This document provides background information on the decline of the Mughal Empire in India and the rise of European trading powers like the Portuguese, Dutch, and British. It discusses key events like the British taking control of India from the East India Company in 1858, the reasons for the Mughal collapse after Aurangzeb's death in 1707, and the establishment of early trading posts and territories by European nations along the Indian coasts and major river systems over the 1600s-1700s. These footholds eventually allowed the British to expand their influence and formally abolish the Mughal Empire in 1858.
4. Reasons why the Mughal Collapse
1. India was left in chaos at the death of
Aurangzeb in 1707.
2. his military campaigns in the south
and is continued persecution of
Hindus and Sikhs had exhausted the
treasury and brought most of the
country to rebellion.
3. his successors on the throne at Delhi
were far weaker men.
5. Mughal Empire
The Mughal Empire was founded in 1526. At its height, about 1700, it
encompassed most of the Indian subcontinent. Mughal rulers developed a
stable, centralized form of government that served as a model for later
Indian rulers. The empire declined in the 1700s and was officially abolished
by the British in 1858.
6. was originally named Muhi-ud-Din
Muhammad, but was given the name
Aurangzeb (“Ornament of the Throne”)
while still a prince.
Aurangzeb
Aurangzeb was the last of the powerful Mughal emperors
of India, taking the throne in 1658. He greatly extended
the Indian empire during his rule, but also weakened it
by severely persecuting all non-Muslim peoples.
7. The Mughal Collapse
His three sons fought for each other in
the usual battles of the Mughal
succession.
After two and half years of civil war,
the victor was then virtually besieged
by a Sikh uprising that swept the
Punjab and by guerrilla warfare to the
west and south.
His death in 1712 brought on another
struggle for the throne among his sons
8. Unfortunately, this did not bring peace and
most of the rest of India continued to be
torn by factional fighting, civil war, local
banditry and widespread raiding by Maratha
cavalry all over the Deccan, along the east
coast and into the north.
Aurangzeb’s immediate successors had
accepted reality by officially recognizing the
Maratha confederacy (so called, although it
never really achieved unity) and its
extensive conquests in and on the southeast
coast.
9. The Mara has were made nominally
tributary allies of the Mughals but
controlled their own growing
territories and large revenues
They were in effect given both the
means and the license to extend their
raids or conquest into still more of
central, southern and eastern India,
whose revenues could further augment
their power
10.
11.
12. The Maratha cavalry operated more and
more as bandits and plunders, rarely even
attempting to set up any administration
in areas they swept for loot and then left
in chaos
Their by now traditional role as spoilers
and harriers of the Mughal drive into the
Deccan had perhaps spoiled too for any
them too for any more constructive
approaches.
13.
14.
15. Trade dwindled in many areas, famine
increased and much of India slipped further
into mass poverty.
At the same time there was a revival of
trade in other areas, especially in the north,
with the collapse of Mughal control
The last shreds of Mughal power were
swept away when the Persian army sacked
and looted Delhi in 1739, massacred its
inhabitants and took back with them the
famous Peacock Throne
16. Iran was in a period of revived strength
under its new ruler ; Nadir Shan (1688-
1747), a powerful general who
repulsed an Afghani invasion and
seized the Persian throne in 1736
He then asked for Mughal help to
crush Afghanistan, formerly a part of
the Mughal Empire, but the Mughals
were by now hard-pressed to defend
even the Delhi against Maratha
raiders.
17. Nadir Shan
Turkmen military leader Nadir Shah took the Iranian throne in
1736 and rapidly built an empire through conquest. By 1738 he
had conquered Afghanistan, and in 1739 he dealt a disastrous
blow to the tottering Mughal Empire of India when he sacked
Delhi. His empire eventually stretched from Iraq to northern
India, but it disintegrated quickly after his assassination in 1747.
18. In 1738 Nadir Shah, acting alone, first conquered
Afghanistan and then went on to Lahore and
Delhi, which he left in smoldering ruins in 1739.
Th dynasty continued in name and successive
Mughal emperors sat in state in Delhi’s Red Fort
until 1858, when the last of them, an old man,
was banished by the British
Surprisingly, the once-brilliant aura of the
Mughals continued to be acknowledged by most
other Indian rulers after 1739 with ceremonial
gifts and recognition of Mughal authority, at
least ritually
19. Even the British followed suit until well
into the nineteenth century.
