Our time traveller in 1707, especially if he had been misled by European accounts of ‘Oriental despots’, may well have failed to appreciate the extent to which the Mughal Empire, like other pre-modern political systems of that scale, operated by a hierarchic distribution of authority among different levels of society. There was no monopoly of military force; there was no monopoly of political authority. The Mughal himself was shahinshah, ‘king of kings’, hence one sovereign among many. Competition to expand geographically was always endemic, as was competition between the vertical levels of the system. It is conflict, as Bernard Cohn has written using the late Mughal period as an example of such systems, that achieves the precarious consensus and balance that allows such political systems to persist. Effective rule required not only resolving competition but also judgment about the conflicts with which to engage. During the first half of the eighteenth century Mughal power contracted, while those who had once been subordinate to the Mughals flourished. Among the new regional powers was a joint stock company of English traders, which, by century's end, was poised to claim the mantle of the Mughals as ruler of the subcontinent.

The ‘Fault Lines’ of Mughal Control

A cogent perspective on Aurangzeb as ruler comes from one Bhimsen, a Hindu Kayastha memoirist, who, in his final decades of service, acted as auditor and inspector for a Rajput noble. Writing at the end of Aurangzeb's life, Bhimsen gives us a ‘grass roots’ view of what he sees as imperial failure. He was, as John Richards has written, one of many who claimed generations of loyalty to the Mughal regime, men who prided themselves on their devotion and courage as well as their mastery of Indo-Persian courtly culture. As Bhimsen followed his master into the futile battles against the rebellious zamindars and chiefs, he despaired of the difference between earlier Mughal rule and that of the later Aurangzeb: