mughal empire research paper

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Agrarian/Rural
• Animal Studies
• Archaeology
• Art and Architecture
• Asian American
• Borderlands
• Central Asia
• Citizenship and National Identity/Nationalism
• Comparative
• Demography/Family
• Digital Methods
• Diplomatic/International
• Economic/Business
• Environmental
• Ethnohistory
• Film Studies
• Food and Foodways
• Historiography/Historical Theory and Method
• Indian Ocean Studies
• Indigenous Studies (except the Americas)
• Intellectual
• Material Culture
• Memory Studies
• Middle East
• Migration/Immigration/Diaspora
• Peace and Conflict
• Popular Culture
• Postcolonial Studies
• Print Culture/History of the Book
• Race and Ethnicity
• Science and Technology
• Southeast Asia
• World/Global/Transnational
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

The mughal empire.

• Michael H. Fisher Michael H. Fisher Department of History, Oberlin College
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.357
• Published online: 26 March 2019

Founded in 1526, the Mughal Empire expanded during the late 16th and 17th centuries across almost the entire Indian subcontinent (except for the southern peninsular tip). At its peak, the empire contained roughly 1.24 million square miles and about 150 million people (half of western Europe in size but double its population). The imperial dynasty was originally Turco-Mongol. But, especially under Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), the dynasty established the Mughal Empire by incorporating Hindu and other Indian cultures and mobilizing India’s human and natural resources more effectively than any previous state there. Nonetheless, emperors almost constantly faced rebellions and revolts by rival members of the dynasty, imperial administrators, army commanders, regional rulers, and popular movements. By the early 18th century, the empire fragmented into successor states, but the dynasty remained on the throne until 1858 when the British Empire finally displaced it.

Throughout, the imperial court patronized extensive histories and literature (in Persian and a range of Indian languages) and works of architecture and representational arts. The imperial administration compiled detailed records, including about the court, army, and the lands it ruled. Historians, from the time of the empire onward, have used these diverse source materials in their own analyses.

• ʿAlamgir/Aurangzeb

You do not currently have access to this article

Please login to access the full content.

Access to the full content requires a subscription

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Asian History. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 30 August 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [81.177.182.174]
• 81.177.182.174

Character limit 500 /500

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Advance articles
• Editor's Choice
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• Why Publish with EREH?
• About European Review of Economic History
• About the European Historical Economics Society
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Dispatch Dates
• Contact the European Historical Economics Society
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Data availability, acknowledgements.

• < Previous

The evolutionary empire: demystifying state formation in Mughal South Asia (1556–1707)

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Safya Morshed, The evolutionary empire: demystifying state formation in Mughal South Asia (1556–1707), European Review of Economic History , Volume 28, Issue 2, May 2024, Pages 303–306, https://doi.org/10.1093/ereh/head029

• Permissions Icon Permissions

This article summarizes my thesis, which studies the impact of conflicts on the Mughal South Asian state formation in the seventeenth century. This thesis examines the relationship between states, elites, and the peasantry in the face of changing conflict intensity. It uses newly collected conflict and state-personnel data to map the evolving structure of the state, arguing that the patterns indicate a localization of the state's administration. By comparing patterns to other large early modern land empires, the text reflects on our broader understanding of the way in which conflict affected changes in state institutions, and the evolving dynamics between core and periphery.

Since Charles Tilly’s ( Tilly 1990 ) groundbreaking work on the effect of war on state development, the literature on the relationship between conflict and state capacity has expanded considerably. Yet, despite being one of the most conflict affected regions in the early modern era ( Dincecco et al. 2022 ), precolonial South Asia has remained relatively unexplored in comparative debates. Part of the reason for the lack of attention paid to the Mughal empire is perhaps that the state has remained an enigma to many economic historians, especially as historians in an older literature have vehemently disagreed about the nature of the state ( Guha 2015 ). Where some economic historians have argued that the state was highly centralized and fiscally extractive, a more recent literature has taken issue with this interpretation through the examination of more local sources ( Hasan 2004 ). Whilst it seems more and more certain that the Mughal state did not have the extractive capacity it was once believed to have, there is still difficulty in reconciling this interpretation with existing sources and the wider comparative state capacity debates.

