects that consumed the labour of thousands of artisans, including Persian and Central Asian master builders drawn by Mughal patronage. That architectural flowering rested on an administrative achievement earlier emperors, especially Akbar, had built: a revenue system sophisticated enough to fund it, a mansabdari service nobility that bound military and administrative elites, many of them Rajput Hindus and other non-Muslim nobles alongside Muslim officials, to the throne, and relative religious tolerance that let the empire draw talent and taxation from a religiously diverse subcontinent. The same fiscal and military overextension that funded Shah Jahan's monuments and Aurangzeb's subsequent wars of conquest weakened the empire within decades of its architectural high point.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When the East India Company first opened a trading post at Surat in 1613, it operated entirely at the sufferance of a Mughal Empire far stronger than any European power then present in India, trading under an imperial farman, a formal grant of permission, that could be revoked at will. William Dalrymple's The Anarchy traces how that balance inverted over the following century and a half, not through any single conquest but through the compounding effect of Mughal internal decline, which accelerated sharply after Aurangzeb's death in 1707 as succession wars, regional revolts and the rise of breakaway regional powers such as the Marathas and the Nawabs of Bengal fractured effective central authority, and Company opportunism, which stepped into exactly the power vacuums that decline created. Robert Clive's victory at the 1757 Battle of Plassey, won as much through bribery and political intrigue against Bengal's own Nawab as through battlefield tactics, delivered the Company's control of Bengal's revenue collection, still nominally under Mughal authority but in practice answering to a corporate boardroom in London. By 1765 the Mughal emperor himself, reduced to a pensioner of the very Company his ancestors would once have expelled, formally granted the East India Company the diwani, the right to collect revenue across Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, a legal fiction dressing corporate conquest in the language of imperial permission. The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, briefly became a figurehead for the 1857 Indian Rebellion against Company rule before the British Crown deposed him and abolished the Company government altogether, closing an empire whose final decades had been spent, in practice, providing legal cover for the trading company that replaced it.