R3.2 The Mughal Empire and the British East India Company (1526–1858)

The Mughal Empire ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century and was one of the largest and richest states in the world. Its decline opened the way for a British trading company to become the ruler of India, until a great rebellion in 1857 led the British state to take over direct rule.

The timeline of 1526–1858 shows two connected stories. The first is the rise and decline of an Indian empire founded by Central Asian conquerors. The second is the rise of a European company that began as a group of merchants seeking spices and cloth and ended as the ruler of most of the subcontinent. The two meet in the eighteenth century, when the Company’s officials still claimed to act in the Mughal emperor’s name.

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North India before the Mughals

In the early sixteenth century north India was ruled by the Delhi Sultanate under the Lodi dynasty, an Afghan family that had held Delhi since 1451. The sultan Ibrahim Lodi (r. 1517–1526) tried to strengthen his authority over the great Afghan nobles, who saw themselves as partners of the ruler and resented his demands. Several of them rebelled, including Daulat Khan Lodi, the governor of the Punjab.

Outside the sultanate, power was divided. Rajput kingdoms led by Rana Sanga of Mewar dominated Rajasthan; independent sultanates ruled Gujarat, Malwa and Bengal; and the Deccan was split between the Bahmani successor states and the Hindu empire of Vijayanagara. Later Mughal histories claimed that Daulat Khan and Rana Sanga invited Babur to attack Ibrahim. The claim is contested, but it shows that rivals of the Lodis were ready to use an outsider for their own purposes.

Babur’s background

Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530) was a prince of Ferghana in Central Asia. On his father’s side he descended from Timur, the Turkic conqueror who had sacked Delhi in 1398, and on his mother’s side from Chinggis Khan; the dynasty called itself Timurid, and "Mughal" is a later Persian and Indian name for it, from "Mongol". Driven out of Ferghana and Samarkand by the Uzbek Shaybanids, Babur took Kabul in 1504 and made it his base.

From Kabul, Babur raided the Punjab several times from 1519. He wrote about his life in a Turki memoir, the Baburnama, which is one of the main sources for the founding of the empire. He also learned from the Ottomans and Safavids how to use field guns and matchlock muskets, which most Indian armies did not yet use in pitched battle.

Babur and the First Battle of Panipat, 1526–1530

Babur crossed the Indus in December 1525 with an army that his officers counted at about 12,000 men, servants included. Ibrahim Lodi met him at Panipat, north of Delhi, on 21 April 1526 with a much larger army, which Babur’s informants estimated at 100,000 men and about 1,000 elephants. These figures come from the victor’s memoir and are probably exaggerated, but historians agree that the Mughals were heavily outnumbered.

Why Babur won at Panipat

• Defensive position. Babur anchored one flank on the town of Panipat and protected his front with about 700 carts tied together with ropes of rawhide, with gaps for cavalry to charge through. He called this the "Rumi" (Ottoman) method; Indian sources call the carts araba.

• Firepower. Behind the carts, the gunner Ustad Ali Quli and the musketeers fired on the Afghan centre. Cannon and gunfire frightened the war elephants and broke the Afghan formation.

• The tulughma. Mobile parties of mounted archers rode round the enemy flanks and attacked from the sides and rear, a Central Asian tactic that pressed the Afghan army into a crowd that could neither advance nor flee.

• Divided enemies. Many Afghan nobles distrusted Ibrahim, and his army fought without a coordinated plan.

When the incitement to battle had come, the Sun was spear-high; till mid-day fighting had been in full force; noon passed, the foe was crushed in defeat, our friends rejoicing and gay. By God’s mercy and kindness, this difficult affair was made easy for us! In one half-day, that armed mass was laid upon the earth.

Babur, Baburnama (memoirs), written in Turki in the 1520s, trans. Annette Beveridge (1922). Babur wrote for his descendants and presented the victory as God’s gift to a small, faithful army. The account is detailed and close to the event, so it is valuable on tactics; its emphasis on the size of the enemy and divine favour served to justify his claim to rule Hindustan.

Ibrahim Lodi was killed on the battlefield. Babur sent his son Humayun to seize the treasury at Agra and occupied Delhi, where the Friday prayer was read in his name.

Khanwa, Chanderi and Ghaghra

Panipat gave Babur Delhi and Agra but not the rest of north India. The most dangerous challenge came from Rana Sanga of Mewar, who led a confederacy of Rajput rulers and Afghan allies. Before the battle Babur gave up wine in a public act of piety and called the war a jihad, to restore the morale of troops who wanted to go home to Kabul. At Khanwa, near Agra, on 16 March 1527, the same combination of carts, guns and flanking cavalry defeated the Rajputs. Babur then took the fortress of Chanderi in 1528 and defeated the Afghans of Bihar and Bengal on the Ghaghra river in May 1529.

Babur died in December 1530. He had won battles but had not built a state: he distributed land revenue to his followers, kept the Afghan nobility at a distance and spent only four years in India. His empire was a military occupation of the Ganges plain held by a Central Asian army.

Humayun, Sher Shah and the Suri dynasty, 1530–1556

Humayun’s first reign, 1530–1540

Humayun (r. 1530–1540 and 1555–1556) inherited an empire with many enemies. Following Timurid custom, he shared his father’s lands with his brothers: Kamran received Kabul and the Punjab, which cut Humayun off from the recruiting grounds of Central Asia. He conquered Gujarat in 1535 but could not hold it, and while he campaigned in the west and then in Bengal, the Afghan leader Sher Khan Sur built up his power in Bihar.

Sher Khan defeated Humayun at Chausa in June 1539 and again at Kannauj (also called Bilgram) in May 1540. Humayun fled through Sind to the court of the Safavid shah, Tahmasp, in Persia. The shah gave him troops on condition that he show respect for Shi’a Islam, and with Persian help Humayun took Kandahar and Kabul from his brothers by 1545.

The Suri dynasty and its reforms, 1540–1555

Sher Khan, who took the title Sher Shah, ruled north India from 1540 until he was killed by an explosion while besieging the fort of Kalinjar in May 1545. In five years he created an administration that outlasted his dynasty. His reforms show that the Mughal state was not built from nothing: it rested in part on Afghan foundations.

Sher Shah’s successor, his son Islam Shah, kept control until his death in 1554. After that the Suri family split into rival claimants, and the empire divided among them. Humayun took his chance: he defeated the Afghans at Sirhind in June 1555 and re-entered Delhi in July. In January 1556 he died after falling on the stone steps of his library, leaving a thirteen-year-old son, Akbar.

The Second Battle of Panipat, 1556

Humayun’s death encouraged the strongest of the remaining Suri commanders, Hemu, a Hindu general and minister of Adil Shah Suri, who took Delhi in October 1556 and claimed royal status under the title Vikramaditya. Akbar’s guardian, the Turkmen general Bairam Khan, persuaded the Mughal nobles to fight rather than retreat to Kabul. On 5 November 1556, at Panipat, Hemu was winning when an arrow struck him in the eye; his army lost heart when it saw its leader fall, and he was captured and executed.

The second Panipat decided the future of north India more than the first. It removed the last Afghan army able to challenge the Mughals and gave Akbar Delhi and Agra. Bairam Khan governed as regent until 1560.

