The sovereign city is a model which was not limited to Shahjahanabad. As the capital of the patrimonial-bureaucratic empire, the sovereign city was found not only in earlier periods of Mughal Indian history but in other premodern Asian states as well. The city was in a sense an urban deduction from patrimonial-bureaucratic premises and can only be understood as the capital of such a state. The fundamental characteristic of the empire was its personal, familial nature, and the overwhelming ambition of patrimonial-bureaucratic emperors was to absorb state into household and to rule the empire as one great patriarchal domain.

Although the size of their states and the inadequacy of their tools made the achievement of this ambition impossible, these rulers were, nevertheless, able to realize a version of their dream in their capital cities. Where the scale was limited, they were better able to impose household rule. While the dominance of the emperors, the great nobles, and their extended households in the state at large was substantial, in the restricted scale of the sovereign city it was overwhelming. Thwarted in their ambition in the larger arena the rulers were able in the microcosm of the sovereign city to create a personal, familial kind of order. By turning the city into an imperial mansion they achieved, in part at least, their ambition to absorb state into household.

Such an analysis applies not only to Shahjahanabad but also to Agra or Akbarabad, the capital of the Mughal Empire from 1565–1648.