Unfortunately, Rajputs, Marathas, Sikhs,
Gujaratis, Bengalis and other regional
groups who had fought against the
Mughals saw each other as rivals and
indeed as enemies rather than as joint
Indian inheritors of power
21. Their language, though related like
those of Europe, were different and they
differed culturally as well.
They were comparable to the separate
European cultures and states in size as
well
Their divisions now made it possible for
the Portuguese, Dutch, English and
French to make a place for themselves
and increase their leverage
22.
23. For about a century after Vasco da Gama’s
voyage to Calicut in 1498 the Portuguese
dominated Western trade with India, as well as
with Southeast Asia, China and Japan
In India they completed with Indian and Arabs
traders and increasingly after the end of the
sixteenth century, with Dutch and English
merchants and their ships
Westerners fought among themselves for
control of the sea routes but their objectives in
India were purely commercial except for the
early Portuguese interest in winning converts
to Catholicism
36. The Portuguese had fortifies a base at
Colombo some years after arriving there
in 1502 and controlled large parts of the
lowland west coast of the island,
including the profitable trade in
cinnamon bark from the Colombo area
Their effort to extend their control inland
were repelled by the Sinhalese kingdom
of Kanya in the central highlands, which
had become the chief power in a divided
Ceylon after the late thirteenth-century
collapse of the classical and medieval
state based at Anuradhapura and
Polonaruwa
37. The Dutch drove out the Portuguese
between 1640 and 1658 and established
their own more extensive position in
Ceylon, including bases on the east and
west coasts
Although they too failed in several attempt
to conquer the mountain girt Kandyan
kingdom, they made Ceylon an even
profitable commercial enterprise and
begin the plantation system there first for
coconuts and later for coffee, brought in
from their territories in Java
38. Like Portuguese, they intermarried with
the Sinhalese, producing a Eurasian
group still known as “Burghers”
The Dutch were to maintain their
control of the trade of Ceylon from their
several coastal bases until the Napoleon
Wars, when the British took over the
island and in 1795 finally conquered the
Kandyan kingdom
39.
40. The English, like other European trader
nations, learned about and began explorations
for a northern passage to India by sea around
Russia and Siberia in 1580
A later effort to run the Portuguese blockade
in 1583 the ship Tiger ended in Portuguese
capture of the vessel but one of the English
merchants aboard, Ralph Fit escaped and
went on to India, where he visited Akbar’s
capitals at Agra and Fatehpur Sikri as well as
Goa, returning to London in 1591 with
firsthand accounts of India’s wealth
41. The first two ventures of the English East India
Company, founded in 1600, were aim at the
spice trade Southeast Asia, but the third went
to India and reach Surat, the major port of
Gujarat on the west coast, 1608
Gujarat had been absorbed into the Mughal
Empire in 1573 and Captain William Hawkins,
were commanded the fleet of three English
ships, carrying presents and a letter from King
James I to the Mughal emperor, Jahangir,
requesting a trade treaty
42. Hawkins claimed that the Portuguese,
especially the Jesuits w were already
ensconced at the Mughal court,
conspiracy against him, but in any
case he was kept waiting for over two
years and was finally obliged to return
home emperor handed
A second English envoy reached Agra
in 16 but was sent away even more
summarily after the Jesuits urged the
emperor not to deal with him
43. However, later in 1612 a single English ship
defeated and dispersed four Portuguese
galleons and a number of frigates off Surat, in
full view of the people on shore feat that was
repeated in 1615
Indians now saw that he English were more
valuable clients than the Portuguese and better
able to defend Indian shipping and coasts from
pirates and from rival Europeans (sometimes of
__ and the same, especially with the
Portuguese, who had been characteristically
aggressive and ruthless whenever they had an
opportunity)
44. In 1616, King James sent another ambassador,
Sir Thomas Roe, who finally won permission
from Jahangir for the East India Company to
build a “factory” (warehouse; “factor” is an
old word for “merchant”) in Surat
Seven years later the Dutch tortured and then
murdered ten English merchants who had
been sharing in the spice trade of eastern
Indonesia, signaling the end of Dutch
willingness to allow any European
competition in what thus became their
private preserve
45. The Indian market, and the Mughals, had
little or no interest in trade with England
and were not impresses by the samples of
goods they were offered from what was,
after all, a much let advanced economy,
which accordingly sought to b Indian goods
but had little that was attractive exchange
for them
However, the Mughals had no navy and
had to depend on foreigners for protection
against piracy; of these, it now seemed
clear, the English were the least
troublesome and the most effective
50. From Surat, English ships completed
the elimination of Portuguese power at
sea, and English merchants became the
principal traders in the port.