My doctoral thesis aims to shed new light on this. My research studies how conflicts affected state formation in the Mughal empire, specifically looking at the impact of rebellions and the state’s institutional responses to conflict change. It shows that the precarious relationship between the state and elites ( Mansabdars and Zamindars ) led the government to adopt policies which prioritized local governance and empowered the local elite. By examining state-periphery relationships and their evolution over time, the thesis offers explanations for the unusual patterns of state behaviour discovered in the data. By focusing on the seventeenth century, often considered to be the state's most centralized period, my findings have implications for wider debates on the great divergence ( Broadberry et al. 2015 ), the prevalence of the seventeenth century crisis ( Parker 2013 ), and the symbiotic relationship between the state and the economy.

Where recent literature on Mughal state has been more qualitative, I adopt a relatively more quantitative approach to measuring the effects of conflict on state development over time. By building or making accessible new datasets of Mughal conflicts and government officials, I map the empire's institutional transformation and identify critical periods of structural change. The first of these new datasets constructed is the Mughal Conflict dataset derived from contemporary state histories. I differentiate this from other conflict datasets on the basis of its focus on conflicts from the state perspective, and for the amount of detail the source affords. The first chapter of my thesis describes this dataset and explains why this method was most suitable for studying conflicts in South Asia where shared sovereignty with local elites was common. The second dataset I use is Athar Ali's ‘Apparatus of Empire’, which provides details of 10,735 official appointments in the Mughal government ( Ali 1985 ). This is a tremendous source for the study of the seventeenth century Indian state where data has otherwise been scarce. By digitizing and cleaning Ali's carefully compiled tables, I am able to analyse the state in more detail than past literature has allowed, consequently revealing previously unseen patterns.

The data reveal some fascinating insights. For example, the second chapter of my thesis explores the institutionalized practice or rebel forgiveness, where rebellious elites (and even the peasantry) were routinely reincorporated into the state with the return of their confiscated wealth and status. I show that 45 percent of a sample of 267 rebels were forgiven, despite these rebels often engaging in violence against the state ( Morshed 2023 ). I argue that rebel forgiveness was not indicative of weakness within the state, but a strategy to reduce administrative costs by retaining skilled administrators. Rebels’ local specific skillsets made them better able to administer their localities, yet their limited ambit of influence meant they often posed a low threat to the state even if they re-engaged in rebellion. Using logistic regressions, I show that rebels of ethnicities and religions more distant to that of the Mughals' were most likely to be forgiven, indicating that local and ethnic specific skillsets were key considerations in rebel forgiveness. I demonstrate this relationship further with the use of case-studies that explore the mechanisms involved and the reasoning of the state in their decisions. For example, one case study involves Sidi Yaqut, the Mughal admiral of African descent who was essential to the defeat of the East India Company during Child's War (1686). When the state considered replacing Sidi's men, the chronicler wrote: “The chief nobles, however, submitted that only the Abyssinians and particularly those trained by Sidi Yaqut, could administer those mountainous regions, command the fort of Rahiri and keep the sea passage to the House of Allah open” ( Khan 1975 ). Thus, the passage highlights the state's prioritization of administrator's abilities in determining their position in government.

The third chapter maps the phenomenal change in the intensity of conflicts the state faced, where the data from the Mughal Conflict Dataset indicate that wars and rebellions became more frequent but also larger in terms of the number of soldiers engaged in them. We can also see a transformation in the nature of conflicts, where the state increasingly faced rebellions from more localized elites and peasantry over time. By looking at the correlation of the timing of and frequency of famines and very large peasant conflicts, my thesis proposes the shift in conflict intensity can be explained by exogenous factors related climate as opposed to endogenous factors related to the state’s extraction of peasant resources, which was an explanation previously proposed in older literature ( Raychaudhuri 1982 ). The analysis shows that turbulence of peasant migration and desperation at the local level explains a dynamic shift between state and elite relations, where the influx of peasants on to Zamindar lands empowered local intermediaries fiscally and militarily.

