Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T22:16:11.586Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Passing of Empire: The Mughal Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

M. Athar Ali
M. Athar Ali
Affiliation:
Aligarh Muslim University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

There have been numerous attempts to explain the fall of the Mughal Empire; and I truly feel great hesitation in adding myself to the long list of its exponents. To historians like Irvine and Sarkar, the decline could be explained in terms of a personal deterioration in the quality of the kings and their nobles. The harem influence grew—and women, for some strange unscientific reason, are always supposed to be a bad influence. The kings and nobles became more luxury loving, though no-one has yet established that the Mughals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries enjoyed any less luxurious mode of living than their eighteenth-century successors. Sarkar, in his monumental History of Aurangzib, also elaborated upon the traditionally recognized factor, namely, Hindu–Muslim differences: Aurangzib's religious policy is thought to have provoked a Hindu Reaction that undid the unity that had been so laboriously built up by his predecessors.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , May 1975 , pp. 385 - 396
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 William, Irvine, Later, Mughals, ed. Sarkar, , 2 vols., and Sarkar, J. N., Fall of the Mughal Empire, 4 vols, passim.Google Scholar

2 Sarkar, J. N., History of Aurangzib, III (Calcutta, 1916), 283–364.Google Scholar

3 Satish, Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707–1740 (Aligarh, 1959), pp. xliii–xlvii.Google Scholar

4 Irfan, Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (Bombay, 1963), pp. 317–51.Google Scholar

5 Pearson, Cf. M. N. in Indian Economic and Social History Review [I.E.S.H.R.], IX, 114 and note.Google Scholar

6 The estimate for 1450 is that of J. Russell (Fontana Economic History of Europe, Vol. I, p. 36) and for 1700 that of André Armengaud (Ibid., Vol. 3, p. 27).

7 Shireen, Miss Moosavi, I.E.S.H.R., X, 194.Google Scholar

8 Tavernier, , Travels in India, 1640–67 (tr. Ball, ed. Crooke, , London, 1925), II, 2.Google Scholar

9 Phyllis, Deane and Cole, W. A., British Economic Growth 1688–1959 (Cambridge, 1962), p. 7.Google Scholar

10 Irfan, Habib, Technology and Economy of Mughal India, Devaraj Chanana Memorial Lectures, 1971 (cyclo-styled).Google Scholar

11 Irfan, Habib, Enquiry, N.S. III (3), 55.Google Scholar

12 On the composition of the Maratha army, see Satish, Chandra, I.E.S.H.R., X, 217 and note.Google Scholar

Cf., Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, pp. 346–51.Google Scholar

13 Cf.Irvine, , Later Mughals, II, 352 (Sarkar's addendum).Google Scholar

14 Azad, Bilgrami, Khizana-i 'Amira, Kanpur (1871), p. 47.Google Scholar

15 Hasan, Mohibbul Khan, History of Tipu Sultan (Calcutta, 1951), pp. 344–47.Google Scholar

16 Phil, Calkins in Journal of Asian Studies, XXIX, 799 ff.Google Scholar

17 Malik, Cf. Z. in I.E.S.H.R., IV, 269–70.Google Scholar

18 Pearson, Cf. in I.E.S.H.R., IX, 118 ff.Google Scholar

19 The British imports from ‘East India’ amounted to £5,785,000 in 1797–8 (Deane & Cole, British Economic Growth, p. 87). These imports included imports from China; but the China trade was itself financed by exports from Bengal.Google Scholar

20 Mountstuart, Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (London, 1839), I, 383, 387–8, etc.Google Scholar

21 Irfan, Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, 175–9.Google Scholar

22 Siddiqi, A., Agrarian Change in a North Indian State (Oxford, 1973), p. 178–9.Google Scholar

23 See the perceptive remarks of Eric, Stokes in Past and Present, No. 58, pp. 144–5, 146–7.Google Scholar