The Decline of the Mughals and 18th-Century India: Regional Powers and British Ascendancy — Part 2: 1. Causes of Mughal Decline

1. Causes of Mughal Decline

1.1 The Nobility Factionalism (Irani vs Turani)

The Mughal imperial system rested upon a carefully managed mansabdari nobility, but from the late seventeenth century onwards it was riven by factional conflict. The main fissure was between the Irani nobles (Shia, of Persian origin) and the Turani nobles (Central Asian Sunnis), supplemented by rivalries among Hindustani and Rajput factions. These factions competed fiercely for jagirs, the wazirship, and influence over the emperor. The Saiyid Brothers — Abdullah Khan and Husain Ali Khan — exploited this chaos between 1713 and 1720, making and unmaking emperors at will. Their dominance illustrated how badly the centre had been hollowed out. Noble rivalries consumed the administrative and military energy that should have gone into governance and revenue collection. This struggle for power between nobles at the centre stands as a major internal weakness of the Mughal Empire.

1.2 Weak Successors after Aurangzeb

Aurangzeb's death in 1707 unleashed a prolonged succession crisis. Between 1707 and 1719, multiple emperors came and went in rapid succession, destabilising the administrative apparatus. When Muhammad Shah Rangila finally secured the throne in 1719 and ruled until 1748, his 29-year reign was long enough for a revival — but his complete incompetence as a ruler made such a revival impossible. It was during his reign that Nizam-ul-Mulk resigned as wazir in 1724 and established the independent state of Hyderabad — the first major breakaway from the imperial centre. Bengal, Awadh, and Punjab followed the same centrifugal pattern. Petty chiefs interpreted this as a signal for rebellion, and the Marathas began their bid to inherit the imperial mantle. The wars of succession and weak rulers that plagued Delhi from 1707 to 1719, and the incompetent rule that followed, together constituted the most direct political cause of imperial fragmentation.

1.3 Economic Crisis and the Jagirdari Crisis

At the structural level, the most influential explanations for Mughal decline point to a fiscal-agrarian crisis. Satish Chandra identified the jagirdari crisis as the fundamental cause: there was a chronic shortage of jagirs relative to the number of mansabdars who required them, producing intense factional rivalry as nobles competed over an insufficient resource base. The crisis worsened as the costs of the Deccan campaigns under Aurangzeb multiplied the number of claimants without expanding the productive base. Athar Ali similarly identified the growing shortage of jagirs in the aftermath of Aurangzeb's Deccan campaigns as structurally destabilising.

Irfan Habib's agrarian analysis adds another dimension: the Mughal fiscal system had an unrestrained tendency to appropriate ever-increasing portions of the peasants' surplus. This created a tri-polar confrontation between the imperial ruling class, the hereditary landowning zamindars, and the peasants. Peasant revolts — of the Jats in the Ganga-Yamuna Doab, of the Mewatis, of the Sikhs in Punjab — both reflected and intensified the empire's inability to enforce revenue collection. The empire was also unable to close the gap between assessed revenue (jama) and what was actually collected (hasil), with transmission losses of up to 20 percent being common.

A competing interpretation from the New Cambridge History of India school argues that Mughal decline was a consequence of the system's very success — that zamindars who undermined the empire were wealthy, merchant-backed agrarian elites whose prosperity had been enabled by Mughal commercial networks. However, this revisionist view remains contested and the economic crisis thesis retains broad scholarly acceptance.

1.4 Nadir Shah's Invasion (1739)

The Persian monarch Nadir Shah invaded India in 1738–39, delivering a devastating blow to the already-weakened empire. Lahore was quickly conquered and the Mughal army was routed at the Battle of Karnal on 13 February 1739. Emperor Muhammad Shah was captured and Delhi was laid waste; the well-known poets Mir and Sauda lamented the devastation. From the imperial treasury and the safes of the nobility, 70 crores of rupees were extracted. The Peacock Throne and the Kohinoor diamond — the two most prized symbols of Mughal sovereignty — were carried off. Nadir Shah also gained strategically crucial Mughal territory west of the river Indus, including Kabul, leaving India permanently exposed to attacks from the north-west. The invasion stripped the empire of both material and symbolic resources, while advertising to every regional power just how vulnerable the Mughal centre had become. It is notable, however, that by 1772 Delhi had revived to a considerable extent, suggesting the invasion's immediate damage was severe but not permanently irreversible for the city itself.