The diagram of the rise of Mughal power groups the factors into three kinds. Military methods explain the battles of 1526–1529, but the loss of the empire in 1540 shows that they were not enough. Mughal power was secured when strong leadership coincided with divided opponents, first in 1526 and again in 1555–1556.

Akbar and the consolidation of Mughal rule, 1556–1605

Akbar (r. 1556–1605) turned a fragile conquest into a lasting empire. When he came to the throne, the Mughals held only the area around Delhi, Agra and the Punjab; when he died they ruled from Kabul to the northern Deccan and from Gujarat to Bengal. He did this by combining three methods: military conquest, the incorporation of local elites into the imperial service, and an imperial ideology that claimed the loyalty of subjects of every religion.

From regency to personal rule

Bairam Khan governed for the boy emperor until 1560, when Akbar dismissed him; Bairam was murdered in 1561 on his way to Mecca. For about two years the court was dominated by Akbar’s wet nurse, Maham Anaga, and her relatives, a period later Mughal writers disapprovingly called the "petticoat government". From 1562 Akbar ruled in person. He faced a dangerous revolt of Uzbek nobles in 1564–1567, which persuaded him that the Central Asian nobility needed to be balanced by new groups loyal to him alone.

Military conquests

The vertical timeline of Akbar’s reign shows a steady sequence of campaigns. Malwa fell in 1561 and the Gond kingdom of Garha-Katanga, defended by its queen Rani Durgavati, in 1564. The Mughal siege of Chittor, the great fortress of Mewar, ended in February 1568 with the killing of a large part of the defenders and the townspeople, about 30,000 people according to Mughal sources; the Rajput women had already died in jauhar. The capture of Ranthambore and Kalinjar in 1569 completed Mughal control of the approaches to Rajasthan.

The conquest of Gujarat (1572–1573) gave the empire the port of Surat and the wealth of the western Indian Ocean trade. Bengal, the richest province, was taken from its Afghan rulers in 1574–1576. Kashmir (1586), Sind (1591) and Kandahar (1595) followed, and from 1595 Mughal armies pushed into the Deccan, taking Ahmadnagar in 1600 and the fortress of Asirgarh in 1601.

Mughal military strength rested on heavy cavalry supplied by the nobles, a siege train of large cannon that could break fortress walls, and the emperor’s wealth, which allowed him to buy the loyalty of enemy commanders. Conquest also paid for itself: each new province brought land revenue to reward the nobles who had won it.

Rajput alliances and policies of conciliation

Akbar’s most important political choice was to make the Rajput rulers partners in the empire. In 1562 Raja Bharmal of Amber (later Jaipur) gave his daughter in marriage to Akbar; she became the mother of the future emperor Jahangir. Bharmal’s grandson Man Singh became one of the empire’s greatest generals and governor of Bengal. Rajput rulers who submitted kept their home territories as hereditary revenue assignments (watan jagirs), received high ranks, and served in campaigns far from home.

The alliance was voluntary for some and imposed on others. Mewar refused to submit: its ruler Rana Pratap fought the Mughals at Haldighati in 1576 and continued resistance from the hills until his death in 1597. For the Rajputs who joined, however, service brought wealth and prestige, and they became among the most loyal groups in the empire for more than a century.

Akbar matched the alliances with measures aimed at his non-Muslim subjects. In 1562 he banned the enslavement of prisoners of war and their families. In 1563 he abolished the tax on Hindu pilgrims, and in 1564 the jizya, the poll tax on non-Muslims, which he saw as a source of resentment among the majority of his subjects.

The mansabdari system

The core of Mughal government was the mansabdari system, which Akbar organised from the mid-1570s. Every noble and senior official held a mansab, a numbered rank in the imperial service that fixed his place at court, his salary and his military obligations. Ranks ran from commanders of ten up to 5,000 for the greatest nobles under Akbar, with higher ranks for princes. From about 1595 each rank had two numbers.

Most mansabdars were paid not in cash but by a jagir, an assignment of the land revenue of a particular area. The jagirdar collected the revenue through his agents, but he did not own the land, and the emperor moved him to a new jagir every few years so that he could not build up a local power base. Land whose revenue went straight to the imperial treasury was called khalisa. To stop nobles drawing pay for troops they did not keep, Akbar introduced the branding of horses (dagh) and descriptive rolls of soldiers (chehra).

The diagram of the mansabdari system shows why it was so effective. Rank, pay and revenue all came from the emperor and could be increased, reduced or taken away, and a noble’s property returned to the treasury at his death. The nobility therefore depended on the emperor and competed for his favour. The system also brought together men of different backgrounds: Turanis (Central Asians), Iranis (Persians), Afghans, Indian Muslims and Rajputs all held mansabs, so no single group could dominate.

Revenue and provincial government

The Mughal state lived on land revenue, which took about a third of the harvest under Akbar. After experiments in the 1570s, the revenue minister Raja Todar Mal, who had learned his trade under the Suris, introduced the zabt system in 1580. Officials measured the cultivated land and assessed the tax in cash from the average yields and prices of the previous ten years (dahsala), so peasants paid in money and the state had a predictable income. Zabt applied in the central provinces; elsewhere the revenue was shared in kind or assessed by older methods, and local zamindars remained the intermediaries who collected it.

In 1580 the empire was divided into twelve provinces (subas); by 1605 there were fifteen. Each had a governor (subadar) in charge of the army and order, and a separate revenue officer (diwan) who reported to the imperial treasury. Dividing military and financial power made it harder for a governor to rebel.

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Religious policies

Akbar’s religious policy developed over his reign. In his early years he behaved as an orthodox Sunni ruler and visited the shrine of the Chishti Sufi saint Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer. He built his new capital, Fatehpur Sikri (from 1571), next to the home of the Chishti saint Shaikh Salim, whose prayers he believed had brought him a son.

In 1575 Akbar built the Ibadat Khana (House of Worship) at Fatehpur Sikri for religious debate. At first only Muslim scholars took part, but their bitter quarrels disillusioned him, and from 1578 he invited Hindu, Jain and Zoroastrian scholars and, from 1580, Jesuit missionaries from Portuguese Goa. In 1579 leading ulama signed the Mahzar, a declaration that allowed Akbar, as a just ruler, to decide between conflicting interpretations of Islamic law. It shifted religious authority from the scholars to the emperor.

From the 1580s Akbar’s court promoted the principle of sulh-i kul ("universal peace"): the emperor stood above all religious communities and protected them all. His historian and adviser Abu’l Fazl presented kingship as a divine light passed to Akbar, which made his authority independent of the ulama. Akbar sponsored Persian translations of Sanskrit texts, including the Mahabharata (the Razmnama), and introduced a solar calendar, the Ilahi era, in 1584.

Around 1582 Akbar formed the Din-i Ilahi, a circle of personal disciples who swore devotion to him. Only a small number of courtiers joined, and it had no scriptures or priests. Most historians, following the study of Akbar’s religious thought by S.A.A. Rizvi (1975), see it as a discipleship that bound an inner circle of nobles to the emperor, not as an attempt to found a new religion.