The fourth chapter uses Ali’s dataset on official appointments to look at how state expenditure on officials changed between 1570 and 1658. State expenditure on Mansabdars is a good proxy for understanding state capacity, where it has been estimated that in 1595 around 80 percent of state expenditure was spent on the jagirdars , who were the administrative and military backbone of the empire ( Moosvi 2015 ). The results are again surprising. As expected, we see in the data an extraordinary increase in the total number of officials over time (even relative to population), yet after 1630 total expenditure on salaries practically flattens and average salaries fall significantly. I argue this pattern exhibits a localization of the Mughal state's structure in the face of greater internal conflict. The state was hiring more localized officials to increase its administrative capacity and to develop better information channels between centre and locality. Drawing on Ottoman state literature ( Koh 2021 ), I discuss an alternative interpretation of the state’s structure and take the view that larger conflicts incentivized the state to increase the number of administrators in the empire. By reducing the ambit of officials' jurisdictions of governance, the state's reach was increasingly targeted and present on the local level, allowing for more flexibility in administration.

In the last chapter, I explore the impact rebellions had on state formation in large agrarian empires by comparing the Mughal Indian experience to that of Qing China (1644–1911). The chapter highlights that despite both empires facing large internal rebellions, the institutional response to these conflicts by each state seems to have been very different, where state fiscal expansion stagnated in China in the face of peasant rebellions ( Chan 2008 ). I suggest a possible explanation for these differences is the degree of ethnic and religious diversity in India compared to China, where because the information costs of administering diverse groups was higher in India, the Mughal empire was more dependent on the influence of intermediaries. However, this mechanism is far from proven.

The fascinating case of the Mughal state formation process bares important lessons for our understanding of centre–periphery relationships. My thesis demonstrates that in the face of increased agricultural disturbance, the empire's institutions adapted further to local conditions and environments. There was a significant expansion in the total number of government officials, but these officials were overwhelmingly from more local communities, resulting in a shift of the locus of the empire to the local level. I argue the increased incorporation of localized elite should not be considered a sign of weakness of the state, but rather as a process of consolidation. These officials became part and parcel of the state’s apparatus, where their connections to local communities made them important resources for an empire increasingly grappling with internal unrest. Parcelling of control was therefore an effective tool for the government in increasing its capacity. Yet, in doing so, the state took into their employ officials with independent minds and objectives, as well as any grievances between the locals and these elites. The state apparatus thus exhibited a duality, becoming more pervasive on the local level, yet more vulnerable to loss of central control. The findings bear lessons in institutional adaption in the face of conflicts, and implications of understanding ‘what’ the state truly was in early modern history.

There is no new data analysis in this article that is not already available online. Data used in my research is discussed in detail in my thesis which is available online in the LSE dissertations archive, accessible via this link: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4505/ . Statistics provided have references in my published article ( Morshed 2023 ).

I am very grateful to my supervisors, Professor Tirthankar Roy and Dr. Jordan Claridge, for their guidance in writing my thesis. I am also grateful to the LSE Economic History department faculty and PhD students for their insights. I am additionally grateful to the Economic History Society for providing support through the Bursary Scheme, as well as the Radwan Travel and Discovery Fund.There are many others whose advice and guidance has been very valuable in writing and conducting my research, though it is not possible to name all of them here due to limited space. A full list of these acknowledgements, as well as the references and sources used in the thesis, can be found in my submitted thesis which is available in the online LSE thesis archives.

Ali , A. ( 1985 ) The Apparatus of Empire: Awards of Ranks, Offices, and Titles to the Mughal Nobility, 1574-1658 . Centre of Advanced Study in History, Aligarh Muslim University .

Broadberry , S. , Custodis , J. and Gupta , B. ( 2015 ). India and the great divergence: an Anglo-Indian comparison of GDP per capita, 1600–1871 . Explorations in Economic History 55 , pp. 58 – 75 .

Google Scholar

Chan , K. ( 2008 ). Foreign trade, commercial policies and the political economy of the song and Ming dynasties of China . Asia Pacific Economic History Review 48 , pp. 68 – 90 .

Dincecco , M. , Fenske , J. , Menon , A. and Mukherjee , S. ( 2022 ). Pre-colonial warfare and long-run development in India . The Economic Journal 132 , pp. 981 – 1010 .

