The Geopolitics of the Mughal Empire
Nowadays the Mughals might be better-known for the Taj Mahal , but from 1526 to the 1700s they were also masters of the Indian subcontinent, ruling over most of what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, or almost 20% of the global population.
In this video, derived from Jos Gommans’ book Mughal Warfare , we’ll examine the geographic conditions – both physical and human – that influenced the Mughal conquest of India. While India’s situation has obviously changed a lot since the 16th Century, the video still contains a few ideas on how we can analyze the relationship between a land’s geography and its politics – or in other words, geopolitics .
1. Assumptions
Every geopolitical theory rests on assumptions that generalize how a society interacts with the world. For us, we start with the idea that the Mughals directly controlled only what their armies could reach: if this wasn’t possible or sustainable, enemy action succeeded by default and therefore – no control. And like all armies, the Mughal military needed men to serve in it and money to pay for it .
The Mughals did have one thing that their enemies often didn’t, however, and that was a strong cavalry archer tradition. True to their Mongolian heritage, the Mughals fought by forming swarms of cavalry archers and firing arrows at anybody who stood in their way. Against the infantry of their enemies this tactic was absolutely devastating, and where it could be deployed the Mughals generally won their fights. Now in places where they couldn’t do that, the Mughals often found themselves either withdrawing, or bogged down in a long war of attrition or siege .
Given this, we would expect the Mughals to operate best in regions where there were plenty of men and plenty of money, or at least where these things could be adequately supplied . We would also expect them to prefer terrain that allowed for the use of cavalry. Regions where these two conditions held were therefore ones which would most likely be conquered and held by the Mughal Empire.
With these assumptions in place, we can begin to analyze the geography of medieval India, and we start by looking at its outer limits.
2. Outer Limits
Natural barriers surround the Indian subcontinent, consisting of harsh terrain that cannot support military or even human activity of much scale. In a clockwise direction, we have the deserts of Baluchistan, the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the Himalayas, and the jungles of Burma. Together, they limit how far an India-based empire could extend on land.
That said, there is one major exception here. At Kabul, Central Asia connects with India through the nearby Khyber Pass, whose relatively gentle gradient, low altitude and watered valleys still makes it a key link today . Anybody heading through the Khyber would have had to go past Kabul, making the city both a strategic position for the subcontinent’s defense as well as a major trading center for the two lands. Unsurprisingly, this made the city a gateway to and from the subcontinent, especially for the Mughals who began their conquest here.
3. The Arid Zone
Now that we have surveyed India’s outer limits, we can now turn our attentions to what is inside.
The Indian subcontinent has a diverse geography: mountain ranges include the Satpuras, the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats, which frame southern and central India in an inverted triangle with the Deccan Plateau in between. Northern India is home to two great rivers in the Indus and the Ganges, with smaller rivers such as the Narmada, the Tapti, the Godavari and the Krishna flowing east-west from the Deccan to the coast.
The Indian climate is structured around the monsoons, with winter and summer rains separated by dry periods in between. But if we look at a map of annual precipitation, we can see a general east-west division along the thousand-millimeter line, with the western interior getting less rainfall than the east. This drier part of India is known as the ‘Arid Zone’, and it is important to Mughal geopolitics for two reasons:
Firstly, more rain means more trees, and cavalry famously handles poorly in forest. Horses also fare badly in high humidity, as do other tools of war such as bows and gunpowder. So while the Mughals still looked to the forests of eastern India for useful animals such as the elephant, their armies preferred to stick to the drier terrain of the Arid Zone .
Secondly, rainfall also influences the type of crops farmers grow. Where water is plentiful, rice is grown due to its high and reliable yield. Rice, however, is labor-intensive and demands constant, year-round attention for its multiple harvests.
By contrast, farmers in the Arid Zone grow wheat instead, running the risk of bad years, crop failure, and starvation. But wheat also requires less tending, and most crucially has a winter ‘off-season’, during which farmers were free to find another job – like soldiering.
So when it came to recruiting cheap cannon fodder, wheat-growing Arid India had more free manpower compared with the rice-growing east, even if it was seasonal and irregular. To be fair, eastern India also had its soldiers, but they tended to be full-time, professional and expensive, especially for a pre-modern economy.
Therefore, for reasons of physical and human geography, the Mughals found it easier to raise armies and deploy their cavalry in India’s Arid Zone. Western India therefore became the focus for their military expansion, a natural highway linking north to south through the campaigns of their armies.
4. Road Systems and Trading Routes
We have seen how Arid India had the edge when it came to men and cavalry. But what about money?
For that, we will turn to India’s trade network. By the 16th Century, the subcontinent was well-connected with the global economy, exporting sugar, dyes and textiles for spices, horses and gold. Its wealthy ports served as hubs for all this activity, in particular those in Gujarat, the Konkan Coast, the Carnatic Coast, the Coromandel Coast, and Bengal.
From the ports, traders travelled inland using a road network centered on two great highways. There was the Grand Trunk Road that ran the width of the subcontinent from Kabul to Bengal, and there was the Dakshinapatha or ‘Southern Route’ that ran its length from Delhi to southern India. Branching routes connected India’s two coastlines together, and combined this road system formed the arteries through which India’s commerce flowed.
And like a few unfortunate arteries, at certain points this road system constricted to a few select chokepoints, usually in the form of mountain passes or river portages. It is at these places that commerce most easily turns into cold, hard cash – through taxes, tariffs and other methods of wealth extraction.