The policy provoked opposition. In 1580–1582 nobles in Bengal and Bihar rebelled, angered by the branding of horses and stricter revenue control, and a qazi (judge) of Jaunpur declared rebellion against Akbar lawful because of his religious innovations. The rebels looked to Akbar’s half-brother Mirza Hakim, ruler of Kabul, whom Akbar defeated in 1581. The court historian Abd al-Qadir Badauni, an orthodox scholar, recorded his disapproval in a secret history, the Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh, which accuses Akbar of abandoning Islam. Badauni and Abu’l Fazl give opposite perspectives on the same policies, and historians use them together.

Jahangir, Nur Jahan and the court, 1605–1627

Akbar’s son Salim took the title Jahangir ("world-seizer") when he became emperor in 1605. He kept his father’s system largely intact: the mansabdari system, the Rajput alliances and the policy of toleration all continued. His reign is better known for court politics, the arts and the growing presence of European traders.

Succession and the execution of Guru Arjan

Within months of his accession Jahangir faced a revolt by his eldest son, Khusrau, who was defeated and later blinded. Mughal succession had no fixed rule such as primogeniture: in the Timurid tradition every son of an emperor had a claim, so each reign began or ended with a struggle among princes. The empire’s nobles had to choose sides, and the losers could lose everything.

The revolt had a religious consequence. In his memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, Jahangir records that the fifth Sikh Guru, Arjan, had received Khusrau and blessed him, and that he ordered the Guru’s property confiscated and the Guru put to death in 1606. Jahangir also describes his annoyance that the Guru attracted Muslim as well as Hindu followers. Sikh tradition remembers Arjan as the first Sikh martyr. Historians generally see the execution as a punishment for supporting a rebel prince, sharpened by Jahangir’s dislike of the Guru’s influence, and it marked the beginning of conflict between the Mughals and the Sikh community.

Nur Jahan and the "junta"

In 1611 Jahangir married Mihr-un-Nisa, the widow of a Mughal officer, who received the title Nur Jahan ("light of the world"). Her family rose with her. Her father, Itimad-ud-Daula, became chief minister; her brother, Asaf Khan, became a leading noble; and Asaf Khan’s daughter, Arjumand Banu (later Mumtaz Mahal), married Prince Khurram, the future Shah Jahan, in 1612. Nur Jahan issued orders (farmans), had coins struck in her name and managed much of the business of the court as Jahangir’s health declined.

On the first of the Divine month of Isfandarmuz I gave the establishment and everything belonging to the government and Amirship of I`timadu-d-daula to Nur Jahan Begam, and ordered that her drums and orchestra should be sounded after those of the king.

Jahangir, Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri (memoirs), entry for early 1622, trans. Alexander Rogers and Henry Beveridge (1909–1914). After her father’s death, the emperor transferred his household and status to Nur Jahan and gave her a public mark of royal rank. Because the words are the emperor’s own, the passage shows that her authority was granted openly, not seized behind his back; as a memoir written for posterity, it also shows Jahangir presenting his favour to her as a natural royal act.

The historian Beni Prasad, in his History of Jahangir (1922), described Nur Jahan, her father, her brother and Prince Khurram as a "junta" that controlled appointments from about 1611 to 1622. The group split in the early 1620s. Nur Jahan married her daughter by her first husband to Jahangir’s youngest son, Shahryar, and seemed to favour him for the succession. When Khurram was ordered to recover Kandahar, which the Safavids had taken in 1622, he refused and rebelled (1623–1626). In 1626 the general Mahabat Khan, fearing he would be ruined by Nur Jahan’s faction, briefly seized the emperor himself; Nur Jahan organised his release.

When Jahangir died in 1627, Asaf Khan backed his son-in-law Khurram against Nur Jahan’s candidate. Khurram became emperor as Shah Jahan in 1628, after his rivals among the princes were put to death, and Nur Jahan retired to Lahore.

Europeans at Jahangir’s court

In 1615–1619 the English ambassador Sir Thomas Roe, sent by James I and paid by the East India Company, lived at Jahangir’s court. He failed to obtain a formal treaty, because the emperor did not negotiate as an equal with a distant island king, but he secured permission for the Company to trade at Surat. To the Mughals the English were minor merchants; to the English, the Mughal court was the richest they had ever seen.

Shah Jahan: splendour and strain, 1628–1658

Shah Jahan’s reign is often seen as the high point of Mughal splendour. He built the Taj Mahal at Agra (begun 1632, completed about 1653) as a tomb for Mumtaz Mahal, who died in childbirth in 1631; a new capital, Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi), with the Red Fort (1639–1648) and the Jama Masjid; and the jewelled Peacock Throne. These works displayed the emperor’s power and wealth to his subjects and to foreign visitors.

Wars and their costs

Shah Jahan was also an ambitious conqueror. In the Deccan he ended the sultanate of Ahmadnagar (1633–1636) and forced Bijapur and Golconda to accept Mughal overlordship and pay tribute (1636). His son Aurangzeb served twice as viceroy of the Deccan (1636–1644 and 1652–1657). In the north-west, a campaign to conquer Balkh and Badakhshan, the Mughals’ ancestral lands in Central Asia (1646–1647), ended in an expensive retreat, and three sieges of Kandahar (1649, 1652 and 1653) failed to recover it from the Safavids.

Building and war were paid for by the land revenue, and the revenue demand rose under Shah Jahan. A severe famine struck the Deccan and Gujarat in 1630–1632. The number of mansabdars grew faster than the land available as jagirs, so the state increasingly assigned jagirs whose estimated revenue was higher than what could actually be collected. Historians of the Aligarh school, such as Irfan Habib, see the roots of the later agrarian crisis in this period.

Shah Jahan was a more orthodox Muslim ruler than Akbar or Jahangir. In 1633 he ordered that recently built Hindu temples be destroyed, and he expelled the Portuguese from Hugli in Bengal in 1632. He continued to employ Rajputs and other Hindus in high ranks, however, and his eldest son, Dara Shikoh, was a patron of religious dialogue.

The war of succession, 1657–1659

When Shah Jahan fell seriously ill in September 1657, his four sons fought for the throne. Dara Shikoh, the eldest and his father’s favourite, was at court. He was a scholar with mystical interests who translated the Upanishads into Persian (Sirr-i-Akbar, 1657) and wrote that Islam and Hinduism expressed the same truth. Shah Shuja declared himself emperor in Bengal, and Murad Bakhsh in Gujarat. Aurangzeb, in the Deccan, allied with Murad.

The war showed both the strength and the weakness of Mughal succession. It tended to bring the ablest and most ruthless prince to the throne, but it divided the nobility, cost huge sums and left grievances. The execution of Dara on religious grounds also signalled the more orthodox direction of the new reign.

Aurangzeb and the challenges to Mughal rule, 1658–1707

Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) ruled for nearly fifty years and brought the empire to its greatest size, yet within a few decades of his death it had fragmented. This makes his reign the centre of debate about the decline of the empire. Historians agree on what he did; they disagree about how far his religious policies caused the challenges he faced and how far those challenges came from deeper political and economic problems.

