The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857

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To them it was vital that Zafar should be put down, precisely because, having a Hindu mother, he appealed to both sides of India's own great religious division. Indian cotton textiles were the most important manufactured goods in world trade in the 18th century, consumed across the world from the Americas to Japan. By the mid-17th century, Indian cultivators begun to extensively grow two new crops from the Americas, maize and tobacco.

well over half of the output from the fields in his realm, after the costs of production had been met, is estimated to have been taken from the peasant producers by way of official taxes and unofficial exactions.Through warfare and diplomacy, Akbar was able to extend the empire in all directions and controlled almost the entire Indian subcontinent north of the Godavari river. Meanwhile, some regional polities within the increasingly fragmented Mughal Empire, involved themselves and the state in global conflicts, leading only to defeat and loss of territory during the Carnatic Wars and the Bengal War. Mughal administrative records also refer to the empire as "Land of Hindustan" ( Persian: بِلادِ هِندوستان, romanized: Bilād-i-Hindustān), "Dominions of Hindustan" ( Persian: وِلايَتِ هِندوستان, romanized: Wilāyat-i-Hindustān), [33] or "Sultanate of Al-Hind" ( Arabic: سلطنة الهندية, Saltanat(i) Al-Hindiyyah) as observed in the epithet of emperor Aurangzeb. Overseas, Europeans depended on Bengali products such as cotton textiles, silks, and opium; Bengal accounted for 40% of Dutch imports from Asia, for example, including more than 50% of textiles and around 80% of silks. million square kilometres, including parts of what are now India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

The historian Shireen Moosvi estimates that in terms of contributions to the Mughal economy, in the late 16th century, the primary sector contributed 52%, the secondary sector 18% and the tertiary sector 29%; the secondary sector contributed a higher percentage than in early 20th-century British India, where the secondary sector only contributed 11% to the economy. Through the Government of India Act 1858 the British Crown assumed direct control of East India Company-held territories in India in the form of the new British Raj.Many of the empire's elites now sought to control their own affairs, and broke away to form independent kingdoms. Such officials included the kotwal (local police), the faujdar (an officer controlling multiple districts and troops of soldiers), and the most powerful, the subahdar (provincial governor).

Although Shah Jahan fully recovered from his illness, there was a succession war for the throne between Dara and Aurangzeb. No longer were Britain's Indian policies in the 1850s conducted by the likes of Warren Hastings and William Jones, who understood and respected Indian values and traditions. The Mughals made a major contribution to the Indian subcontinent with the development of their unique Indo-Persian architecture. By the time he was invited by Lodi governor of Lahore, Daulat Khan, to support his rebellion against Lodi Sultan Ibrahim Khan, Babur was familiar with gunpowder firearms and field artillery, and a method for deploying them.As Dalrymple depressingly notes, such caricatures are still circulating in the western anathemas of Islamic societies today.