Guha , S. ( 2015 ). Rethinking the economy of Mughal India: lateral perspectives . Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58 , pp. 532 – 75 .

Hasan , F. ( 2004 ). State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, C . University of Cambridge Oriental : Publications , pp. 1572 – 730 .

Google Preview

Khan , K. ( 1975 ). Muntakhab ul Lubab, trans . Syed Moinul Haq Karachi : Pakistan Historical Soc .

Koh , C. ( 2021 ). The ottoman postmaster: contractors, communication and early modern state formation . Past & present 251 , pp. 113 – 52 .

Moosvi , S. ( 2015 ). The Economy of the Mughal Empire, C.1595: A Statistical Study. Revised and Enlarged . New Delhi : Oxford University Press .

Morshed , S. ( 2023 ). State of forgiveness: cooperation, conciliation, and state formation in Mughal South Asia (1556–1707) . Economic History Review pp. 1 – 30 . https://doi.org/gate3.library.lse.ac.uk/10.1111/ehr.13252 .

Parker , G. ( 2013 ). Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century . New Haven; London : Yale University Press .

Raychaudhuri , T. ( 1982 ). The State and the Economy. In T. Raychaudhuri and I. Habib (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India . Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , p. 1982 .

Tilly , C. ( 1990 ). Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 . Cambridge, Mass., USA : Blackwell .

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• The EHES Blog
• Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1474-0044
• Print ISSN 1361-4916
• Copyright © 2024 European Historical Economics Society
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Introduction to The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan

2019, The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan, edited by Ebba Koch and Ali Anoohshahr, Mumbai: The Marg Foundation

The introduction discusses the research on Shah Jahan, the transition between Jahangir and Shah Jahan and the chapters of the contributors to the volume

Related Papers

The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan

Ebba Koch , Ali Anooshahr

In this volume an international group of eminent scholars with various historical interests – political, social, economic, legal, cultural, literary, and art-historical – presents for the first time a multidisciplinary analysis of Shah Jahan and his predecessor Jahangir (r. 1605-27). Corinne Lefèvre, Anna Kollatz, Ali Anooshahr, Munis Faruqui and Mehreen Chida -Razvi study the various ways in which the events of the transition between the two reigns found textual expression in Jahangir’s and Shah Jahan’s historiography, in subaltern courtly writing, and, how in a material form the changeover affected architecture. Harit Joshi and Stephan Popp throw light on the emperor’s ceremonial interaction with his subjects and Roman Siebertz takes the reader step by step over the bureaucratic hurdles which foreign visitors had to face when seeking trade concessions from the court. Sunil Sharma analyses the new developments in Persian poetry under Shah Jahan's patronage and Chander Shekhar identifies the Mughal variant of the literary genre of prefaces. Ebba Koch derives from the changing ownership of palaces and gardens insights about the property rights of the Mughal nobility and imperial escheat practices, Susan Stronge discusses floral and figural tile revetments as a new form of architectural decoration and J. P. Losty sheds light on the changes in artistic patronage taste that transformed Jahangiri painting into Shahjahani. R. D. McChesney shows how Shah Jahan’s reign cast such a long shadow that it even reached the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rulers of Afghanistan. This imaginatively conceptualised collection of articles invite us to see in Mughal India of the first half of the seventeenth century less a periodical division than a structural continuity which Shah Jahan managed to hegemonize. The reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan emerge as a unit, a creative reconceptualisation of the Mughal Empire as imagined by Akbar on the basis what Babur and Humayun had initiated.

Journal of The Economic and Social History of The Orient

Corinne Lefèvre

sara chaabani

For the first time in India, Mughal regime succeeded in establishing a single political authority. Akbar the Great, who is conventionally described as the glory of the Mughal Empire, reigned in the last half of the sixteen century from 1556 until 1605. During this period, he succeeded to extend the empire he inherited to Afghanistan in the west, and to the Godavari river in the south. Akbar was assisted by Abul Fazl, the chief advisor who helped him enormously in formulating the wise policies of governing from 1579 until he was murdered du in 1602. Abul Fazl composed “Akbarnama” a masterpiece of the Mughal literature, describing the History of Mughal ancestors and focusing on Akbar’s own reign. Based on Abul Fazl’s composition Akbarnama, we will discuss in this paper how the Great Mughals were dealing with the West or with “Faringis” as the Mughals called them.