But they still sought bases on the east
coast and in Bengal, where they could
buy the finesr-0quality cottons more
directly as well as the indigo and
saltpeter (for gunpowder) produced in
the finest quality in the world
51. After their early attempts to penetrate
Bengal had been driven off by the
Dutch from their already established
east coast bases, the English in 1639
negotiated with a small local ruler to
the south to buy land near the village
of Mandaraz around a small lagoon at
the mouth of the tiny Coum River
This later became Madras, where they
soon built what they called Fort St.
George, named for England’s patron
saint.
54. From Madras as their chief base in eastern
India, which also gave access to south
Indian cottons and other goods, they made
repeated efforts to trade directly in Bengal
and finally established a “factory” (a base
for merchants) upriver near the provincial
capital
They had traded periodically at a small
market called Sutanuti (a hank of cotton) a
day’s sail up the Hooghly River, one of the
lesser mouths of the Ganges, that was
occupied only on a market days.
55. In 1690 they decided to make a settlement
there where they thought their ships could
protect or rescue them if needed and where
they were more in the fringes of Indian
authority
Shortly thereafter, they received permission
to build fort, and the new settlement was
called Fort William (after William III, who
had come to the English throne in the
Glorious Revolution of 1688), soon to be
known instead as Calcutta. The name
probably came from the nearby shrine of the
goddess Kali at Kalighat (ghat is a set of steps
descending to a river) or from the adjoining
village of Kalikata
56. Rear view of the East India Company's Factory at
Cossimbazar
57. At Surat, the English were only one among
many merchant groups and were depending on
the fickle pleasure of Mughal and Gujarati
powers
Put Bombay, originally a chain of small islands
enclosed in a large bay was ceded to the
English crown by Portugal in 1661 as part of the
marriage contract of the Portuguese princess
Catherine of Braganza and Charles II
The Portuguese had built no settlement there
and used it only occasionally, since it was
highly exposed to piracy, was cut off from
landward access to markets by the rampaging
Marathas, and had a harbor that was really too
big for the small ships of the time
58. But the quite different draw-packs of
Surat and the attractions of a more
nearly independent and protected
base, as at Madras and (later)
Calcutta, led the East India Company
to move its western India
headquarters to Bombay in 1687.
With the founding of Calcutta in
1690, they now had three small
territories footholds, well placed to
tap the trade of India in west, south
and east
59. But the English, like all other
foreigners in India, remained
petitioners, still dependent on the
favors of the Mughal state or of local
rulers and still liable to be driven to
expropriated, or denied trading
privileges
No one certainly English realized at the
time what was happening to Indian
power after the death of Aurangzeb as
the country as a whole slid ever more
deeply into chaos.
60. The Company sent an embassy by then
virtually powerless Mughal emperor in 1714
The embassy’s leader prostrated himself
before the throne as the smallest particle of
“sand” giving “the reverence due from the
slave.”
He asked first for additional trade privileges
and then, more significantly, for the right to
collect revenues in the immediate areas
around Madras and Calcutta, where the
Company was by now the de facto
government
61. The embassy was largely ignored and
would probably never have been
acknowledge if the emperor had not
fallen ill and asked for treatment from
the embassy’s English doctor, Walter
Hamilton
His success, probably just as much a
stroke of luck as the emperor’s illness,
led to the embassy’s reception, and in
1717 all their requests were granted
63. The Mughals viewed that the English
were little different from scores of other
who had long been granted such right,
equivalent to the Mughal jagir or
zamindari, and Delhi attached little
importance to the 1717 concession
Indeed, it seems important now only
because we know what followed and can
recognize it as the first step towards
English territorial sovereignty in India
64.