Religious and legal policies

Aurangzeb presented himself as a pious Sunni ruler who governed according to the sharia. He stopped some court ceremonies that had Hindu or Persian origins, such as the emperor’s daily appearance at a palace window (jharokha darshan), withdrew patronage from court musicians, and appointed muhtasibs (censors of public morals) to enforce Islamic rules on behaviour. He sponsored a great compilation of Hanafi Islamic law by a board of scholars, the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri.

Two policies affected non-Muslims directly. Aurangzeb ordered the destruction of a number of temples, including the Vishwanath temple at Banaras (1669) and the Keshava Deva temple at Mathura (1670), and in 1679 he reimposed the jizya on non-Muslims, a century after Akbar had abolished it. In 1675 the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed at Delhi; Sikh tradition holds that he died defending the right of Kashmiri Brahmins to practise their religion.

Other evidence complicates the picture. Aurangzeb also issued grants of land to temples and Brahmins, and protected temples in some places while destroying them in others. The number of Hindus in the higher ranks of the nobility rose during his reign, from under a quarter to about a third of the nobles of high rank by M. Athar Ali’s counts, mainly because Marathas and Deccanis were recruited during the Deccan wars. Many of the temples destroyed were linked to rulers or groups in rebellion, which suggests that political motives were mixed with religious ones.

Domestic opposition

From the late 1660s Aurangzeb faced a series of revolts. They came from very different groups and had different causes, as the table of domestic opposition shows.

The revolts suggest that no single cause explains the opposition to Aurangzeb. The Jat and Satnami risings were largely agrarian, rooted in the revenue demands that Habib emphasises. The Rajput war began as a political dispute over succession. The Sikh and Maratha conflicts combined religious identity with the ambitions of regional leaders. Religious policy hardened some of these conflicts but did not create all of them.

The Deccan "ulcer" and the rise of the Marathas, 1680–1707

The greatest challenge to Aurangzeb came from the Marathas, Marathi-speaking warrior and peasant communities of the western Deccan. Their leader Shivaji (1630–1680), the son of a commander in the service of Bijapur, built an independent state of hill forts in the Western Ghats. He raided Mughal territory, sacked the rich port of Surat in 1664 and again in 1670, and in 1674 was crowned Chhatrapati, an independent Hindu king. The Marathas demanded chauth, a quarter of the revenue, from districts outside their control in return for not raiding them.

In 1681 Aurangzeb moved the court and army to the Deccan, partly to pursue his rebel son Prince Akbar, who had fled to Shivaji’s successor Sambhaji. He never returned to the north. The vertical timeline of the Deccan war shows his apparent successes: the annexation of Bijapur (1686) and Golconda (1687) and the capture and execution of Sambhaji (1689). Yet the war continued for eighteen more years. Maratha commanders fought a mobile war of raids against Mughal supply lines and retook forts as soon as the imperial army moved on. After Rajaram’s death in 1700, his widow Tarabai led the resistance as regent for her young son.

Historians have compared the Deccan war to the "Spanish ulcer" that drained Napoleon’s armies in Spain. Its costs reached the whole empire. The emperor’s absence from the north for twenty-six years weakened control there; the annexation of Bijapur and Golconda destroyed states that had employed many Deccani soldiers, who then joined the Marathas; and the need to win over Maratha and Deccani commanders led to a flood of new mansabs.

M. Athar Ali (The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, 1966) showed that the nobility expanded rapidly in the second half of the reign. Nobles who held jagirs for short periods had little reason to protect the peasants who paid the revenue. A French physician who lived in Mughal India in the 1650s and 1660s had already described this danger.

Why should the neglected state of this land create uneasiness in our minds? and why should we expend our own money and time to render it fruitful? We may be deprived of it in a single moment, and our exertions would benefit neither ourselves nor our children. Let us draw from the soil all the money we can, though the peasant should starve or abscond.

François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656–1668 (first published in French, 1670), trans. Archibald Constable (1891). Bernier imagines the reasoning of jagirdars and revenue officials. He lived at the Mughal court and saw the war of succession, so his account of the system is informed, but he wrote for a French audience, including the minister Colbert, to argue that private property in land made a kingdom prosperous. His claim that the Mughal state owned all the land is therefore part of his argument against royal despotism, and historians such as Habib use his evidence on peasant flight while rejecting his wider theory.

Aurangzeb died in March 1707 near Ahmadnagar, aged 88, with the Marathas undefeated. The empire was larger than ever on the map, but its treasury, its nobility and its control of the provinces had all been strained.

The impact of the Mughal Empire

The Mughal Empire shaped the economy, culture and religious life of South Asia far beyond its political lifespan. Its impact can be judged in four areas: the economy, culture and law, the lives of women, and the meeting of religious traditions.

Economic impact

Mughal India was one of the largest economies in the world. Its population is estimated at between about 100 and 150 million around 1600, a range that reflects how little reliable data exists. Imperial unity, a standard silver currency, safer roads and the demand of the court and nobility for luxury goods encouraged trade and manufacturing. Indian cotton and silk textiles from Gujarat, the Coromandel coast and Bengal were sold across Asia, Africa and, through European companies, in Europe. Because Europeans had few goods that Indians wanted, they paid in silver, much of it from the Spanish mines in the Americas, and this inflow helped to sustain the cash economy that the revenue system relied on.

The bar chart of shares of world GDP shows the scale of the Mughal economy. Its size came mainly from India’s large population: income per person was much lower than in north-western Europe, and historians such as Stephen Broadberry argue that the gap was widening by 1700. The great ports of Surat, Hugli and Masulipatnam, and banking families such as the Jagat Seths of Murshidabad, show a commercial economy of great sophistication.

The burden fell on the peasants. The revenue demand took between a third and a half of the harvest, and Irfan Habib (The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1963) argues that its growth in the seventeenth century drove peasants to flee or rebel. The wealth displayed in the Taj Mahal and the court was drawn from the countryside.

Cultural impact: arts, architecture and law

The Mughals created an Indo-Persian court culture that blended Central Asian, Persian and Indian traditions. Persian was the language of government and high literature, while emperors also patronised poetry in Hindi dialects.

• Architecture. Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi (1560s), built by his widow, introduced the Persian garden tomb (charbagh) to India. Akbar’s Fatehpur Sikri combined Persian and Rajput styles in red sandstone. Under Shah Jahan, white marble, symmetry and inlaid stone reached their height in the Taj Mahal. Aurangzeb’s Badshahi Mosque at Lahore (1673) was among the largest mosques in the world.

• Painting. Akbar’s workshops, staffed largely by Hindu artists working under Persian masters, illustrated the Hamzanama and the Akbarnama. Under Jahangir, painters such as Mansur and Abu’l Hasan produced detailed studies of animals, plants and individual portraits.

• Literature and history. Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari recorded Akbar’s reign and administration in great detail. Babur, Gulbadan Begum and Jahangir wrote memoirs. Outside the court, Tulsidas composed the Ramcharitmanas (c. 1574–1577), a retelling of the Ramayana in the Awadhi dialect.

• Music. The singer Tansen, at Akbar’s court, is remembered as a founder figure of Hindustani classical music, which drew on Persian and Indian traditions.

• Law. Muslims were judged by qazis applying the sharia, Hindus generally followed their own customary and religious law, and the emperors added their own regulations (zawabit). Aurangzeb’s Fatawa-i-Alamgiri became a standard reference for Islamic law in South Asia and was later used in British courts.