Purvai Dwivedi

The medieval period of Indian history has been a subject of much interest for the historians all across the globe. This interest has been greatly fostered by the vast expanse of the Mughal dominance in fields of trade, warfare, culture and geographical size of the empire and most importantly, due to the plethora of available literary sources from this period. India during the period of Mughal dynasty (16th-18th centuries) is exceptionally well illuminated by a large body of historical literature, mainly in Persian. By its very volume, if nothing else, Mughal historiography has, however, t be studied and assessed separately. Indo-Mughal historical literature is not only large, but also varied: histories of India, dynastic and regional histories, gazetteers and administrative documents are well represented. This paper is an attempt to throw light upon Persian sources which have been brought into use by scholars and historians in order to understand and revisit the Mughal reign, with particular focus on Nizamuddin Ahmad's Tabaqat-i-Akbari.

Indian Historical Review

Meena Bhargava

Rukhsana Iftikhar

Abstract: Interpretation of Muslim state in India is always remaining a colonial scholarship. Muslim rule in India is narrated as "Oriental despotism" in which a large number of Hindus were the victim of genocides. Monolithic agenda of religious confrontation was introduced by commissioned historians who organized and re write the scattered past of oriental worlds. James Mill divided Indian past into Hindu, Muslims and modern British India. Hindus were the custodians of the Vedic culture. Muslim conquered this land by force and ruins the temples and worshipping places. Muslims permanent hostility towards other communities was not possible in medieval times. After many shocks of conquest Muslims prepared to find a via media for those who were living around them. Muslim interacted with other communities like Hindus, Buddhist even Christian and create a congenial environment. Muslims and Hindus had closer relation as compare to other communities. It is hardly impossible to exaggerate the extent of Muslim influences over Indian life in every sphere. From state formation to the selection of nobility- from economic life to domestic one, even in the marriages, foods, festivals and fairs, Muslim shared their cultural Influences with other communities. This paper is an effort to dilute this image that Mughals were more orthodox towards other communities in India and developed a theocratic state. This research will also highlight the Mughals sense of "Unity in diversity".

Ali Anooshahr

Gunieve Jaswal

The Mughal Empire was one of the largest centralized state in the pre-modern world and this volume traces the history of this magnificent empire from its creation in the early 16 th century to the mid-18 th century. Interestingly, the book weaves the history of empire through different focal points which were not quite conventional to the process of history writing and which resulted in whole new spectrum of themes and some very innovative endeavors. The new entry points through which the book revolves are-sources of Mughal state's legitimacy , the evolution and meaning of court etiquette , the world of the imperial Mughal family and the interaction between folklore and court culture. It can be perceived that there is a constant attempt to co-relate the dynasty's inner world with popular perception. Harbans Mukhiya for writing this book, assiduously looked into the official documents, painting, travel accounts, court chronicles and this was the first time a historian used bazar gossips and folklores for premising a historical argument.

Often overshadowed by his overachieving ancestors and ‘dominated’ by his wife, Jahangir is projected as an undeserving, notorious Mughal. This essay tries to reassess the Jahangirnama or his memoirs to capture what has been ignored. It begins with a general presentation of Jahangirnama and its importance as a source to reconstruct history. Further, the style of writing and the colloquial nature of Jahangir’s memoirs are assessed critically. This was followed by an important thesis of the political culture under Jahangir’s regnal years, how he inherited the administrative policies from his illustrious father’s court and put them to great use. This essay also highlights Jahangir’s inclination towards aesthetics, literature and natural sciences. Finally, there has been made an attempt to reassess Jahangir as a political sovereign as opposed to the popular, conventional European historiography about his notorious identity.

Mehreen Chida-Razvi

It is recognised that imperial architecture of the Mughal period was considered to be a reflection of the royal patron; this was particularly true during the reign of Shah Jahan, when the palaces, gardens and tombs he commissioned were seen as physical visualisations of his imperial ideology. This paper will question the patronage of Jahangir’s Mausoleum, in Lahore, documented by Shah Jahan’s historians as having been commissioned by him during the first ten years of his reign. I will argue that the architecture and decoration of the tomb, which do not ‘fit’ with comparative Shah Jahani architecture of the period, are actually indicative of a different patron.