65. Part of the context of the time was that
the death of Aurangzeb neither the
Mughals nor the local or provincial
administrations had been able to keep
order
The East India Company was able to
carry out this basic function of
government in its small but fortified
bases and, with the help of small
private armies their they developed, in
the areas immediately around their
bases
66. Hence, the main consequence of the
fading Mughal power was not that the
English were seen or saw themselves as
rising political powers in India but they
were driven increasingly to provide their
own defense, policing, revenue collection
to pay the costs and local government
They did this well enough to survive, as
well as to attract Indian merchants to deal
with them and even become residents of
the English bases, where their profits and
property could also be secure.
67. The Company prospered and Indian
cottons became too popular in England
that in 1701 Parliamentary, feeling that
need to protect English textiles, prohibited
their import.
When that ban was ignored, a
parliamentary ruling in 1702 prohibited
their use or wear, but reexport to the
continent continued, and even domestic
consumption could not be prevented
Indian cottons were clearly superior, the
finest of them never surpassed even now.
68. But it was not only the company that
prospered.
At every period, from the first “factory” at
Surat to Indian Independent in 1947,
Indians found new employment, new
scope and new wealth in expanding
economy of colonial ports and inland
trading posts, as well as in the colonial
bureaucracy. However, most of the
biggest gainer were British; most Indians
remain poor, while those prospered did so
as junior partner.
69.
70. The French had also been active contenders for
the trade of India since the rather belated
founding of the French East India Company in
1664
It had established a “factory "at Surat, an east
coast base at Pondicherry south of Madras, and
another “factory” just upriver from Calcutta
The French in India had the advantage of superb
leadership under Joseph Dupleix and of equally
outstanding military and naval commanders
Their forcers captured Madras in 1746 and went
on to defeat the local Indian ruler of the
southeast, becoming the dominant power in the
whole of southern India
71. Unfortunately to them, they got little support from
home, and the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748
restored Madras to the English
Two years later Robert Clive defeated both the French
and their southern Indian allies with only a small
force of Indian and British troops
When the Seven Years War erupted in Europe,
fighting spread to the French and British holdings
overseas, in India as in North America, and the home
government took a deprived of Dupleix’s leadership–
he had been called home for spending too much of
the French company’s resources in “unprofitable
adventures” – the French lost out in this struggle,
which was fought mainly by Indian troops in the
service of both sides as well as by independent but
client Indian groups
72. As western military local authority
increased, the English became less
deferential to the still technically sovereign
rulers of Bengal, now independent of the
Mughals
No longer humble petitioners who had
kissed the feet of the nawad (ruler) of
Bengal, their independent behavior and
their addition to the fortifications of Fort
William offended the new nawab, Siraj-ud-
Dowlah, who came to throne in 1756
In a last flash of imperial fire, his army and
war elephants overwhelmed Calcutta and its
relative handful of defenders in June 1756
73. Some escaped in boats and fled to Madras, but
about 60 were left behind, to be thrown into the
fort’s tiny, airless dungeon and spend a hot night in
this steamy climate
The next morning all but about 20 were dead of
suffocation
The incident of the “Black Hole of Calcutta” became
infamous. It seemed the end of the English position
in Bengal but appearance were deceiving.
Within four months an expedition sailed from
Madras under the same Robert Clive who had earlier
ousted the French from their remaining bases in
Bengal. With support from Indian groups, he then
defeated the huge army of the nawab at the Battle of
Plassey, some 75 miles northwest of Calcutta
76. Robert Clive had shipped out to Madras as
an East India Company’s clerk, but he
soon developed a reputation as an
adventurer
He found his clerk’s job so boring that he
tried unsuccessfully to kill himself with a
pistol that misfired
Adventure soon came when the French
captured Fort St. George in 1746 and he
was taken prisoner.
He escaped and took a commission in the
company’s small army
77. His first military expedition, against a
powerful southern kingdom allied with
the French, was won by brilliant strategy
even though his opponents
outnumbered him 20 to 1
Clive was acclaimed as a hero; he then
repeated his successes by driving out the
French and their allies in the major
Deccan kingdom of Hyderabad
Still only 27 years old, he was praised as a
deliverer and granted two years’ home
leave
78. Already known to Indians as “He Who Is
Daring in War”, Clive sailed north with a
small force
He recaptured Calcutta, defeated the vastly
superior army that tried to stop him just
north of the city, and, four months later met
the main Bengali contingent at Plassey. By
this time he had just 1,000 British troops and
about 2,000 Indians under his command.