The cultural legacy lasted longest. Urdu, which grew from the meeting of Persian and Hindi in the camps and cities of the empire, became one of the main languages of South Asia, and Mughal buildings remain symbols of India today.

Experiences of women

Elite Mughal women lived in the imperial household (the haram, from the Arabic for "sacred" or "protected"), which was a political institution as well as a home. Senior women such as Babur’s daughter Gulbadan Begum, who wrote the Humayun-nama, and Akbar’s mother Hamida Banu negotiated between princes and advised emperors. Nur Jahan was a co-ruler in all but name. Shah Jahan’s daughter Jahanara, the Padshah Begum (first lady), was one of the richest people in the empire: she owned ships and trading rights, built the Chandni Chowk market in Delhi and patronised Sufi orders. Her sister Roshanara backed Aurangzeb in the war of succession, and Aurangzeb’s daughter Zeb-un-Nisa was a respected poet.

These examples come from a tiny elite. Elite Muslim and many Hindu women lived in purdah, secluded from public view. Rajput women at Chittor (1568) and elsewhere committed jauhar rather than face capture, and the burning of widows (sati) continued in some Hindu communities; Akbar tried to stop forced sati by requiring that it be voluntary. Peasant and artisan women worked in the fields, spun thread and wove cloth, but they appear in the sources mainly as part of their households.

Syncretism, Bhakti and Sufism

Religious life under the Mughals was shaped by two devotional movements that crossed communal boundaries, and by the meeting of traditions that historians call syncretism.

• Bhakti, a devotional movement in Hinduism, stressed love for a personal God over ritual and caste. Its poet-saints, such as Kabir (d. c. 1518), Mirabai, Tulsidas and Tukaram, wrote in regional languages and attracted followers from low castes and, in Kabir’s case, from Muslims as well as Hindus.

• Sufism, the mystical tradition of Islam, spread through orders such as the Chishtis, whose shrines at Ajmer and Delhi drew Hindu as well as Muslim pilgrims. Akbar was devoted to the Chishtis; the more orthodox Naqshbandi order, led in India by Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), criticised Akbar’s policies and called for a stricter Islam.

• Sikhism grew from the teaching of Guru Nanak (1469–1539), who drew on Bhakti and Sufi ideas. Under Mughal pressure after the executions of 1606 and 1675 it developed a military organisation, the Khalsa, founded by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699.

Syncretism at court reached its fullest expression in Akbar’s sulh-i kul and Dara Shikoh’s writings. It was always contested, however: Sirhindi, Badauni and Aurangzeb represented a strand of Mughal Islam that saw such mixing as a threat to the faith. The Mughal period produced both deeper interaction between communities and sharper definitions of religious identity.

The decline of the Mughal Empire after 1707

Within fifty years of Aurangzeb’s death the Mughal emperor had become a ruler in name only. The sequence of decline began at the centre and spread outwards.

Succession crises at the centre

Aurangzeb’s sons fought for the throne in 1707. The victor, Bahadur Shah I, was already 63 and died in 1712, which set off another war. Between 1707 and 1719 five emperors ruled. From 1713 to 1720 two nobles, the Sayyid brothers, acted as kingmakers, setting up and deposing emperors. One of their puppets, Farrukhsiyar, issued the farman of 1717 that allowed the English East India Company to trade in Bengal free of customs duties. Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748) reigned for nearly thirty years, but real power passed to governors and factions of nobles.

Successor states and regional powers

Provincial governors turned their provinces into hereditary successor states, still recognising the emperor and sending occasional tribute while ruling independently. Nizam-ul-Mulk, who left the court in disgust, made Hyderabad his own state from 1724. Bengal under Murshid Quli Khan and his successors, and Awadh under Saadat Khan from 1722, became effectively independent states under their nawabs. The Marathas, led from 1720 by the Brahmin ministers known as Peshwas, expanded into Gujarat, Malwa and towards Delhi, collecting chauth across central India.

Invasions from the north-west

The weakness of the centre invited invasion. In 1739 Nadir Shah, the ruler of Persia, defeated the Mughal army at Karnal and sacked Delhi, where his troops massacred many thousands of inhabitants. He carried away treasure including the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. From 1748 the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani invaded repeatedly. At the Third Battle of Panipat on 14 January 1761 he defeated the Marathas, who had become the main power in north India, with very heavy losses. The battle checked Maratha expansion northwards just as the British were taking control of Bengal.

The diagram of Mughal decline separates three groups of factors. Older interpretations stressed Aurangzeb’s policies and the external invasions. More recent work by historians such as Muzaffar Alam and C.A. Bayly sees much of the eighteenth century as a time of regional growth: the empire decentralised rather than collapsed, and the successor states were often prosperous. This matters for the rise of the East India Company, which did not conquer a ruined country but a set of rich, competing regional states.

The East India Company: from traders to rulers, 1600–1818

A trading company in Mughal India

The East India Company was founded by a charter from Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600, which gave a group of London merchants a monopoly of English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. It was a joint-stock company: investors bought shares, and an elected Court of Directors in London managed the business. The charter also allowed the Company to make war and peace with non-Christian rulers, mint money and govern its own settlements.

For a century and a half the Company was a junior partner in Mughal commerce. With Mughal permission it set up factories (trading posts) at Surat (1613), Madras (1639), Bombay (1668, received from the English Crown) and Calcutta (1690). It bought Indian textiles, indigo, saltpetre and later tea from China, paying largely in silver. An attempt to fight Aurangzeb in 1686–1690 ended in humiliating defeat, which showed how weak the Company was against a strong Mughal state.

The decline of Mughal authority changed the balance. In 1717 the emperor Farrukhsiyar granted the Company the right to trade in Bengal free of customs duties, using passes called dastaks; Company servants abused these to cover their own private trade, which angered the nawabs of Bengal. In south India, the Company fought the French East India Company and its Indian allies in the Carnatic Wars (1746–1763). Both companies trained Indian soldiers, sepoys, in European drill and lent them to Indian rulers in return for revenue and privileges, and the British victory left them the strongest European power in India.

Bengal: Plassey and Buxar

Bengal was the richest province of the former empire. In 1756 its young nawab, Siraj-ud-Daula, angered by the abuse of dastaks and by new fortifications at Calcutta, captured the town. Many British prisoners died in a small cell overnight, an event that British writers called the "Black Hole of Calcutta"; the number of deaths given by the survivor J.Z. Holwell (123) is thought by modern historians to be exaggerated. A Company force from Madras under Robert Clive retook Calcutta in early 1757.

Clive then conspired with Siraj’s enemies: his commander-in-chief Mir Jafar and the Jagat Seth banking house, whose money underpinned the nawab’s government. At Plassey on 23 June 1757 much of the nawab’s army did not fight. Mir Jafar became nawab and paid the Company and its officers huge sums.

About this time some of his principal officers made overtures to us for dethroning him. At the head of these was Meer Jaffier, then Bukhshee to the army, a man as generally esteemed as the other was detested. As we had reason to believe this disaffection pretty general, we soon entered into engagements with Meer Jaffier to put the crown on his head.

