THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUGHAL EMPIRETogether these two men could have prevented Nadir Shah’s incursion
from Persia into India and his sacking of Delhi in 1739. United, they could
have prevented his taking the peacock throne of the Great Mughals and
many other treasures. But it was exactly at that time that the vezir chose to
embark with all his troops on a campaign against Baji Rao, thus leaving
northern India wide open for Nadir Shah’s invasion. Baji Rao emerged
victorious from this encounter and the vezir had to yield to him most of the
territories of the empire to the south of Delhi. After Nadir Shah’s
campaign and Baji Rao’s success not much was left of the Mughal empire.
Only a few years later the vezir himself set the pace for the final dissolution
of the empire. He left Delhi and settled down in Hyderabad where he
established his own dynasty. His successors, the Nizams of Hyderabad,
became the most important allies of the British in India and thus they were
able to continue their rule until the twentieth century. The peshwas, on the
other hand, resisted the British and were eliminated.
INDIAN LANDPOWER AND EUROPEAN SEAPOWER
When Baber made his first forays into India where his dynasty established
one of the greatest landpowers of Asia, the Portuguese seapower already
controlled the Indian Ocean. The Mughals stuck to the land and never
thought of building up a navy to reflect their great power. Even the
Mughal ships carrying pilgrims across the Arabian Sea depended for their
protection on the Portuguese.
This maritime indifference of the Great Mughals was in striking
contrast to the concern of the rulers of Egypt, who dispatched several fleets
to the Arabian Sea in order to break the Portuguese stranglehold. This
disparity in policy was due to the fact that the Egyptian rulers, after having
been challenged by the Christian Crusaders, had followed a protectionist
policy which enabled them to control the Red Sea trade route; this trade
had become a state monopoly and it yielded a handsome income to the
government.
The Mughal state, on the other hand, did not depend on the control of
trade, but on the collection of land revenue. For this the influx of precious
metals was important because India had no silver mines and only very
modest gold mines. Thus the metal for India’s currency had to be obtained
from abroad. The Great Mughals were accordingly very much interested in
international trade, but they could not care less about the people and the
powers involved in it so long as the flow of the precious metals was not
interrupted. The European seapowers did not interrupt this flow; on the
contrary, they contributed to it in a big way.
Only small local rulers along the coast of India, who were themselves
interested in trade, had any reason to complain about the Europeans. Such
rulers were also in sympathy with the Egyptian maritime intervention. But