The Bengali army totaled 18,000 cavalry and
50,000 foot soldiers, as well as over 50 field
guns managed by French artillerymen
79. Robert Clive, became the first British Governor of
Bengal after he had instated the schismatic Mir Jafar as
the Nawab of Bengal.
80. Again Clive’s tactical genius won the
day, confusing, outmaneuvering and
finally routing the enemy.
He then marched on to the Bengali
capital, where he installed his own
Indian client and ally as ruler
Clive and his English and Indian
colleagues helped themselves to the
provincial treasury, and the Company
too was richly repaid in reparations and
new revenues now under its control
81. Four years of incessant activity broke his
health, and he spent five years in England but
was sent back to India in 1765 to try to check
the plundering excess of his successors and
reorganize what now amounted to East India
Company government in Bengal
Two years later he was back in England to face
charges in Parliament that he had defrauded
the Company and enriched himself by
extortion, accusations brought by people
whom he had tried to restrain from exactly
those things and who were jealous of his
unbroken string od successes
82. Although in the end he was cleared, he
brooded over his grievances and still
suffering from poor health, he shot
himself in 1774 at age 49
He was far more than a brilliant field
commander and was concerned about
larger patterns of British policy in India
His immediate successors were more
interested in personal enrichment
83.
84. The beginning of
Britain’s Indian empire
1. Sir Thomas Roe’s mission in
1616
2. The founding of Madras in 1639
3. And of Calcutta in 1690
85. With Bengal now in their hands, many of the
English turned to simple plunder as well as
trade, extorting silver and jewels from the
rich and demanding what amounted to
“protection money”
After a few years this brought severe criticism
from home, parliamentary inquiries, and
finally in 1784, the India Act, which created a
new Board of Control for India in London
By this time the worst of the plunder was
over, although beyond Bengal, the rest of
India remained in turmoil
86. Afghan armies repeatedly ravaged
the northwest and looted Delhi
again in 1757, slaughtering most of
the inhabitants
A huge Maratha army gathered to
repel yet another Afghan invasion
in 1760 was crushed in a great
battle near Delhi early in 1761,
removing the only Indian power
able to contest the English
87. The much smaller force of Company troops
beat them soundly in a battle at Buxar at the
western edge of Bengal in 1764, surmounting
the last serious challenge to their power in the
north
Three years later, the surviving government of
Bengal, still nominally in place, then made
common cause with the remnants of Mughal
power and raised a large army to drive out the
English, now belatedly recognized as the most
dangerous contenders.
88. The Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II, who with his allies fought against
the East India Company during his early years (1760–1764), only
accepting the protection of theBritish in the year 1803, after he had
been blinded by his enemies and deserted by his subjects.
89.
90. From then on, the policy of both the East
India Company and its London supervisors
was to acquire no more territory, but to
achieve their ends through alliances with
Indian princes, offering them military
protection in exchange for trading rights
In Bengal as in the smaller areas around
Madras and Bombay, they continued to
collect taxes and run the administration as
nominal agents of the local or regional
Indian rulers, not as a sovereign power
91. Administration was expensive and distracted
from the Company’s main business, trade.
Collection of rural taxes was farmed out to
Bengali agents or zamindars, a bad system but
one that gave the zamindars a stake in British
rule, especially as they also became landlords,
with British approval, acquiring land from
defaulting taxpayers
Calcutta was made the capital of all of British
India, which by 1785 had settled down to a
generally efficient and honest administration
bent on promoting trade and revenues and on
attracting Indian collaboration, although all
higher administrative and military posts were
reserved for the British
92. The omissions of the war against
Napoleon in Europe made Britain
anxious to end the French threat in India
in 1799, Mysore was overwhelmed by
company troops.