Robert Clive, account of the battle in a letter of 1757 to his employers in London, reproduced in Oliver J. Thatcher (ed.), The Library of Original Sources (1907). Clive wrote to report and justify his actions, so he presents Siraj as hated and the plot as a response to a general wish. The letter is valuable because it admits openly that the victory rested on a prior agreement with the nawab’s own commander, which supports historians who see Plassey as a political conspiracy more than a military triumph.

Mir Jafar could not meet the Company’s demands and was replaced in 1760 by his son-in-law Mir Qasim, who tried to restore the nawab’s authority and taxed Company trade. War followed. At Buxar on 22 October 1764 the Company defeated Mir Qasim, the nawab of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daula, and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. Buxar, a hard-fought battle against a large coalition, was the real military foundation of British power in north India.

By the Treaty of Allahabad (August 1765), Shah Alam granted the Company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa: the right to collect their land revenue. The Company now received the tax revenue of about twenty million people, which it used to buy Indian goods for export and to pay its army, so trade, government and war became one enterprise.

Famine, plunder and parliamentary control

From 1765 to 1772 Bengal was governed under a dual system: the Company collected the revenue, while the nawab’s officials remained responsible for justice and order. Revenue collection was harsh, and when the rains failed in 1769 the authorities did little to relieve the population. In the Bengal famine of 1769–1770 a large part of the population died; the Company’s own estimate of about ten million deaths, a third of the population, is regarded by some historians as too high, but all accounts agree that the loss was catastrophic.

Company servants returned to Britain with great fortunes and became known as nabobs. Their wealth and the famine produced a political scandal, and the Company itself needed a government loan in 1772. Parliament responded with the Regulating Act (1773), which created a Governor-General of Bengal, the first being Warren Hastings (1773–1785), and Pitt’s India Act (1784), which set up a government Board of Control to supervise the Company. Hastings’s impeachment by Parliament (1788–1795), led by Edmund Burke, ended in his acquittal but publicised the abuses of Company rule.

Lord Cornwallis (Governor-General 1786–1793) reorganised the administration. His code excluded Indians from the higher posts of government, and the Permanent Settlement of 1793 made the zamindars of Bengal owners of the land with a revenue payment fixed for ever. The Company hoped to create a loyal class of improving landlords and a secure income; in practice many old zamindar families lost their estates when they could not pay, and peasants lost customary rights.

Wars of expansion: Mysore and the Marathas

The Company’s main rivals were two strong regional states. Mysore, under Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan, had a modernised army and sought French help. In four Anglo-Mysore Wars (1767–1769, 1780–1784, 1790–1792 and 1799) the Company gradually defeated it; Tipu was killed defending his capital, Seringapatam, on 4 May 1799. The Marathas, a confederacy of chiefs under the Peshwa at Pune, were the largest power in India but were divided among themselves. The Company fought them in 1775–1782, 1803–1805 and 1817–1818.

Richard Wellesley and the subsidiary alliance

Richard Wellesley (Governor-General 1798–1805), who arrived as Britain was at war with revolutionary France, set out to make the Company supreme in India. His main instrument was the subsidiary alliance.

As the diagram of a subsidiary alliance shows, an Indian ruler who signed one kept his throne but accepted a Company army in his state, paid for it, received a British Resident, and gave up the right to make war or treaties. The Nizam of Hyderabad signed in 1798, Awadh was forced to cede half its territory in 1801, and the Peshwa accepted an alliance by the Treaty of Bassein in 1802, which provoked the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Wellesley’s brother Arthur (the future Duke of Wellington) defeated the Marathas at Assaye in 1803, and Company forces took Delhi in the same year. The Mughal emperor Shah Alam II became a pensioner under Company protection.

The Company’s expansion was costly, and the directors in London recalled Wellesley in 1805. His successor in the 1810s, Lord Hastings, finished his work: the Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817–1818) abolished the Peshwa’s state and made the Company the paramount power in India. The Company had also fought the Gurkhas of Nepal (1814–1816). Sind was annexed in 1843, and the Punjab, ruled by the Sikh kingdom of Ranjit Singh until his death in 1839, remained independent until the Anglo-Sikh Wars (1845–1846, 1848–1849).

Why did the Company succeed?

The table of factors suggests a cycle that historians call military fiscalism: revenue paid for armies, and armies seized more revenue. The Company was successful because it combined this cycle, which many Indian states also practised, with access to Indian credit and British sea power.

Company rule and its failures, 1818–1856

After 1818 the Company ruled most of India directly or through subordinate princes. It was now a government more than a business. The Charter Act of 1813 ended its monopoly of trade with India and allowed Christian missionaries to work there; the Charter Act of 1833 ended its trading altogether and turned it into an administrative agent of the British state, headed by a Governor-General of India. British policy in this period was shaped by two strands of thought: evangelicalism, which wanted to spread Christianity and end practices it saw as immoral, and utilitarianism, which wanted to reform Indian law and government on rational principles. James Mill’s History of British India (1817), which dismissed Indian civilisation as backward, was widely read by Company officials.

Land revenue settlements

The Company’s income came mainly from land revenue, and it tried different systems in different regions. Each was meant to raise revenue and create secure property rights, but each also caused hardship.

Historians such as Eric Stokes have shown that the districts where land changed hands most through revenue sales were often those where the rebellion of 1857 was strongest.

William Bentinck, 1828–1835

Lord William Bentinck (Governor-General 1828–1835) combined cost-cutting with social reform. Influenced by utilitarian ideas and supported by Indian reformers such as Rammohan Roy, he issued the Bengal Sati Regulation in December 1829, which made sati illegal and punishable as homicide. From the 1830s the officer William Sleeman organised a campaign against thuggee, gangs who robbed and murdered travellers; historians now debate how far the British exaggerated thuggee as a hereditary religious cult. Bentinck also opened some judicial posts to Indians.

The most lasting decision of his government concerned education. The Company’s education committee was divided between Orientalists, who wanted to fund learning in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, and Anglicists, who wanted Western learning taught in English. The new Law Member of the Governor-General’s council, Thomas Babington Macaulay, settled the argument in a minute.

I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute on Indian Education, 2 February 1835. Macaulay admitted he knew no Sanskrit or Arabic, and his dismissal of Indian learning reflects the confident cultural superiority of British reformers in the 1830s. Bentinck accepted his view in the English Education Act of March 1835, and in 1837 English replaced Persian as the language of higher administration. The minute is evidence of the ideology of reform, and of why educated Indians later saw it as an attack on their culture.

Dalhousie, 1848–1856

James Broun-Ramsay, Lord Dalhousie (Governor-General 1848–1856) believed that British rule was better than any Indian government and expanded it by every means available.

• Conquest. After the Second Anglo-Sikh War the Punjab was annexed in 1849, and Lower Burma in 1852.

• The Doctrine of Lapse. When a dependent ruler died without a natural male heir, Dalhousie refused to recognise an adopted son and annexed the state: Satara (1848), Jhansi (1853) and Nagpur (1854) among others. Hindu law and custom recognised adoption, so princes saw the doctrine as a breach of their rights. He also stopped the pensions of the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Nana Sahib.