5. Centers of Power
So, we have identified the regions where Mughal armies could best operate, as well as the routes through which India’s wealth flowed. Where the two overlapped, the Mughals would find it possible to control a part of India for themselves.
But some regions were better-positioned for control than others. Oftentimes these regions would host powerful states of their own, competing against the Mughals for control. These regions can be described as ‘Centers of Power’, and their strategic advantages inevitably attracted the gaze of the Mughal Emperors.
We have seen how Kabul’s position as a agricultural and commercial oasis made it the place from which to control the Khyber Pass, determining access for Central Asian armies and traders heading south, or for their Indian counterparts moving north. Evidently, the city qualified as a Center of Power.
Moving down the Grand Trunk Road, we reach the most dominant Center of Power in India – the triangle of Lahore, Ajmer and Agra, within which sits the city of Delhi . Nourished by both the fertile Ganges and Indus, the triangle boasted a large population while also being at the heart of the Arid Zone . Furthermore, the Grand Trunk Road joined up with the Dakshinapatha within the triangle, giving the region direct access to most of the subcontinent: Lahore looking north and west towards Kabul and the Indus; Ajmer looking south towards central India and Gujarat; and Agra facing east towards Bengal. With all roads leading to Delhi, it is no coincidence that this wealthy region also became the Mughals’ seat of power.
Continuing eastwards we reach Bengal, the richest region of India due to its fertility – but also one that was not in the Arid Zone . For the Mughals, establishing direct control here through conquest was going to be a long and difficult affair.
What was much easier, however, was for the Mughals to impose an indirect control over Bengal, dominating the region’s communications and trade lifelines in such a way that would force it into their orbit. As such, northwest Bengal initially was the Center of Power for the region. Situated closest to the Arid Zone, the area also was a transportation bottleneck where traders switched from Ganges boats to barges better suited to navigating the Delta. So from this position, Bengal’s access to India’s markets could be controlled by the Mughals, providing both wealth and a sword to hold over the region’s rebellious subjects.
Eventually, as the Mughals adapted to river warfare, their ability to penetrate Bengal increased and by the 1600s Dhaka, positioned at the junction of both Indian and overseas trade routes, would become the new Center of Power.
Turning towards Central India and the Dakshinapatha, we find a Center of Power at Burhanpur. Here, the Satpura Range lies across the subcontinent east-to-west, creating a natural barrier that, while watered by the Narmada and Tapti Rivers, can be difficult to cross. At Burhanpur, however, a gap cuts across the Satpuras and as such became a bottleneck for merchants traveling along the Southern Route. In addition, possessing Burhanpur along with Ajmer also meant controlling Gujarat’s access to northern India and thus like Bengal, Gujarat’s wealthy ports could be indirectly controlled from afar.
Further south, we come to the Deccan Plateau. Despite being an Arid Zone region sitting astride the Dakshinapatha, the Deccan itself has no Center of Power. This is because the region’s agricultural potential is poor even compared with its neighbors, which makes it hard to maintain armies here for long. Secondly, while bottlenecks do exist in the Deccan in the form of mountain passes across the Western Ghats to the Konkan ports , the Dakshinapatha runs parallel with the coast and therefore there is no single point from which to dominate the region’s trade.
That said, the Marathas eventually did bring all of these mountain bottlenecks under their rule, and through their resultant control of the Konkan ports eventually became powerful enough to defeat the Mughals in the 18th Century.
If the Deccan was to be controlled, it was to be from the south and east, where the lower Godavari and Krishna rivers made agriculture productive once more. To the east, Golconda was the first stop on the east-west trade route from the port of Masulipatam, and coupled up with the area’s diamond wealth made it a natural Center of Power for the eastern Deccan.
To the south the Madras region, including the religious center of Tirupati and later the fort of Arcot , served as another endpoint for the Deccan’s trade routes as well as for the overland horse trade from Central Asia. This was also the southern terminus of India’s Arid Zone, with Tamil Nadu far too humid for Mughal armies to operate in.
In any case, the 1,700km straight-line distance from Delhi to Arcot was already causing significant command and control problems for the Mughal Emperors, with administrative, logistical and loyalty issues overriding any geopolitical incentive the Mughals might have had to push on.
Through military superiority and a bit of luck, the Mughals gradually conquered all the Centers of Power between Kabul and Arcot, and by the 1690s had seemingly ‘won’ the game of Indian geopolitics. But within a few decades the Empire would go into irreversible decline, with most of the Centers of Power breaking away to form new states of their own. How could this even happen?
6. Conclusion
Answering this question will hopefully shine some light as to the limits of geopolitics. Firstly, no geopolitical advantage can overcome basic problems in governance. The failure of the Mughals to consolidate control over their subjects meant that as their power waned in the late 17th Century, the Centers of Power under them gradually became strong enough to override central authority. No geographic advantage can help a state whose government cannot mobilize its resources to match those of its opponents.
Secondly, by the 18th Century the earlier assumptions of Mughal geopolitics were no longer valid. Developments in warfare, especially the introduction of European weapons and tactics, meant that cavalry archers no longer held an advantage over enemy musketmen. And with that came a complete change in India’s geopolitics, with the professional nature of east Indian soldiery now becoming a decisive advantage in war. Powers positioned to take advantage of these changes, such as the Bengalis, thus rose at the expense of the Mughals.
In conclusion, over the course of this video we have briefly looked at India during the Mughal period, examining how its geography affected the Mughals’ expansion. Ultimately this is just one historian’s view out of many, and as new information emerges this will inevitably have to be adjusted. But for what it’s worth, thank you for watching
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