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Mughals main cause of decline
Executive summary
Historians treat the Mughal decline as multi-causal rather than the result of one single failure: common explanations in contemporary summaries include weak successors and court factionalism, economic distress and peasant exploitation, military deterioration and succession wars, and external invasions such as those by Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali (examples summarized across sources) [1] [2] [3]. Major scholarly collections also group causes under land-relation breakdown, rise of regional powers, noble rivalries, and the drain of prolonged Deccan campaigns — showing there is no single consensus “main cause” in the literature [4].
1. Weak rulers and court factionalism: the political centre unravels
Contemporary exam and overview sites emphasize that after Aurangzeb’s death the empire faced rapid turnover of weak emperors, succession struggles and nobles who backed rival claimants; that fragmentation of court authority let provincial chiefs grow independent and eroded central control [2] [5] [1]. These accounts argue the personal quality of rulers and the politics of the court — not a single battlefield defeat — opened space for centrifugal forces.
2. Military decay and the jagir/mansabdari crisis: the state’s coercive backbone weakens
Multiple summaries point to deterioration of the Mughal army, loss of experienced commanders in civil wars, and problems in the jagir/mansabdari land-salary system that undermined soldier pay and morale; the result was an army less able to contain revolts or resist invasions [6] [7] [8]. The practical implication in these accounts is that administrative-institutional breakdown translated quickly into military weakness.
3. Economic distress, peasant exploitation and decline of artisanal industries
Scholars and education sites stress economic explanations: excessive extraction and corruption, tax-farming, and declining trade and handicrafts under late Mughal conditions produced peasant and artisan discontent and reduced the fiscal base the court depended on [9] [10] [11]. Irfan Habib’s line — echoed in summaries — highlights peasant exploitation as a structural factor that removed popular support and resources for the regime [9].
4. Regional powers and social resistance: the empire’s peripheries fight back
The rise of powerful successor states — Marathas, Sikhs, regional nawabs in Bengal, Awadh, Hyderabad and Mysore — and peasant or sectarian uprisings (Satnami, Jat, Sikh) are routinely offered as key pressures that eroded Mughal territorial control and fiscal reach [7] [12] [11]. Editors of collected histories explicitly list the emergence of regional powers and social unrest as one of the grouped causes [4].
5. External invasions and catastrophic shocks: punctuated decline
Narratives frequently mark Nadir Shah’s 1739 sack of Delhi and later Afghan incursions as catastrophic blows that both looted wealth and signalled imperial vulnerability to the subcontinent’s rulers [3]. These external shocks did not spring from nowhere — they exploited pre-existing internal weaknesses — but the immediate damage amplified the empire’s disintegration [3] [10].
6. The role of policy choices: Aurangzeb’s Deccan campaigns and religious politics
Several sources single out Aurangzeb’s prolonged Deccan wars and controversial religious policies as accelerants: extended southern campaigns drained resources and his orthodoxy alienated allies (some Rajputs and others), helping create the political fractures that followed [4] [3] [11]. Commentators differ on weight, but many place these choices among the critical turning points.
7. Why historians disagree: competing frameworks, not just facts
Collections and reviews show historians divide along paradigms: economic-structuralists (stress land relations and peasant exploitation), political-institutionalists (stress court factionalism and weak successors), and event-based accounts (stress invasions and military defeats); edited volumes present all these as complementary interpretations rather than mutually exclusive single causes [4] [9]. Exam-focused materials also synthesize multiple causes for students, reflecting the consensus that decline was complex [1] [5].
8. What the available sources do not settle (and what to watch for)
Available sources in this set do not offer a single, unified quantitative breakdown allocating percentages of blame among causes; they instead present overlapping narratives and lists of factors. For a deeper judgement on “the main cause” one would need targeted scholarly articles or primary fiscal/military records beyond these summaries — not found in current reporting here [4] [9].
Concluding note: the literature you supplied consistently rejects a monocausal explanation and instead treats Mughal decline as the cumulative outcome of political, military, economic and external pressures; which of those was “main” depends on the interpretive lens a scholar chooses [4] [9] [3].