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

Anne Murphy

Harit Joshi

CRACOW INDOLOGICAL STUDIES XIV

Piotr Borek

Entangled Religions

stéphane boissellier

Muhammad Ahmad Munir

Najaf Haider

Ars Orientalis

isara solutions

International Res Jour Managt Socio Human

Indian Economic and Social History Review

Journal of History and Social Sciences

Umer Hameed

International Journal of Advanced Research

Hakim Zainal

JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS

ARNISHA ASHRAF

SANI PANHWAR

fouzia farooq

irfan ismail

Basharat Hassan

Mughal Emperors Chronicals/ Mughal Dynasty

Zeeshan Ansari

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

caa.reviews

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Political Ideas & Institutions of Mughal State

23 Pages Posted: 19 Jun 2010

Gautam Jayasurya

Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law

Date Written: June 19, 2010

The Mughal Period on a clearer basis extended from 1526-1540 and 1555-1712 (due to the interregnum of Sher Shah Suri 1540-1555). The Mughal Empire was an Islamic imperial power which ruled most of the India subcontinent from the early 16th to the mid-19th centuries. The Mughal Emperors were of Turko-Mongol descent, but developed a highly sophisticated mixed Persian culture. At the height of its power, around 1700, it controlled most of the Subcontinent - extending from present-day Bangladesh to Kashmir and part of what is now Afghanistan. To be mentioned in a more precised manner, the rule of Mughal Empire stretched from Mughal period, an exemplary period in its own particular ways. This period is sometimes considered to be the blue print of modern India. In the fifteenth century when the political condition of India had deteriorated and there was no powerful kingdom in the northern India. The last ruling dynasty was of the Lodhis with a weekend position. Such a situation invited invasions from the northwestern borders of India. Babur’s invasion and subsiquent were indeed its result. Babur invaded India in 1526, i.e. Battle of Panipat, in which Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodhi and thus established his empire over India. Expansion and annexation of India by Mughals and diplomatic absorption of the Rajputs, economic policies, religious policies and socio-economic policies, the sovereign, his power and duties are worth mentioning. Punjab to Bengal including Jaunpur and Bihar in the 16 century. Included Kabul in the north-west and Kashmir in the north, Sindh, Multan and Gujrat in the west, Malwa and Benar in the south and Orrissa and Bengal in the east at the time of Akbar’s death. It stretched from Kabul, Kandhar and Peshawar in the north and Kaveri in the south by the end of seventeenth century. Its population at that time has been estimated as between 110 and 130 million, over a territory of over 4 million km² (1.5 million mi²). The foundation for the Baburids empire (Mughal Period) was established around the early 1500s by the Timurid prince Babur, when he took control of the Doab and eastern regions of Khorasan controlling the fertile Sindh region and the lower valley of the Indus River. In 1526, when Babur defeated the last of the Delhi Sultans, Ibrahim Shah Lodhi, at the First Battle of Panipat, Babur was invited to invade the Delhi Sultanate by Rana Sanga, who thought that after defeating Ibrahim Lodhi, Babur would go back and he would become the Ruler of Delhi. To secure his newly founded kingdom, Babur then had to face the Rajput confederacy led by Rana Sanga of Chittor, at the battle of Kanwah, 1527. These early military successes of the Turks, achieved by an army much smaller than its opponents, have been attributed to their cohesion, mobility. Every ruler contributed in his own particular way, which hold a great importance in adding glitters to the shining empire. Beginning from the very first ruler everyone did his best or tried do his best.

Keywords: Mughal Era, Political Ideas

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Gautam Jayasurya (Contact Author)

Rajiv gandhi national university of law ( email ).

Sidhuwal - Bhadson Road Patiala, PA Punjab 147001 India +91-9780655139 (Phone) 0175-2304189 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.bagaboys.wordpress.com

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics, related ejournals, legal history ejournal.

Subscribe to this free journal for more curated articles on this topic

Political Theory: History of Political Thought eJournal

Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic

Political Behavior: Race, Ethnicity & Immigration Politics eJournal

India law ejournal.