In five minutes
The decline of the Mughal Empire was a slow loss of power, not a single collapse. Around 1700 the emperor Aurangzeb ruled most of the Indian subcontinent. By the 1760s Delhi's rulers controlled little beyond the capital. In 1803 the British took charge of Delhi and the emperor, and in 1858 they ended the dynasty for good.
Four things drove the decline: long wars in the Deccan that drained money, a shortage of land revenue to pay the nobles who ran the army, regional rulers who stopped obeying Delhi, and foreign invaders and a trading company that took advantage of the weakness. This article follows them in order. It is part of the wider story of imperialism, because a weak Mughal state opened the way for British rule in India.
The empire at its height
Babur, a ruler from Central Asia, founded the empire in 1526 when he defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, at the First Battle of Panipat. His grandson Akbar (ruled 1556–1605) built the system that held it together. Nobles called mansabdars were given ranks that fixed how many soldiers and horses they had to supply. They were paid mostly through jagirs, the right to collect land revenue from a set area.
The emperor moved nobles from one jagir to another so that none grew rooted in a single region. Land revenue was collected in silver coin from a huge farming economy, and it paid for the army, the court and great buildings such as the Taj Mahal, built under Shah Jahan.
The system worked as long as the emperor was strong and new conquests gave him land to hand out. Both conditions began to fail under Aurangzeb.
Cause 1: Aurangzeb's long wars (1658–1707)
Aurangzeb took the throne in 1658 after a war of succession against his brothers. In 1681 he moved to the Deccan, in southern India, to fight the Marathas and the sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda. He conquered Bijapur in 1686 and Golconda in 1687, and the empire reached its greatest size.
But the Marathas could not be finished off. Shivaji had been crowned in 1674 and died in 1680. After his son Sambhaji was executed in 1689, Maratha leaders kept fighting a guerrilla war from hill forts. Aurangzeb spent the last 26 years of his life on campaign and died in the Deccan in 1707, aged about 88.
The wars cost enormous sums and kept the emperor far from the north for decades. Revolts by Jats, Sikhs and others added to the strain. Many historians also argue that policies such as the return of the jizya tax on non-Muslims in 1679 deepened distrust among some Rajputs and other groups. They disagree about how much weight religion deserves compared with money and politics.
Cause 2: a money problem among the nobles
New conquests brought in less land than there were nobles to reward, so there were more jagir-holders than good jagirs. Historians call this the jagirdari crisis. Nobles waited years for a worthwhile posting, squeezed the peasants on the land they did get, and often could not afford the soldiers they owed the emperor.
When farmers fled or rebelled, revenue fell even further. Historians such as Satish Chandra and Irfan Habib place this agrarian crisis at the centre of the story. As the emperor's grip loosened, nobles had more reason to protect their own interests than the empire's.
After 1707: weak emperors and rising regions
Aurangzeb's death set off a fight among his sons. Bahadur Shah I won and ruled until 1712, followed by a rapid run of short reigns. Farrukhsiyar (ruled 1713–1719) came to power with the help of the Sayyid brothers, two powerful nobles who made and unmade emperors until Muhammad Shah, who took the throne in 1719, pushed them aside. Court factions fought for control, and money for the army ran short.
Meanwhile governors turned their provinces into near-independent states. Nizam-ul-Mulk, governor of the Deccan, built the base of the future state of Hyderabad in the 1720s. Awadh and Bengal followed the same path. These rulers still swore loyalty to the emperor and sent a little tribute, but they governed for themselves. The Marathas expanded from the west, and in 1737 the Maratha leader Baji Rao I brought an army to the edge of Delhi.
Invasions: Nader Shah and Ahmad Shah Durrani
In 1739 Nader Shah, the ruler of Iran, invaded. He beat the Mughal army at Karnal in February and entered Delhi in March. After a riot in the city, his troops killed many residents, with estimates running to tens of thousands. Nader Shah left in May carrying away vast treasure, including the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Muhammad Shah kept his throne, but everyone had seen how weakly Delhi was defended.
From 1748 Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Afghan Durrani Empire, raided north India several times. At the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761 his army defeated the Marathas, then the strongest power in the north. That ended any chance that the Marathas would take over the Mughal role, and no Indian state filled the gap.
The East India Company steps in
The British East India Company had traded from coastal bases since the 1600s. Now it became a political power. After winning at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and at Buxar in 1764, the Company made the emperor Shah Alam II sign the Treaty of Allahabad in 1765. It gave the Company the diwani, the right to collect revenue, of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. A trading company was now taxing one of the richest regions of India in the emperor's own name.
In 1803, during the Second Anglo-Maratha War, British forces took Delhi, and Shah Alam II came under Company protection. The emperor kept his title, a pension and his palace, but not real power. The last emperor, Bahadur Shah II (ruled 1837–1858), was taken up as a symbolic leader by the sepoys in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. After the British retook Delhi they put him on trial and exiled him to Rangoon in Burma, where he died in 1862. In 1858 the British Crown took over the Company's rule in India, and the Mughal line was over.
Two ways to read the decline
Older histories, such as those by Jadunath Sarkar, blamed Aurangzeb and an empire stretched too far. Later work by Satish Chandra and Irfan Habib stressed the jagirdari and agrarian crisis.
Since the 1980s other historians, including Muzaffar Alam and C. A. Bayly, have argued that the 1700s were not simply a time of ruin. Regional states such as Awadh, Bengal and Hyderabad were often prosperous and well run, and on this view the empire's authority passed to them rather than vanishing. The Company then took advantage of a shifting set of states, not of one collapsed empire. Most historians accept parts of all these arguments.
What exams ask
- Causes: the Deccan wars, the jagirdari crisis, the rise of regional states, foreign invasions and the growth of European trading companies.
- Dates to know: 1526 (Panipat), 1707 (Aurangzeb's death), 1739 (Nader Shah in Delhi), 1757 (Plassey), 1761 (Third Panipat), 1765 (Allahabad), 1858 (end of the dynasty).
- Comparison: the Mughals, Ottomans and Safavids are often grouped as gunpowder empires, so you may be asked to compare why each lost power.
- Significance (AP-style): the British did not conquer a strong, united Mughal state. They exploited a weakened and divided political landscape, which shaped how colonial rule began.
Read next
- The Battle of Plassey (1757): the battle that began Company rule in Bengal.
- The Indian Rebellion of 1857: how the last emperor was drawn in, and why the dynasty ended soon after.
- The Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery: another side of how British power was used in the 1800s.
- Imperialism: What It Was, Why It Happened, What It Left Behind: the big picture that this story belongs to.
