‘The eighteenth century was a century of universal decline’. Comment.

The eighteenth century was a century of universal decline:

The decline of the Mughal Empire was only natural, after the death of Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb died in 1707 at the age off 88.

His wars against the Marathas lasted nearly 26 years and depleted his treasury of all monies. 

Though the death of Aurangzeb was a significant event in Mughal history (and also in the 18th century), the decline of the Mughal Empire cannot be wholly attributed to this single event because Aurangzeb’s successors did try to reverse the downfall of their dynasty, though unsuccessfully.

In order to understand the process of Mughal decline one has to take both a long-term view and a conjunctural view.

The long-term view is that the Mughal Empire provided a number of institutions ostensibly to centralize power, but unfortunately those led to periodic crises in institutional and fiscal arrangements of the empire, which the Mughals were unable to sort out effectively.

Some examples of this are the inability of the state to affect parity between assessment of revenue and what was actually collected, or its failure to prevent transmission losses of up to 20 percent of its revenue from the countryside.

There was also the more structural inability of the empire between a set of enduring systems between the agrarian elite and the state.

Both existed in a state of perennial contradiction. Of course, there were instances of rapprochements between the two.

For example, there was the so-called Rajput policy of Akbar; but even this did not cover the whole of Rajputana or the entire grid of Rajput clans, nor was it able to contain a potent source of political friction. 

This was further aggravated by the inability of the state to strike out workable (consensual) arrangements with a myriad of small zamindars scattered even in the heartland of the empire as well as all over the country, and this accentuated problems.

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