• Annexation of Awadh in February 1856 on the grounds of misgovernment, although the nawab had been a loyal ally. Awadh was the home of a large part of the Bengal Army’s high-caste sepoys, and its great landholders, the taluqdars, lost many of their villages in the land settlement that followed.

• Modernisation. The first passenger railway ran from Bombay to Thane on 16 April 1853; telegraph lines and a uniform postage stamp followed in 1854, and a Public Works Department built roads and canals.

Dalhousie’s successor, Lord Canning (1856–1862), passed two more laws in 1856 that added to Indian fears: the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act, and the General Service Enlistment Act, which obliged new recruits of the Bengal Army to serve overseas if ordered. For high-caste Hindus, crossing the sea threatened loss of caste.

The failures of Company rule

By the 1850s Company rule had created many groups with grievances. Weavers lost their markets to cheap machine-made cloth from Lancashire, a process historians call deindustrialisation, while British cotton goods entered India almost free of duty. The courts and households of annexed princes, which had employed soldiers, officials, artists and servants, disappeared. Indians were excluded from senior posts in the government and army, and social contact between British and Indians declined as more British women came to India and evangelical attitudes spread. Sepoys’ pay had not risen for decades, and the allowance (batta) for service outside the Company’s territory was withdrawn when annexation turned foreign territory into Company land.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857

In 1857–1858 much of north and central India rose against the Company. The rising began as a mutiny of sepoys of the Bengal Army and spread to princes, landholders, peasants and townspeople. It was the most serious challenge to British rule in India before the twentieth century.

Causes

The diagram of the causes of 1857 groups them by timescale. The immediate trigger was the new Enfield rifle, whose paper cartridges had to be torn open with the teeth. In early 1857 a rumour spread that the greased cartridges were coated with cow fat, sacred to Hindus, and pig fat, unclean to Muslims. The Company withdrew the greased cartridges and allowed sepoys to grease their own, but the rumour had already convinced many that the government meant to destroy their caste and religion and convert them to Christianity.

Sepoys of the Bengal Army had specific grievances. Most were high-caste Hindus from Awadh and Bihar, and the annexation of Awadh affected their families’ land and status. The overseas-service rule, the loss of allowances and the slow promotion of Indian officers added to their anger. Outside the army, princes affected by the Doctrine of Lapse, taluqdars who had lost land, peasants burdened by revenue and debt, and Muslim scholars who saw the Mughal dynasty threatened all had reasons to join.

From soldiers they were converted into policemen, 200,000,000 natives being curbed by a native army of 200,000 men, officered by Englishmen, and that native army, in its turn, being kept in check by an English army numbering 40,000 only. On first view, it is evident that the allegiance of the Indian people rests on the fidelity of the native army, in creating which the British rule simultaneously organized the first general center of resistance which the Indian people was ever possessed of.

Karl Marx, "The Revolt in the Indian Army", New-York Daily Tribune, 15 July 1857. Marx wrote from London within weeks of the outbreak, using British newspaper reports, and saw the revolt as the result of an empire that depended on Indian soldiers. His figures are rough, and his interest was in the weaknesses of British capitalism and empire, but his point that the sepoy army had become an organised Indian force is one that later historians develop.

The course of the rebellion

On 29 March 1857 a sepoy at Barrackpore near Calcutta, Mangal Pandey, attacked British officers; he was hanged and his regiment disbanded. At Meerut, 85 troopers who refused the cartridges were sentenced to long prison terms and publicly put in irons on 9 May. The next evening, 10 May, sepoys at Meerut rose, freed them, killed British officers and civilians and rode to Delhi. On 11 May they entered the city and proclaimed the elderly Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, as their leader. His name gave the rising a political centre and a claim to legitimacy. A proclamation issued at Azamgarh in August 1857 in his name, most probably written by his grandson Firoz Shah, stated rebel aims: it appealed to landholders, merchants, officials and others, Hindu and Muslim, to unite, blamed British rule for ruining their livelihoods and presented the rising as a defence of religion.

The vertical timeline of 1857–1859 shows how the rebellion spread and was suppressed. The main centres had different leaders and character, as the table of the main centres of revolt shows.

Who did not rebel

The rebellion was concentrated in the Ganges plain and central India. The Madras and Bombay armies stayed largely loyal, and so did the newly conquered Punjab, where Sikh and Punjabi Muslim soldiers helped to retake Delhi. Most princes, including the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Sikh rulers, supported the British, and the Bengali educated class in Calcutta mostly stayed loyal. This geographical and social limit is central to the debate about whether 1857 was a national rising.

Why the rebellion failed

• No common leadership or aim. The rebels looked to Bahadur Shah, Nana Sahib and regional leaders, each with local goals; there was no single plan or command.

• Limited geography. Large parts of India, and most princes, stayed loyal, so the British could draw troops and money from Madras, Bombay and the Punjab.

• British resources. The British controlled the telegraph and the sea and brought reinforcements, including troops on their way to China, while the rebels had little artillery or access to arms.

• Divisions among Indians. Sikhs, Gurkhas and many others fought for the Company, and some Indians who had gained from British rule, such as moneylenders and new landowners, were targets of the rebels.

Violence and reprisals

The rebellion was extremely violent on both sides. Rebels killed British officers, women and children at Meerut, Delhi and Kanpur, and the killings at the Bibighar became the centre of British memory of 1857. British reprisals were on a far larger scale: villages were burned, rebels were hanged in large numbers or blown from the mouths of cannon, and civilians in Delhi and the towns of Awadh were killed after the British recaptured them. About 6,000 Britons, soldiers and civilians, died. Indian deaths are not known: estimates range from about 100,000 to far higher figures, which some writers have put in the millions, a contested claim because no reliable count was made.

The end of Company rule and the establishment of direct rule, 1858

The rebellion convinced the British government that a trading company could no longer rule India. In Parliament, critics blamed the Company’s annexations and reforms; the Company’s defenders argued that the rising was a military mutiny that had little to do with its policies.

The Government of India Act and the Queen’s Proclamation

The Government of India Act 1858, passed on 2 August 1858, transferred all the powers of the East India Company to the Crown. A Secretary of State for India, a member of the British cabinet advised by a Council of India in London, took charge of Indian policy. In India, the Governor-General also took the title of Viceroy, the monarch’s representative; Canning was the first. The Company was wound up in 1874. Bahadur Shah Zafar had been tried for rebellion and exiled to Rangoon in Burma, where he died in 1862, which ended the Mughal dynasty after 332 years.

On 1 November 1858 Canning read Queen Victoria’s Proclamation at Allahabad. It was addressed to the "Princes, Chiefs, and People of India" and set out the principles of the new government.

We desire no extension of our present territorial possessions ... We shall respect the rights, dignity and honour of native Princes as our own.

We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in anywise favoured, none molested or disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances ...

And it is our further will that, so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of which they may be qualified, by their education, ability, and integrity, duly to discharge.

Queen Victoria, Proclamation by the Queen in Council to the Princes, Chiefs, and People of India, 1 November 1858. The proclamation was written to win back the groups whose loyalty had failed in 1857, so it promised the end of annexation, respect for princes and for religion, and equal access to office. Its qualifying phrases, such as "so far as may be" and "qualified, by their education", left the British free to limit Indian appointments, which is why later Indian nationalists could quote it as a promise that had not been kept. The proclamation also offered a pardon to rebels who had not killed British subjects.

