I - The mid-eighteenth-century background

Summary

At its height the Mughal empire had imposed on the greater part of the Indian sub-continent a fair measure of political unity. Centralized administration, a uniform revenue policy, a network of inland trade fostered by Mughal peace and active encouragement to an expanding overseas commerce created conditions in which economic stimuli travelled fast enough from one part of the empire to another. Prices in the different ports and emporia moved along similar if not identical lines. The empire was of course not a firmly unified modern nation state and subsistence agriculture sustained a hard core of economic isolation in all but the most commercialized regions. Yet imperial unification under the Mughals had, beyond reasonable doubt, strengthened the economic links connecting its far-flung territories and stimulated an expansion of commerce and productive effort.

By the middle years of the eighteenth century the empire lay in ruins, its once vast possessions reduced to ‘roughly a rectangular wedge of territory about 250 miles from north to south and 100 miles broad’. The imperial governors did not formally deny their allegiance to Delhi, but one after another they had asserted their autonomy: the Nizam-ul-mulk in the Deccan in 1724 (his territories also included coastal districts north of the Krishna river, and the Coromandel plains to the south), the eastern provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in about 1740; Gujarat and Sind in 1750, Oudh in 1754. Independent Pathan dynasties ruled in Farrukhabad and Rohilkhand within striking distance of the capital. The Rajput alliance destroyed by Aurangzeb's wars was never completely restored. In the far south, the former Hindu kingdom of Mysore was to grow powerful under the adventurer Haidar Ali.