The peninsular south was now firmly
under Company control, but the
Marathas, despite their early defeat by
the Afghans in 1761, remained a
formidable power and their home base
in Maharastra blocked Bombay’s access
to inland markets
93. Taking advantage of internal Maratha
division, the Company signed treaty with
one side in 1802 promising military
support in exchange for territorial rights
When the Marathans puppet, the British
had installed tried later to revive its
power, the Company defeated his forces
and took control all the Maratha
domains in 1818, soon joining then the
Bombay Presidency, the major British
territory in western India
94. Meanwhile in Bengal, Warren Hastings had been
appointed governor of Fort William and was later
confirmed as governor-general of British-power
Bengal, Madras and Bombay
Hastings had long experience working for the
Company and like so many of the English who went
out to India, he become fascinated by the rich
Indian tradition; he was a scholar of Persian and
Urdu and had many Indian friends
He largely checked the extortion and corruption by
Company officials that had been widespread earlier
and made sure that the official revenue collections
got to hid government rather than into private
pockets
96. Hastings reduced the nawab of Bengali even
more to a British client and stopped the annual
tribute that was still being paid to the Mughal
emperor
But he also began the British strategy of
intervention in the fraction fighting within the
Maratha confederacy, partly to forestall the
French, but also partly to strengthen the overall
British position in India and meet the still-serious
threat of Maratha power Hastings began the first
moves against the ruler of Mysore and sent a
Company army south to defend Madras all this
cost money and Hastings was driven to extort
funds from several of his Indian “tributary states”
to support the “pacification of India,” which, he
argued, was in everyone’s interest
97. Jealous rivals at home engineered
impeachment proceedings against him, and
when the new India Act of 1784 was passed
setting up the Board of Control in London, he
felt further threatened
He resigned in 1785 and left India for good
98. He was succeeded as governor-general by Lord
Cornwallis, the same man who had surrendered
the British forces to the Americans and French
at Yorktown
Cornwallis had a reputation for honesty and
integrity and cracked down still more on
extortion and corruption, but in 1793 he
confirmed the landowning rights of the
Indians, many Bengalis, who had been made
zamindars, in what was called “The Permanent
Settlement,” thus strengthening an exploitative
system that became still more so in subsequent
years.
99. Cornwallis, anxious not to be responsible for
losing another colony, further pursued the
campaign against Mysore and issued a new
administrative code for all British territories,
establishing rules for all services, courts and
revenue systems and empowering British
magistrates to administer legal justice
100. In 1798, Richard Wellesley elder brother of the
future duke of Wellington who was to become
the hero of Waterloo and who had also
campaigned in southern India, succeeded to
the governor-generalship as the Napoleonic
Wars were in full spate
He completed the conquest of Mysore in 1799
and subsequently added still more territory in
the south to British control
101. The ruler of the state of Oudh (Awadh) with its
capital at Lucknow was forced to accept British
protection, although he was promised that his
own formal sovereignty would remain, as
company ally
The same arrangement was made with the still-
reigning Mughal emperor for his domains in
the Delhi- Agra area.
Southern Gujarat, including the commercially
important port of Surat, was also brought
under the Company control
102. Only Rajasthan, the Indus valley and Sindh,
Kashmir and Punjab remained outside the
British sphere, although much of what the
British controlled was nominally ruled by
Indian princes as allies
103. Fear of the still-live French threat during the
Napoleonic Wars and the memory of French
naval successes in the Bay of Bengal 50 years
earlier prompted the British to move on
Dutch-held Ceylon after Napoleon occupied
Holland
Their first concern was to take over the fine
harbor of Trincomalee on the east coast of
Ceylon, where they could base their naval
vessels.
105. With the fading of the French threat, British
attention shifted to the far more productive
southwestern lowlands of Ceylon and the
colonial capital was fixed at Colombo
Roads were built crisscrossing the island
followed by railways after 1815
Coffee plantation spread rapidly with this
improved access to export markets, as did
coconut production
Tea replace coffee after a disastrous coffee
blight in the 1870s and rubber was added at the
end of the century
106. Ceylon was designated a Crown Colony, not
part of British India and was administered
separately despite its long and close Indian
connections
107.
108. 1. This relatively sudden rush of land
grab and the rise of the East India
Company could not have happened
without the a great deal of
Indian (and Sinhalese) support
2. Factional divisions fatally
weakened what efforts there were at
Indian resistance
109. Most people accepted Company
control either because they
benefited from it as merchants,
bankers, collaborators, agents or
employees or because they saw it
as preferable to control by the
Mughals, the Marathas or any of
the local rulers, whose records
were not attractive
110. 4. Most contemporary Indian states were
oppressive, taxing merchants and peasants
unmercifully and often arbitrarily while at
the same time failing to keep order, suppress
banditry, maintain roads and basic services
or administer justice acceptably
5. Revenues went disproportionately to
support court extravagances and armies,
which spent their energy more in
interregional conflict than in genuine
defense.
That was enough to win Indian support.