Reorganising the army and the state

The army was rebuilt to prevent another rising. The proportion of British troops was raised, to about one British soldier for every two Indians in the Bengal Army, and artillery was kept almost entirely in British hands. Recruitment moved away from the high-caste men of Awadh and Bihar towards groups who had stayed loyal, such as Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims and Gurkhas from Nepal, whom the British later described as martial races. Regiments mixed men of different communities so that they would find it harder to act together.

Policy towards Indian society changed too. The princes, many of whom had stayed loyal, became pillars of British rule, and their states, covering about two-fifths of India, were guaranteed. In Awadh, the taluqdars who had rebelled were given back their estates in return for loyalty. Ambitious social reform was largely abandoned, since the British concluded that interference with religion and custom had helped to cause the rising.

The diagram of the consequences of the rebellion groups them as political, military and social. Many of the changes were continuities in a new form. India was still ruled from London for British interests, and the same officials ran the government; what changed was who held ultimate authority and how carefully the new rulers treated Indian elites.

Social, cultural and political reactions

Reactions to the rebellion differed sharply between groups.

• British reactions. British newspapers, sermons and novels presented the rising as a "Mutiny" marked by Indian treachery and British heroism, centred on Kanpur and Lucknow. The rebellion hardened racial attitudes: many British in India came to see Indians as untrustworthy, social distance increased, and Muslims were widely blamed as the main conspirators.

• The Bengali educated class. Most English-educated Bengalis in Calcutta had supported the government, and the British Indian Association declared its loyalty. For this group the future lay in reform and political rights within British rule, which led towards the constitutional politics of later decades.

• Muslim reformers. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, a judicial officer in the Company’s service who had saved British lives at Bijnor, wrote an analysis of the causes of the rising for British readers.

To form a Parliament from the natives of India is of course out of the question. It is not only impossible, but useless. There is no reason however why the natives of this country should be excluded from the Legislative Council, and here it is that you come upon the one great root of all this evil.

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, The Causes of the Indian Revolt, written in Urdu (1859), English translation published 1873. Sir Syed wrote as a loyal Muslim official, partly to defend Muslims from the charge that they had planned the rising. He argued that the government had misunderstood its subjects because no Indian sat on the Legislative Council, and he listed misunderstanding of the government’s intentions, laws that clashed with Indian customs and the bad management of the army among its causes. His purpose limits what he says about popular anger, but the essay is valuable as an Indian perspective written within a year of the events. He later founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh (1875) to give Muslims a Western education.

Over time Indian memory of 1857 changed. For several decades it was rarely celebrated in public, but in 1909 V.D. Savarkar called it India’s first war of independence, and it became part of the nationalist account of resistance to British rule. Its place in the rise of Indian nationalism after 1858 belongs to the history of the independence movement.

Perspectives and debates

Akbar’s religious policy

Contemporaries disagreed about Akbar. Abu’l Fazl, his friend and official historian, presented him as a divinely guided ruler whose tolerance brought peace. Badauni, writing in secret, accused him of abandoning Islam. Modern historians largely agree that Akbar’s policies were both sincere and political. S.A.A. Rizvi (Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbar’s Reign, 1975) traced the influence of Sufi and Persian philosophy on his ideas; Muzaffar Alam (The Languages of Political Islam, 2004) argues that sulh-i kul grew from a long Persian tradition of ethics and kingship that saw the ruler as a just arbiter among his subjects. The debate is mainly about motive: personal belief, statecraft or both.

Aurangzeb and the decline of the empire

These views are not simply alternatives. Sarkar’s religious explanation was shaped by early twentieth-century debates about Hindu and Muslim identity; the Aligarh historians (Habib, Athar Ali, Chandra) moved the focus to structures of land and revenue; the "revisionists" (Alam, Bayly) questioned whether "decline" is the right word at all. Truschke’s work has been strongly criticised in India, both by historians who think it understates the religious element of Aurangzeb’s policies and by political groups. A strong judgement weighs the structural problems (jagirs, revenue, succession) as the underlying causes and Aurangzeb’s policies and the Deccan war as the factors that brought them to a crisis.

The rise of the East India Company

An older nationalist view, put forward by Dadabhai Naoroji (Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, 1901) and R.C. Dutt (The Economic History of India, 1902), saw Company rule as a drain of wealth from India to Britain. From the 1980s P.J. Marshall (Bengal: The British Bridgehead, 1987) and C.A. Bayly (Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire, 1988) stressed Indian conditions: the Company succeeded because it fitted into the politics of the eighteenth-century successor states and was backed by Indian bankers, merchants and soldiers. William Dalrymple (The Anarchy, 2019) returns to the violence and greed of a corporation that conquered a subcontinent, while accepting the role of Indian collaborators. The debate is about weight: how far the Company created its opportunities, and how far it took advantage of Indian divisions.

The nature of 1857

Each interpretation reflects the time and purpose of its authors. The "Mutiny" view served to present British rule as legitimate; Savarkar wrote to inspire armed resistance; S.N. Sen’s centenary history was commissioned by the government of independent India, and Majumdar, who had left an official project, wrote partly to challenge the claim to a national war; the subaltern studies historians wanted to recover the actions of ordinary people. The evidence of where the rising happened, who joined and who stayed loyal supports the view that it was a series of connected regional revolts with a sepoy core.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

These questions are written in the style of Paper 3. Each is followed by guidance in the form of a markscheme: what the question requires, indicative content (neither prescriptive nor exhaustive), and what a top-band answer does. Answers are marked against the Paper 3 markbands as a best fit.

Question 1: the rise of Mughal power (with a full essay plan)

Question 2: Aurangzeb and the challenges to Mughal rule

Question 3: consolidation under Akbar

Question 4: the establishment of Company rule

Question 5: the causes of the rebellion of 1857

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain why Babur won the First Battle of Panipat and why his victory did not create a secure empire.

• To do:

  I can explain how Humayun lost and regained the empire, and the significance of the Suri dynasty’s reforms.

• To do:

  I can explain why the Second Battle of Panipat (1556) was decisive.

• To do:

  I can describe Akbar’s conquests and explain his policy towards the Rajputs.

• To do:

  I can explain how the mansabdari and jagir systems and the zabt revenue system worked and why they strengthened the emperor.

• To do:

  I can explain Akbar’s religious policies (Ibadat Khana, Mahzar, sulh-i kul, Din-i Ilahi) and the opposition to them.

• To do:

  I can explain the role of Nur Jahan and the "junta" and weigh different views of her power.

• To do:

  I can describe the achievements and the costs of Shah Jahan’s reign and the war of succession of 1657–1659.

• To do:

  I can explain Aurangzeb’s religious policies and weigh their importance against other causes of opposition.

• To do:

  I can explain the domestic opposition to Aurangzeb, the rise of the Marathas and why the Deccan war became an "ulcer".

• To do:

  I can explain the jagirdari crisis and use Bernier’s account as evidence with care.

• To do:

  I can assess the economic and cultural impact of the empire, the experiences of different groups of women, and the role of Bhakti, Sufism and syncretism.