Collapse of Mughal Central Authority and Rise of the Successor States
The structural crisis of the Mughal Empire after Aurangzeb's death in 1707 was fundamentally fiscal. The jagirdari system that funded the imperial nobility depended on expansion that had ended, leaving revenue assignments in arrears and the nobility fractured into competing factions. A rapid succession of weak emperors and the murderous dominance of the Sayyid Brothers as kingmakers (1713-1720) destroyed what remained of central cohesion. The decisive moment came with the career of Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah. Frustrated by court intrigue and unable to reform the empire from within, he marched to the Deccan, defeated a rival imperial army at the Battle of Shakar Kheda (1724), and effectively founded the autonomous state of Hyderabad while nominally remaining a Mughal subject. His withdrawal was the clearest signal that the empire's most capable servants no longer believed the centre worth serving. Across the same years Bengal under Murshid Quli Khan, Awadh under the Nawabs, and the Maratha Confederacy under the Peshwas all consolidated as effectively independent successor states that remitted little or no revenue to Delhi. By 1724 the Mughal emperor's writ scarcely extended beyond the Doab. This peripheral and fiscal disintegration — rather than any single external conquest — was the core mechanism of Mughal collapse, leaving a power vacuum that Nadir Shah's invasion of 1739 and the European companies would exploit.
- Year: 1720 CE
- Category: Political
